MAKENA NJERI ON BEING OUTED ON TWITTER AND CAR VANDALISED

Former BBC producer Makena Njeri has opened up about being outed on Twitter in July 2019.

Speaking for the first time about her car being vandalised, the former journalist said she learned about the incident when she was trending on Twitter. “A couple of years ago when I was working with the BBC, I had a crazy life changing experience. I remember I was asleep at 5am and my phone kept on ringing one call after the other and I was wondering what’s going on.

When I picked it, I had like 15 missed calls and messages on Whatsapp. I opened the messages from my cousin who was like ‘what’s going on?’ It was at that moment that it hit me that the previous night my car had been vandalised and all sorts of messages written on it.”

According to Makena, she parked the car outside the gate after a night out, “Because of the trauma that I was going through and I had gone out partying. I came back and parked the car outside the facility, in the morning when people were going to work and they took pictures of the car and it went up on Twitter. By the time I was being called people had already seen things on Twitter and someone had identified my car.

I trended for three weeks and it left me with trauma because when that happened immediately my sexuality and gender was outed through that process. So many people started writing the ‘gay journalist’, many people went into the discussion of sexualising queer people.”

The actress had to report the matter to her boss at BBC, who arranged for her to relocate to another place, “Everything that you would imagine happened. At that time I was working for the BBC and the first thing that I thought about was I had lost my job. Immediately I wrote an email to my boss and explained what had happened, my bosses responded and said they already knew of the situation and that they cared about my safety.

That was the first time in my life I had someone saying that it doesn’t matter who you are, you are a human being who first requires love, safety and care. The BBC were kind enough to move me from my space and house me for a couple of months because I went into mini depression just thinking about this person that I have been all my life now seeing people canceling my existence. There were tweets that I should be killed, this is wrong all that stuff. I felt like every single bit of me had been buried.”