Explaining her thought process in the situation, the boxer stated, “I was scrolling on my phone. I actually don’t even know how that tweet ended up on my Twitter because I don’t follow it – someone who I follow must follow that. And I didn’t even look at what it said, I just looked at the video.
“It was about 12-year-old girl who had been led to her death, raped, murdered and chopped up and put into a suitcase. And that just filled me with anger and sadness.
“To be very honest with you, I never thought of the hurt that I could cause to anybody by retweeting it. I never thought of what I said in the retweet either. I just said it. It was a spur of the moment thing. I said it and I put it up on Twitter,” she continued.
Almost as soon as she posted it, the LGBTQ+ athlete began receiving private messages from people she knew and respected, who warned her of the dangers of sharing such rhetoric.
“They weren’t being aggressive to me, they were just trying to educate me a little bit,” Harrington explained.
“I had basically painted a group of people with the same paintbrush that people like me, from my community, from my area have been and are still being painted with for many years. So I know what that’s like. And that’s exactly what I had done with my retweet. I didn’t realise that at the time.
“So I deleted the tweet. I took it down and I apologised personally in the messages to people who I had hurt. They understood and they said, ‘Look, we’re all learning.’ We’re all human, you know? There’s good and bad in everyone.