Friday, September 02, 2022

Twitch streamer and transgender activist doxxed in Northern Ireland after leaving Canada

Ahmar Khan and Amy Simon - Yesterday 

After being doxxed in her hometown of London, Ont., Clara Sorrenti, a transgender woman and streamer, said she has been doxxed again in another swatting attempt in Northern Ireland.


Clara Sorrenti, known online as Keffals, was doxxed and swatted by online trolls leading to an arrest by London Police Service at gunpoint© Keffals / Youtube

“I feel like the only reason this happens to me is because people don’t want to see me be successful in the activism that I do,” she said.

Read more:
Doxxed Twitch streamer and transgender activist leaving Canada amid ongoing harassment

After announcing last week that she would be moving to Europe to escape continuous harassment, Sorrenti, who goes by "Keffals" online, told Global News that on Tuesday evening, she was warned by a friend that someone was outside her home.

Images posted to online forums showed 28-year-old Sorrenti’s residence in Northern Ireland with a letter labelled with her incorrect name and gender, otherwise known as a “deadname” and is considered harmful.

“It is scary,” she said. “I don’t have privacy or any normalcy because there is always a risk that someone is going to stalk or swat me.”

Red flags aplenty in London police’s swatting of Twitch streamer Clara Sorenti, expert says

Swatting involves reporting a false crime in the hopes of sending a large number of armed law enforcement to a person’s address. This is commonly used as an intimidation tactic.

Read more:
Red flags aplenty in London police’s swatting of Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti: expert

Sorrenti said that police showed up at her door telling her that they had been notified that someone in the residence was going to shoot themselves in the head. She said it happened shortly after she finished streaming online.

“Two days ago, someone had called in that someone in the flat had a firearm, but they dismissed it as a prank call,” she said.

Global News contacted Northern Ireland police who said they “do not comment on named individuals and no inference should be drawn from this.”

Sorrenti noted that she was shaken up about the most recent incident considering she had left Canada to travel to the U.K. until she could secure a safe home.

Earlier this month, Sorrenti was at the centre of a previous swatting attack after being doxxed by harassers who sent false death threats with her name and address to London city councillors, leading to her being arrested at gunpoint.

Video: Clara Sorrenti details being swatted, arrested at gunpoint

Read more:
Twitch streamer and trans woman, Clara Sorrenti allegedly doxxed again

Last week, Sorrenti told Global News that she believes the majority of the harassment she and her family have received stems from her speaking against an online forum known as Kiwi Farms, which describes itself as a “community dedicated to discussing eccentric people who voluntarily make fools of themselves.”

But despite ongoing harassment, Sorrenti said that she refuses to be scared and intimidated.

“I feel like I should be scared, but I’m not,” she said. “I don’t think they had any intent on hurting me. I think what their intention was to intimidate me, and I don’t plan on letting that happen.”


Venice: Trace Lysette Is First Trans Actress to Lead a Film at the Festival

Scott Roxborough - Yesterday 

Fans of Transparent will recognize Trace Lysette. For five seasons on Amazon’s groundbreaking gender- and genre-breaking series, she played Shea, a transgender yoga teacher who helps Jeffrey Tambor’s character — and the non-trans audience — understand trans lingo and culture.

It was also Lysette who came forward, in 2017, with claims that Tambor had sexually harassed her on the Transparent set, one of several allegations that led Tambor to exit the show after its fourth season.
More from The Hollywood Reporter

Her performance as Shea helped get Lysette the role of Tracey in Lorene Scafaria’s 2019 blockbuster Hustlers alongside Jennifer Lopez, one of the first times a trans actor had a starring turn in a major Hollywood film.

And then, nothing. Aside from the occasional guest appearance, voice work on Netflix’s short-lived LGBTQ animated series Q-Force and a supporting turn in Ty Hodges’ Venus as a Boy, Lysette’s burgeoning career appeared to come to a halt.

“Besides Hustlers, there really wasn’t much movement for me personally, in my career,” Lysette tells THR. “As a transgender actor, I don’t have the luxury of rummaging through a handful of scripts every week, saying, ‘Oh, I’d like to play this one or try to read for this one.'”


Lysette (right) with Alexandra Billings on the Amazon series ‘Transparent.’© Provided by The Hollywood Reporter

One script that had come through, in December 2016, was for Monica, a family drama from Andrea Pallaoro, the Italian director of Medeas (2013) and Hannah (2017). Lysette was up for the eponymous lead, playing a trans woman, estranged from her family, who returns home to care for her sick mother (Patricia Clarkson), whom she hasn’t seen since before her transition and who doesn’t recognize Monica as her child.

“Here was a transsexual protagonist, the movie was centered around her, seen from her lens,” Lysette recalls, “and that’s rare. It’s also rare that it’s done well. And I think they [Pallaoro and co-screenwriter Orlando Tirado] wrote a really good script, centered on family, and survival, without being too in-your-face.”

Lysette read for the role, going through several rounds of auditions. But it wasn’t until last year that the project finally secured funding, got the green light and gave Lysette her first leading role. Monica will premiere in competition at the Venice Film Festival, making it the first movie with a trans lead to grace the Lido.

While the actor says she always tries to find a personal link to roles she plays — “I get a parallel in my own life and then sort of tai chi it into the character” — Lysette found much of the film’s story to be autobiographical.

“I don’t want to dive down the rabbit hole of my trauma, but I think Monica’s story — being rejected from your biological family when you are young and queer or, you know, assigned as male at birth — is pretty typical,” she says. “And so, spoiler alert, her having to go survive on her own was something that a lot of trans folks identify with. I think that grabbed me.”

Not that Monica is a message movie. As in Hannah, which also premiered in Venice (winning the best actress prize for Charlotte Rampling), in his latest feature, Pallaoro favors the slow burn over melodrama, the subtle over the explicit. There is no screaming confrontation between Monica and her mother, no big reveal. Instead we see Monica go through a series of struggles — learning to be a caregiver to her mother, reconnecting with her brother (Joshua Close) and playing auntie to his children, maneuvering the online hookup scene — both poignant and mundane. In the end, her victories, too, are understated and conditional.

“It would have been easy to make it more shiny, more Hollywood, but I think that the way we did it was extremely true to life,” says Lysette. “You don’t always get the black or white answer or revelation that you’re seeking. A lot of times life is just this gray area where you have to find the good and find the happiness and your contentment in that.”

The core of the film’s story — Monica’s reconnecting with the mother who once rejected her — was something Lysette said she “could definitely relate to in my life.” The actor has spoken publicly about how she was estranged from her family for a period of time when she transitioned, but how she has reconnected with her mother, who has become her “biggest cheerleader.”

For the film, it didn’t hurt that Patricia Clarkson manner “reminded me a lot of my own mother,” Lysette says. “I kind of grabbed onto that. She was so warm and welcoming and complimentary of my work, which really helped me feel even more comfortable.”

Hollywood, Lysette says, has become a bit more comfortable with trans actors since Transparent. But true equality is still a ways off, she says, as she continues to push for more, and faster, change within the film industry.

“There has been progress, there has been change, but it’s been slow, if I’m being honest,” she says. “I feel so honored to be able to play trans characters, and I think there are so many more trans stories out there that deserve to be told. But at the same time, I don’t want to have to limit myself in the same way that other leading ladies don’t have to limit themselves. It would be awesome if I could be in the Marvel Universe or play somebody’s friend or auntie in another indie film that tugs at your heartstrings…. I just hope people seeing this film, and knowing that a trans actress is leading a film at Venice, will shake things up. And when people watch this film and see that the transness is very understated, and that the role could be any leading lady, they’ll see that maybe being a trans actor doesn’t have to be this niche thing. It’s so weird that Hollywood sometimes boxes us in, and I think we just want to kind of get past that.”

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