Journalist Liz Fraser has detailed a nearly decade-long campaign of online harassment and defamation that she endured, culminating in significant personal and professional damage. Fraser described the experience as a coordinated effort by groups of women who fabricated numerous false claims about her, including accusations of abandoning her children, attempting to run someone over with a car, and extorting money from vulnerable women.
Fraser, who has a career spanning nearly 30 years in media and entertainment, stated that these fabricated stories, posted across various gossip websites and forums, reached nearly a million words and deeply impacted her reputation. The abuse extended beyond online platforms, with perpetrators contacting people in her local community, her children's school, and even her local government position as a parent governor.
The campaign directly led to the shutdown of her independent publishing company, which she had founded as a lifelong ambition. Fake social media accounts were created to impersonate the company, and defamatory comments were posted on platforms frequented by clients, falsely claiming it was a front for financial exploitation.
Fraser recounted a particularly distressing incident in February 2024, when her holiday with her young daughter was compromised after her location was shared on a gossip platform. This event led her to contemplate suicide, feeling that there was no safe place left for her and her child. She described her abusers as mocking her distress, attributing it to narcissistic personality disorder.
Fighting Back
After a period of withdrawal and attempting to rebuild her life away from public scrutiny, Fraser decided to reclaim her narrative. In June 2026, she made her Instagram account public again and shared a video detailing her experience. This prompted hundreds of responses from individuals, primarily women, who reported similar experiences of being attacked by other women.
Fraser is now advocating for stronger measures against what she terms online abuse, rather than the commonly used but, in her view, downplayed term 'trolling.' She argues that these persistent, group-based attacks cause serious injury and that current laws are insufficient to address the issue. She calls for reforms including the closure of unregulated gossip sites, better support for victims from employers, and the elimination of anonymous posting to hold abusers accountable. Fraser believes that ending anonymity would significantly deter such behavior.
She stated that the perpetrators were not anonymous individuals but rather organized groups, often comprised of women, who felt entitled to say anything under the protection of pseudonyms. This phenomenon, she noted, is not limited to specific online subcultures but is a broader issue of women targeting other women.