It's a bad week to be named Amy Cooper

• Several women named Amy Cooper have found themselves on the receiving end of online hate this week.
• People have mistaken those women for the Amy Cooper who called the police on a Central Park bird-watcher.
• Two women named Amy Cooper told Insider that when the messages started rolling in, they weren't yet familiar with the now-infamous incident.

Amy Cooper is a 37-year-old physical therapist who lives in Manhattan.

She's white. She sometimes visits Central Park to go running. But she's not that Amy Cooper.

For the past week, though, she has received dozens of social-media messages, friend requests, and phone calls from angry people — more than 90% of them men — who seem to believe she is the Amy Cooper who called the police on a black man who was bird-watching in Central Park on Monday, she told Insider.

And she's not the only Amy Cooper this has happened to. A "mommy influencer" in the UK has also been subjected to an outpouring of hate mail because of her common name.

"Monday night I started getting these Facebook message requests. There were three or four in a row, just kind of threatening — 'People are going to come for you.' 'You're a horrible person,' 'You're a terrible racist,'" the New York Cooper (but, again, not that New York Cooper) told Insider. "I was just doing my work and enjoying the day. I thought I must have been hacked."

Almost immediately after the first messages started rolling in, Cooper's friend sent her a link to a story about the Central Park incident in which a white woman — later identified as Amy Cooper — was filmed threatening to call the police on a black man and then doing it.

The man's sister, who shared the video on Twitter, said the altercation started when her brother, a bird-watcher named Christian Cooper (no relation to Amy Cooper), asked the woman to put her dog on a leash. Before calling the police, the Amy Cooper in the video told Christian Cooper she'd tell them there's an "African American man threatening my life." The video sparked widespread outrage and led to her being fired from her job, and civic groups have called for her to be barred from the park.

But the incident had nothing to do with other Amy Coopers of the world.

This Amy Cooper is a cat person

The video also gained infamy because Cooper not only accused the man of threatening her life but also appeared to choke her dog. The physical therapist Cooper in New York, though, doesn't have a dog. She has two cats: Picasso and Matisse.

It was her self-described status as a "cat lady" that helped some of her friends and family know right off the bat that she couldn't possibly be the woman from Central Park, she said.

They, too, started reaching out with messages of support.

The hateful messages, though, outweighed the others. Most were incoherent and filled with rage. The seven or so voicemails she received were left, primarily, by angry men calling her names.

"Of all the places to be a racist timid little Karen," one man wrote in a Facebook message viewed by Insider, using a slang name for an entitled woman. "In CENTRAL PARK? you dumb ugly bitch. Watching you lose everything is going to be so sweet, Karen."

"I hear you've been reported to animal control," another said. "Expect a knock at your door."

Cooper said she wasn't really worried about her safety because she left the city over the weekend and intended to stay away for a few weeks. She just blocked the accounts as messages came in and changed some of her privacy settings.

She responded to a few of the social-media users to let them know they had the wrong Cooper and also to remind them how common her name was. She's still waiting for the misplaced outrage to fade away.

The UK Amy Cooper relies on social media for her job

Amy Cooper of Dorset, England, is taking a similar approach. But for this Cooper — a well-known parenting blogger — her presence on social media is an integral part of her job.

To fend off the comments, she pinned a Tweet to the top of her account letting people know they were harassing the wrong woman, on the wrong side of the Atlantic.

"I've had a couple of hundred messages. Around one in five was a case of mistaken identity and sadly 99% of these were from men," the UK Cooper told Insider in an email. "Comments included death threats and people claiming they would track me down. However, the remaining 80% were supportive. Most people are smart enough to see straight away that I'm an entirely different person in an entirely different country!"

When the threats first started arriving, Cooper, who is six months pregnant and has three young children, was worried about her safety. Once she started reading about the incident, though, she realized it was in New York and she wasn't in real danger.

"However when I realised it was in America I felt a little better as I am so far away," she wrote. "I absolutely understand the strength of feeling around the story, but two wrongs do not make a right — sending abusive messages to someone, whatever the situation, won't make it better."

Amy Cooper is a popular name

A public-records search for people named Amy Cooper shows pages of women around the US and several dozen in New York alone.

In fact, Amy Cooper (the cat-owning physical therapist) says she's had many mix-ups in Manhattan doctor's offices and elsewhere.

One of the most memorable was years ago during the New York City Marathon. When she picked up her bib, she said, there was a note slipped into her registration packet.

"It said, 'Tell Amy Cooper that her husband loves her very much and wishes her luck,'" Cooper remembered. "I wasn't married."

As far as cases of mistaken identities though, the past week has been the strangest.

But Cooper said understood that people were enraged by the video.

If anything, one of the more frustrating parts of being flooded by angry messages was seeing how many people seemed to be more concerned over the dog — who was ultimately given up to an animal-rescue organization — than they were for Christian Cooper, she said.

"I got really annoyed. The dog is not the story here," Cooper said. "This is way bigger than the dog."

• Read more:
• A woman in a video appears to call the police claiming there's an 'African American man threatening my life' — he apparently had asked her to put her dog on a leash
• Investment firm suspends woman over video of her calling the police on a black man who asked her to put her dog on a leash
• A New York woman who called the police and falsely claimed that there was an 'African-American man threatening her life' said her actions were 'unacceptable'