Don’t we all love a happy ending?
I know I do: a clean, simple story with a beginning, middle and end – and we can all get on with our lives afterwards knowing there are no lingering unanswered questions.
What I don’t love is a cliffhanger.
Take, for example, a dramatic saga orchestrated by a well-known TikTok influencer – someone you may not have heard of, but your teenage daughter certainly has – complete with PIs, clandestine investigations, damning dossiers, cryptic social media posts and even a glossy magazine cover teasing an earth-shattering denouement…
Only for the final chapter we were all waiting for on the edges of our seats to be torn away, leaving us with no closure, no answers, nothing really.
Almost like the whole thing had never happened to begin with.
TikTok mumfluencer Indy Clinton shone at the TikTok Awards in Sydney last year as she capped off a year that saw her launch a public crusade against her online trolls
I was energised by Indy’s very public campaign to unmask her anonymous trolls. But after getting the information she was after, it all seemed to fizzle out. Now, I and others are left wondering what it was all for, writes DailyMail+ columnist Amanda Goff
Confused? I certainly was. If you haven’t realised already, I’m of course talking about mumfluencer Indy Clinton and her headline-making battle against her army of trolls.
For those over 35, think of Indy as an Australian Kardashian for Gen Z.
The 27-year-old mother of three boasts an enormous presence on social media, thanks to her ‘relatable’ parenting woes (sigh) and controversial nose job.
She has two million followers on TikTok – her preferred platform – and 654,000 on Instagram, offering up an addictive lifestyle brand best described as ‘chaotic realness’ – punctuated by near-constant stressing over her kids, crying-in-the-car videos and, of course, videos of her glammed up for red carpet events.
One of those events took place in Sydney last week: the TikTok Awards.
Indy waltzed down the red carpet at the ICC looking – admittedly – fantastic in a glittering halterneck gown with a plunging neckline and thigh-high split.
You’d have no idea from the photos of her paparazzi preening that she’d spent months unmasking some of the most vicious anonymous trolls lurking in the stinking alleyways of The Dark Side of the Internet.
You see, earlier this year, Indy wasn’t just juggling kids and filming reels. She was fighting a war – a war against her faceless online tormentors.
Indy danced around her kitchen with joy after receiving a 64-page dossier identifying her trolls – including mothers and professional women – ‘who have bullied and defamed’ her online
While some of my generation might roll their eyes and say ‘just shut the laptop, darl’, I, for one, applauded her campaign to punish her trolls for the lies, hate and smears they post about her online.
As Indy launched her crusade against her bullies, she declared, ‘The anonymous accounts and the people hiding behind them need to be held accountable.’
I felt energised. As someone who has been trolled in the past, I backed her 100 per cent.
And, for the record, I still admire her chutzpah – despite having misgivings about what would follow… but more on that later.
Of course, Indy lacked the know-how to unmask her enemies herself, so she called in the big dogs: a private investigations company called Cybertrace, which embarked on a three-month forensic investigation, worth $8,000, looking into 15 of the worst offenders who had targeted Indy and her family personally.
And, lo and behold, she got the dirt on them. Every single one. All tied up neatly in a 64-page report that she proudly displayed while dancing around her kitchen in a TikTok video. Alarmingly, the trolls were women – some of them mothers.
‘Let me tell you, you are not anonymous,’ she warned, ‘because I literally have every f**king detail.’
And boy, that she did. Indy claimed she knew which hospital the women gave birth in, their tattoos, their ABNs, what hairdressers they went to. The level of detail she claimed to be privy to was, frankly, scary.
Still, I clapped. Finally, here we had a woman in the public eye with balls big enough to take on the faceless horde.
And her bombshell dropped at the perfect time: an Irish court had just unmasked the owner of toxic gossip forum Tattle Life, where much of the vitriol against Indy was – and is still – gleefully documented.
Luckily, I’m not a ‘Tattle celeb’ like Indy and her contemporaries Tammy Hembrow, Sophie Guidolin and Kayla Itsines – but I have been the target of trolls many times.
Only recently, I was sent a DM saying ‘women like me deserved a bullet in the head’ because of a recent column I wrote (I refuse to give any more oxygen to the sender), so I know what it’s like to be mocked, judged and threatened.
It would break some people – and it has.
TV host Charlotte Dawson was 47 when she took her own life in 2014 after being relentlessly hounded by trolls on social media. It’s easy to wax hypothetical about freedom of speech and online privacy until something unspeakably awful lands in your inbox from an unknown sender.
Which is why Indy’s crusade felt powerful – and personal – to me.
I was rapt that someone with real clout was going to name and shame these trolls – mothers, women with ‘high-paying jobs’ – and ensure they faced real consequences.
Indy may have been doing it for herself and her family, but I also felt then that she was doing it for all of us. By outing a dozen or so of the worst offenders, maybe their cackling acolytes would close their accounts and think twice before telling a stranger she’s a terrible mother or deserves to die.
And that’s when it happened for me. As a 51-year-old woman, I saw a Gen Z TikTok star – the type I’d usually ignore like Ebola – as a steamrolling force for good in the world. It takes a lot for me to say that.
Indy’s campaign came at the perfect time: a court had just unmasked the owner of gossip forum Tattle Life, where much of the vitriol against Indy was – and is still – gleefully posted
Vegan influencer Sebastian Bond was identified as the man behind Tattle Life, and could face a slew of defamation cases
So I waited for the names and Facebook profiles to drop. I was refreshing Indy’s TikTok for the big reveal. I, like her millions of followers, was itching to see who these seemingly ordinary women behind the toxic ‘tattle’ were.
And why should I have expected differently? After all, Indy had made such a (literal) song and dance about her crusade. It had made her mainstream-famous – the talk of TikTok, podcasts and traditional media. It had even landed her a cover shoot for Stellar magazine – the Sunday pull-out for News Corp’s metro newspapers.
But then… nothing. Nada. Not one single name. Not even a blurred profile picture. Absolutely bugger all.
Indy, of course, has her reasons for not naming and shaming. Maybe the personal satisfaction of unmasking them was enough. Perhaps there were legal issues. It’s entirely possible she sent out cease-and-desist letters that we don’t know about.
Still, I felt short-changed that such a public crusade ended abruptly after Act 2. It was like I’d been ghosted, gaslit and strung along for a campaign that, in the end, only served to make Indy Clinton slightly more famous than she was before and give the folks at Cybertrace a nice bit of positive PR.
All that hype, the headlines, the literal dancing with the dossier… and she decides to take the high road because – in her words – ‘it won’t be beneficial for anyone’ to out her trolls. Sorry, Indy, I disagree. Accountability would be beneficial. Outing a dozen or so of the absolute worst offenders would send a warning shot to the others: stop the abuse, or the same might happen to you.
After seeing Indy in her element at the TikTok Awards, I can’t help but feel she should have taken her campaign to the next logical step, and now it all feels like a colossal waste of time. Harassment and stalking are crimes – why not take them to court?
Instead, she appears to have simply moved on – washing the kids’ clothes, spruiking products, dancing in her slippers… Of course, that’s her right. But I feel let down.
And not only that, this whimper of an ending feels… off-brand for her. Indy is loud, she’s exaggerated, she overshares. Why decide now is the time to stay quiet?
I felt like I’ve been cheated of the ending – and I’m not the only one. And now I suspect that the trolls, feeling like they’ve dodged a bullet, will continue to do what they have always done – with zero consequences. And for that, I’m angry, honestly.
Let me make myself clear here: I am not diminishing the abuse she copped. It would break a lot of people. But when Indy rallied the troops, when she spent almost ten grand to fight for names, I had her back. I genuinely believed something monumental might happen that would benefit us all. A cultural shift, even.
I foresaw respectable activewear mums with corporate jobs being unmasked as trolls. Brutal? Yes. But also the sort of direct action that makes people think twice before unleashing vitriol online.
Instead, Indy did what the majority of influencers do so effortlessly: pivoted.
She changed the subject. Now, we’re expected to forget about her dossier and move on to her latest red carpet look.
After all that build-up, we were left with a cliffhanger, and no sign of a sequel.
If Indy wants to ignite a long-overdue national conversation about the human toll of anonymous online abuse and then simply duck out, she’s perfectly within her rights.
But as a woman who has copped her fair share of hate, I wanted accountability, answers and – for heaven’s sake – a happy ending to this tawdry saga.
