A proud father recently took to Twitter to congratulate his daughter on being accepted to college, where she will pitch for the softball team.
Then the trolls showed up and changed everything.
Unfortunately for the trolls, the proud father was none other than retired World Series MVP and future Hall of Fame pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, Curt Schilling, and he wasn’t about to let the trolls win.
Schilling, a former Boston Red Sox pitcher who’s won a World Series MVP award, posted an innocent tweet congratulating his daughter on getting accepted into the Rhode Island college Salve Regina, where she’ll be following in her father’s footsteps and pitching for their softball team, the Seahawks.
“Congrats to Gabby Schilling who will pitch for the Salve Regina Seahawks next year!!” was Schilling tweet.
While many others joined him in congratulating his 17-year-old daughter on being accepted to the Rhode Island college, a few took the opportunity to hit on her, and some even descended to posting crude vulgarities aimed at the young woman.
Schilling was having none of it though, and the proud father shifted into protective mode, saying, “As a father, besides providing for my family, what other job do I have? Loving my kids and protecting my family.”
Using publicly available information, Schilling was able to track down at least nine of the worst trolls, causing them to lose their jobs or be kicked off their athletic teams … “and we’re not done,” he added.
“Lost in all of this is, my daughter is 17. She’s a minor. And these guys are all adults. I’m pursuing legal recourse on a couple of them because they broke the law. What they did can have them labeled as a sex offender for the rest of their lives.”
The former pitcher and ESPN analyst also took to his own personal blog, entitled 38 Pitches, and posted a lengthy enraged rant aimed at the sexually explicit trolls who had bullied his daughter.
Calling the men “gutless cowards,” he lamented the fact that such individuals hide behind their computers and smartphones and say things they otherwise wouldn’t even dream of saying to someone’s face.
Schilling also made it clear that he wasn’t so much interested in getting personal revenge, but in pushing back against online bullying that can lead some young people to despair and even suicide.
“This is not a pride thing, where it’s, ‘I’m going to show them.’ One of the defenses of people trying to defend these guys is, ‘You should know this is the world we live in now.’ And my response was, ‘No, it’s not. We can allow it to be that way, but it’s not.’ You want bad to be the norm, then do nothing,” Schilling said Monday night.
“Let me be very clear. I don’t know that I could put myself in a place where my daughter would take her life, but if that happened, I’m that father with nothing to lose. This was an attack on my family.
Hopefully, the message was sent loud and clear to all of the trolls out there on the Interwebs … You are not as anonymous as you think you might be.
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