On August 5, streamer and activist Clara “Keffals” Sorrenti woke up with a gun to her face. Her home was raided by police in response to a threatening email she did not send. Someone had hit her.
The attack is linked to an ongoing campaign of intimidation against the streamer, in which last month trolls abused Twitch’s reporting system to get her suspended from the platform for 28 days. (opens in new tab).
London Police (in the Canadian province of Ontario) told Sorrenti that all city councilors had received an email at 6 a.m. that day. In it, a person who claimed to be Sorrenti, who is a trans woman, announced that she had been given a gun, killed her mother and planned to go to City Hall and “shoot every cisgender person” in sight. While Sorrenti doesn’t know who impersonated her in the hoax email, she tells PC Gamer that she believes the information used in the swatting “came from the same community” that had abused Twitch’s reporting system.
Sorrenti’s family had previously contacted London police about being placed on a “don’t slap” list, but were treated as if they were “wearing aluminum foil hats,” she says. Despite that attempt to alert authorities to the possibility of a slapping attempt, the email was taken seriously and police arrived at her home fully armed, with a warrant to search for firearms, phones and computers.
Although police found her mother unharmed and no firearms in the house, Sorrenti says they confiscated phones and computers belonging to both her and her partner. The repossessions left them both “functionally unemployed,” she says, and had to spend “thousands of dollars” replacing electronics, which are still in police possession.
On August 5, I was awakened with an assault rifle pointed at me and arrested for a crime I had not committed. I need your help. Please share this video widely https://t.co/URNsfyrSQcAugust 9, 2022
In her account of her arrest, Sorrenti states that her treatment by the London police was persistently transphobic. The email that triggered the raid referred to Sorrenti by both her real name and her dead name — the name she was given at birth — but police referred to her and only booked her through the latter. When the police spoke to Sorrenti’s mother, the police constantly referred to Sorrenti as her “son”. Using her dead name in the email successfully tapped into “bias many police have toward transgender people,” she said.
“Instead of the police helping me, they terrorized me and my loved ones,” Sorrenti wrote in a statement about her arrest. “They victimized me because I was the victim of a hate crime.”
In a statement sent to PC Gamer and published online (opens in new tab)London police chief Steve Williams acknowledged that officers were not using Sorrenti’s correct name and gender, and said the incident is under review.
The reason there aren’t many very high profile trans content creators is because they are dominated, beaten and harassed off the internet.
Clara “Keffals” Sorrentic
Sorrenti was eventually released without charge, but he says he remains a suspect in the police investigation. London police declined to comment further on the incident.
“As the investigation is active and ongoing, we are unable to share anything additional at this time,” a spokesman for the London Police Force told PC Gamer.
No longer feeling safe in her home, Sorrenti started a GoFundMe campaign (opens in new tab) to fund a move to a new home and establish a legal fund to “seek justice.” At the time of writing, she had received enough donations to fund the move, and subsequent donations were used for legal fees.
“The support has been overwhelming,” Sorrenti told PC Gamer, “I feel like everyone has come together for this to support me, because they realized how terrible injustice this is, even people who don’t watch my content and see me personally. not allowed”.
Sorrenti had just been not banned from Twitch (opens in new tab) on August 2, three days before her arrest by London police. While she’s been streaming a bit in those few days, she’s not sure when she’ll be back.
“The reason there aren’t many very high-profile trans content creators is because they are dominated, beaten and harassed off the internet,” Sorrenti said. “If you want to see transgender people thrive in these online spaces, you need to support them when the going gets tough.”
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