Cyberbullying is the last thing one would expect to be a danger that is associated with the porn industry.
Alyssa Funke, 19, took her own life after she was being cyberbullied in the weeks following a video release for amateur porn site CastingCouch-X.
A straight-A student, Funke was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin’s River Falls who used the stage name “Stella Ann” and had plan to major in biology and become an anaesthesiologist, both things she will never be able to achieve after taking a shotgun to her head on April 16th.
According to KMSP, Funke started receiving spiteful messages on Facebook and Twitter just a few days after her video was posted. Most of the harassment were from her former peers at Stillwater High School. Funke’s video turned out to be a big deal and students were seen hovering around their phones during lunch. One student sent a tweet that read, “Wow your a thot” — slang for a prostitute — and posed the question: “Does her dad know?”
Another wrote, “Nothing brings a school together like a porn star who graduated last year. I guess you could say news spreads fast here at Stillwater hahah.”
Alyssa responded with her own tweets,
Funke may have projected a strong and confident attitude in her tweet but it was only two weeks after her video was posted that she drove to a boat landing on Big Carnelia Lake and shot herself with a 12-gauge shotgun.
KMSP suggested that the cyberbullying definitely played a major role in Funke’s decision to commit suicide but her parents claim that she also suffered from depression.
Now, let this tragedy serve as further restatement that there is never any need for mean comments and hateful words on the internet — there is no need to be a keyboard warrior.
Plus, anyone with even the smallest amount of common decency should know that, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all and just because you can say something, it doesn’t mean you should.
