“Seven days, 18 hours, 39 minutes ago my beloved… died suddenly of cardiac arrest”. When Victoria Brownworth logged onto Twitter to post these words about her partner of 23 years, she didn’t know that two of them in particular would provoke a storm of online harassment.
Because, as Victoria waited at her home in Philadelphia on [November 20] for her wife’s ashes to be delivered, a video titled Died Suddenly was about to drop.
In an hour and eight minutes of dramatic music and out-of-context news reports, the film tells a fictitious story of a dangerous vaccine killing off swathes of young people – all part of an imagined plot to depopulate the earth.
The claims made in the video quickly fall apart under scrutiny. Vast amounts of evidence from different independent scientists all over the world, as well as the experiences of billions of people, have shown that serious Covid vaccine side effects are rare.
But its call for people to look at any reported deaths through a lens of suspicion had made Victoria fair game – and as the phrase “died suddenly” started to trend, people flocked to her memorial thread.
“How long’s it been since she got the jab?”, hundreds of people began to reply.
Victoria’s wife, Madelaine Gold – a painter and design professor – had an advanced stage of cancer, though she had been doing better just before she died. There is no suggestion the vaccine had anything to do with her death.
When she began to hit back, Victoria was told she was lying.
“She did die suddenly… We didn’t have time to say goodbye, I didn’t have time to give her a last kiss. I will never get to talk to her again.”
“They were trolling her obituary, literally.”
