- Two years ago, Claira Janover lost a job offer with Deloitte after a TikTok went viral.
- Janover told Insider that far-right Trump supporters doxxed and harassed her over an "All Lives Matter" analogy.
When Claira Janover shared a TikTok with her over 250,000 followers about "All Live Matters" arguments, she didn't expect that the short video would blow up her world.
Janover, 24, was raised to be outspoken, especially about issues around social justice and equality. But after being doxxed online and losing a job offer, Janover said she is "completely averse to the idea of ever being a public figure on the internet again."
"I grew up with a very politically-active mom. She was a union organizer, a public high school history teacher who taught African American studies and women and gender studies," Janover told Insider. "I grew up going to the polls and going to community meetings. And I had protested with my mom at a young age and then all in high school and college, I would attend protests."
In the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd and nationwide protests, Janover made a TikTok video addressing comments proclaiming "All Lives Matter," a term created in response to the "Black Lives Matter" movement.
The video hadn't received a largely negative response — at first.
Far-right political activist Jack Posobiec tweeted a response to a separate TikTok video of Janover acting out a conversation with a hypothetical Trump supporter. In the video, she said Trump voters were "implicitly homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic," Insider previously reported.
"Leftists are now having imaginary conversations with themselves instead of talking to actual Trump supporters," Posobiec said in the tweet with a link to the clip.
Janover said Posobiec's tweet led people to her TikTok and to a different video about "All Lives Matter, which she made about a month earlier. In the video, she analogized "All Lives Matter" and Black Lives Matter to someone who has a papercut and someone who has been stabbed.
"The next person who has the sheer nerve — the sheer caucasity — to say 'All Lives Matter,' I'mma stab you," Janover said in the video. "I'mma stab you. And while you're bleeding out, I'm gonna show you my paper cut and say 'my cut matters, too,'" Janover joked in the video.
Janover told Insider that people began sending her death and rape threats. Online users began tagging her employers and demanding her termination. Some thought that Janover's message was threatening violence and demanded she be held accountable she said.
Her TikTok video about "All Lives Matter" was meant to be satirical and hyperbolic and never intended to promote violence, Janover said.
"I was getting like tens of thousands of really hateful messages that were just really grotesque. And then they grew into things like death threats and rape threats," she said.
After her address was shared online, Janover said she used a pseudonym to move to a different apartment building that had security.
Online user tagged her employers in posts demanding she be fired
At the time, she was a student at Harvard University and had a job offer lined up with Deloitte. Janover told Insider that as she was dealing with a whirlwind of interactions online, she sent a "very long, very explicit email" to the company to explain what happened online.
Janover said she was staying with a friend's family at the time and as the online harassment increased, more people began tagging Deloitte in posts. Her friends parents advised her to "get ahead of it."
"I was saying, 'I'm sorry if this name is being attached to you because of my LinkedIn profile that had been going viral as well," she said. "And I wanted to assure them that I was not instigating any kinds of violence."
Janover said she sent an email to the HR department at Deloitte with pictures of the death threats she received, threatening messages that were sent to her late mom's Facebook account, and Nazi propaganda memes that were being spread around about her. Janover said the threats and comments she received were also tied to her identity as an Asian-American woman.
"These messages weren't just – 'I hate you. I'm going come murder you and your family,' which it was like a lot of the time – but a lot of the time it was also going into deep description of other ways in which they would assault me –- sexual violence and like rape and gang bang. So that was something that I know that none of those messages would've been sent to a straight male," she said.
Deloitte's responded to her email by asking her to join a Zoom call, where she said she was told the company "cannot have somebody work for us who in any shape, way, or form endorses or promotes violence, even if it was satirical."
Despite trying to clarify her comments and the backlash, the job offer was rescinded. The call she said lasted less than a minute.
She moved on and stepped away from social media
Janover, who grew up with a single mom who died in 2019 from cancer, and an only child said she found the strength to keep going despite the threats because she didn't have anyone else to worry about. However, she noticed that began to be isolated as some friends kept their distance from her over safety concerns.
Two years later, Janover says she feels safer. She's since graduated from Harvard and worked for President Joe Biden's 2020 campaign.
"It was a very crazy whirlwind time. And then I ended up working full time with the Biden Administration for his 2020 campaign up in California. So I was based with the California Dems and then I was working with Gen Z for Change, which is now its own really incredible organization," she said.
Despite the personal attacks she faced, Janover said she's been able to contribute to work that she cared about. But when her TikTok account was hacked in December 2020, she never tried to reopen it.
"I was so excited to not be a content creator anymore," Janover said.
Instead, she spent her time out in the countryside with her extended family in Wyoming. The time away and in the outdoors influenced the courses she was taking in the Spring of 2021 as she finished up her Harvard degree. Janover said she ended up applying for and going on travel fellowships for the rest of 2021.
"I think that gave me room to take a step back that I don't think I would've had or really conceived of as a possibility or a reality had I not had that ability to be broken down and having to rebuild," Janover said.