https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/mar/18/my-mother-troll-of-madeleine-mccann-parents
Brenda Leyland spent her life hiding – by making things up, and concealing herself behind fake names and avatars. After she died, Ben examined her Twitter account closely. There were friends in the McCann trolling community who grieved her passing. But, by and large, after she was exposed people on social media were cruel and unforgiving. In her final days, the troll was trolled mercilessly. “On Twitter people said things like, ‘I hope you beg for mercy, I hope you get gang raped orally, anally and vaginally,’” Ben says. “They Photoshopped pictures of her to make her look like she had fangs and was a zombie with blood pouring out of her.” As Brenda had forgotten about the McCanns’ humanity, so her critics forgot about hers. Ben believes in her final hours she would have read some of these tweets.
Nine years on, he no longer blames the Sky News exposé for his mother’s death. It was inevitable that at some point she would be exposed for one thing or another, he says. There were so many things she was ashamed of that she had never addressed – her mental health problems, her mythomania, her anger, her lack of purpose. “That’s what killed my mum,” Ben says. “It was encrusted layers of shame over the years that made it impossible for her to do more than allude to stuff that she had to deal with. Her inability to say, ‘I need help’; her inability to say, ‘I am not OK.’”