It’s been almost a year since the whole Lotto/Davis nonsense and I wanted to share my experience as a female whistle-blower in the world of cycling.
First, let me touch on some misconceptions, countless people assumed I somehow profited from sharing my experience. All my interviews and hours for those news stories were unpaid. All of the time to reply to countless abuse surrounding the event was also unpaid. The time spent with police due to threats, was again unpaid. All the time to send UCI what they wanted, also unpaid.
As a writer, you’d think maybe meeting all these people from all the different publications that perhaps one would garnish even a chance to get into the industry as a writer. Sadly they just wanted the story and moved on.
A few random people and maybe a few I know, bought me a coffee using the link in my bio. I had so much abuse about this link. It was there for years well before anything happened. A few kind gestures shouldn’t generate so much abuse. It wasn’t much, it wasn’t what people implied.
And on the subject of the abuse, I had death threats and tons of hate threads not just on Twitter. My tweets were dissected, my body trashed, you name it and I was abused because of it. Countless new accounts were created to try to discredit me and hurl abuse at me.
It was implied I’m into married guys, which is categorically untrue. Lots of sex worker comments which was funny because Allan didn’t pay me anything so where is this “work” element they speak of? I had so many people say I was on onlyfans that later in the year I finally signed up, I figured if everyone was going to abuse me for being on the site, I should at least be on the site and make some money from it, right?
So the theory I shared my experience as a get-rich scheme is laughable. And I must admit that in the throws of responding to all these fellow writers, even 1 offering to help me get into the biz would have been amazing, but it never happened.
Even my tweets trying to find work from before and after the tweet in question people made fun of, which was hurtful.
So in summary, I spent tons of hours and went through lots of stress. To this day I’m finding out people who blocked me I never interacted with, because somehow they believe it was all my fault.
People ask why women don’t come forward. Let my experience answer that for you.