It all started more than a year ago, in October 2015, when Lauren Batchelder attended a Donald Trump rally and asked him this question: “I want to get paid the same as a man, and I think you understand that. So, if you become president, will a woman make the same as a man and do I get to choose what I do with my body?”
Trump responded to Batchelder at the rally, “You’re going to make the same if you do as good a job, and I happen to be pro-life.”
But Trump wasn’t done with his response. He later took to Twitter to call the woman “arrogant” and said she asked her question in a “nasty fashion.”
That’s when the cyberbullying started for Batchelder. A year later, she says she is now ready to talk about what she faced online.
“I think the worst day was when someone said my address and they said they were coming and they were going to rape me,” Batchelder told CNN’s Brooke Baldwin. “I never expected that that would ever happen.”
“It made me really angry because to me, they were just trying to objectify me,” she said.
Baldwin asked Batchelder about Trump’s claim that she was a staffer for his Republican presidential rival, Jeb Bush. Batchelder said she did work for the Bush campaign, but only as a volunteer, and that she actually considers herself a liberal.
“I had volunteered for the campaign because I think it’s important to volunteer for people you don’t necessarily agree with,” she said. “I mean, Mr. Bush is a very nice guy, but ultimately I am a Democrat, so I would never, ever, go in there with a planted question.”
“I think words have actions,” Batchelder said, “You can’t just tweet what you think at a moment, you have to think of the big picture.”
Batchelder is still active on Twitter, but she keeps most of her tweets private.
“I’ve seen the really bad side of Twitter. And I know that President-Elect Trump can use it to make the world a better place, and I urge him to do that.”