Jessica Pegula addresses ‘crazy’ people spreading insults and death threats online

Jessica Pegula says she doesn’t care what angry gamblers say because she thinks “they’re all crazy”. However, she adds that she doesn’t feel good at all when her family and friends open the comments on her Instagram page and see some of the disgusting messages directed at her.

There has been a lot of talk about online abuse in tennis during week 1 of the US Open and it all started after Caroline Garcia shared a series of messages she received following a first-round loss to Renata Zarazua. In one of the messages the French player revealed, a critic shockingly told her to “consider committing suicide.”

“And now, 30 years old, even though it still hurts because at the end of the day I’m just a normal girl who works really hard and tries my best, I have tools and I’ve done work to protect myself from this hate. But still, this is not okay. It really worries me when I think about younger players coming up, who have to go through this. People who haven’t fully developed as people yet and who can really be affected by this hate. Maybe you can think that it doesn’t hurt us. But it does. We are human,” Garcia wrote in her post.

As the media quickly picked up on the story, several top players have been asked about the matter. And world number 6 Pegula was one of them. The 30-year-old American said she has someone who manages her social media – and although she doesn’t see it directly, she has been told that some have even made death threats.

“Honestly, I don’t really care because I know they’re all crazy. But I feel bad when my grandparents or my, I don’t know, are on my Instagram and I see horrible comments. There’s a girl who manages my social media and she was like, ‘You know, you’re getting a lot of negative messages.’ I laughed because it’s so normal to me. I was like, ‘Oh no, don’t worry, it’s nothing.’ She was really concerned about me getting death threats on my Instagram page,” Pegula said.

How does Pegula’s good friend Coco Gauff deal with this?

While some players no longer look at what fans have to say or open their DMs at all, world number 3 Gauff does the exact opposite: she prefers to read everything that is said about her online.

When the American – now 20 years old – was at the beginning of her career in 2019, it didn’t take long before she had her first experience with critics and hecklers. But over time she just accepted that it was “normal” on the Tour and that she was not the only one.

But the same person can’t try to beat the 2023 US Open champion twice because she blocks anyone who insults her.

“I didn’t see her (Garcia’s) post, but they told me about it. It’s obviously tough. Especially when I was younger, I had no idea that this was a thing. I thought I was being targeted at first. Then I realized that everyone got it. It’s tough because you hear a lot of bad things and people talk about your appearance, your family’s appearance, all that stuff. When you’re already struggling with your own mental health issues and then people dig even deeper, it’s tough,” Gauff said.

Iga Swiatek’s thoughts on the problem of online abuse

Considering how successful Swiatek has been in recent years, you would think that the Pole would not know what it feels like to receive scary messages. But in reality, the five-time Grand Slam champion has had to deal with such situations many times himself.

And now the current world No. 1 prefers to only open messages she receives from people she is connected to. But regardless, she agrees that there is “a lot of hate” and that the internet is not exactly the safest place – not just for athletes, but for people in general.

“Well, it’s happened a couple of times, but I have to say I don’t, you know, go to my other inbox. I only see the messages from my closest ones, the ones that I’ve already accepted. But there’s definitely a lot of hate. Because I feel like we can’t be on the internet anymore and feel safe. You really have to be careful about what you read and who you follow,” Swiatek said.