Have Star Wars trolls forced Kelly Marie Tran off Instagram?

Ben Arnold
·Contributor
Kelly Marie Tran in The Last Jedi (Credit: Lucasfilm/Disney)
Kelly Marie Tran in The Last Jedi (Credit: Lucasfilm/Disney)

Actress Kelly Marie Tran, who played resistance fighter Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, had a coveted Instagram account which delighted her fans around the world.

But it appears that at the weekend the actress deleted all of her posts, after what fans noted had followed months of online racial and sexual harassment.

The page is still active, but there are now ‘zero’ posts for her 190,000 followers.

Her page description, ‘Afraid, but doing it anyway’, remains.

After Tran, who is Vietnamese-American, arrived in the spotlight following her starring role in the second movie of the new Star Wars trilogy last year, she has been targeted with abuse on both Instagram and Twitter.

In another instance, her entry in the Wookieepedia, the Star Wars wiki, was edited to include offensive remarks and racial slurs.

Fandom, the company that runs the pages, later issued an apology, adding that it had ‘a zero tolerance policy for vandalism, inclusive of racism and harassment’.

Daisy Ridley also deleted her Instagram account in 2017 and never returned, after becoming the victim of harassment and abuse over a remark she made about gun control in the US.

She later told Glamour magazine: “I was on Instagram, trying to do that whole thing, and people weren’t very nice. I posted a thing about gun regulations, because I was at an event in tribute to the Orlando shooting at Pulse [where 49 people were killed and over 50 were wounded]. People weren’t nice about how I looked. And I was like, ‘I’m out.’ Simple as that. That is not what I signed up for.

“Everyone said, ‘It’s because she talked about gun safety,’ but it wasn’t. If I want to talk about gun safety, I will talk about gun safety. And I didn’t sign up for people to go, ‘You’re amazing!’ But I didn’t sign up for them to say things like ‘Your skin is sh*t,’ either… so I took down the post, and then I deleted my account.”

Fans have taken the news badly, but appear not to be surprised, many also referring to the abuse that child actor Jake Lloyd, who played the young Anakin Skywalker in George Lucas’s prequels, also received at the hands of a certain branch of Star Wars fan.

Pleasingly, however, fans are also now rallying behind Tran.

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