Texas Republican state representative Scott Sanford received a violent threat from a pro-choice activist over Twitter, his consultant Jordan Berry confirmed to National Review Online. His office reported the threat to the Department of Public Safety.
The tweet, sent on July 2 from the handle @Tupacca, reads, “I will drown @Scott_SanfordTX in blood & bile then feed his corpse to territorial crows. Satan come to us we are ready. #hailsatan #tcot.”
Sanford is one of several Texas conservatives who continue to receive threats and extreme verbal abuse.
State representative Jodie Laubenberg, the sponsor of the anti-abortion bill, drew national media attention when she suggested that rape kits get women “cleaned out.” Since then, her office has received hundreds of verbally abusive and sexually explicit phone calls from pro-choice activists.
“One of the callers left a message and said that they hoped her daughters and granddaughters were raped,” says Suzanne Bowers, Laubenberg’s chief of staff. “A lot of the messages have been, ‘I hope you die.’”
Bowers says many of the messages the office has received are “very sexually explicit.”
“Lots of the f-word, lots of the c-word, which we’ve never heard in our office before,” she continues. “So, just despicable messages. They call and are very sexually explicit about what they would like somebody to do to her.”
The majority of the calls have come from out-of-state, she says. About one quarter of the callers have specifically said they want Laubenberg to be sexually assaulted or violently attacked, Bowers tells me.
Laubenberg tells me that her office has had to take extra security precautions to keep the staff safe.
“We’ve had to keep our office door locked, which I hate to do,” she says. “But if they storm in, that could be a little unnerving for me and for my staff.”
Laubenberg tells me that the way some pro-choice activists have approached her in the state capitol has been frightening.
“I’m a little person,” she says. “I didn’t use to think of myself as being little until I got involved with this. When you have big guys or large groups coming at you, you get a little claustrophobic. It is unnerving, you feel vulnerable.”
Laubenberg adds that sometimes the DPS or other members of the House have had to clear a path for her so she can get through groups of protesters.
“If I walk down the crowd and one of them recognizes me, they’ll try to get very close, they’ll try to get in my face,” she tells me.
State representative Stephanie Klick, who is pro-life, tells me that on the night of Davis’s filibuster, pro-choice protesters followed her into the women’s room, where they surrounded her and yelled at her.
“It’s a woman’s right to choose and you oughta be ashamed that you’re supporting this legislation!” they yelled, according to Klick.
“I tried to engage them briefly as to whether or not they had even read the bill, and they hadn’t, and they became louder and were chanting,” she continues. “So I stepped back out of the ladies’ room, and some of them followed me, but I was able to lose them in the stairway.”
Klick adds that the encounter left her shaken.
“These folks were really pretty edgily dressed,” she says. “They were pretty out there in their attire and the things that they were saying. They were using profanity, they certainly did not know normal professional courtesies. None of that was extended to me.”