Trans Twitch streamer Keffals is still being swatted despite moving house

Trans Twitch streamer and activist Clara ‘Keffals’ Sorrenti has been forced to move out of her home in Canada due to constant doxxing and swatting attempts. Even as she moves across the country, she’s being targeted ⁠— but she’s vowing to fight back.

Keffals is an outspoken force on Twitch, an activist trying to push trans rights and pushing back against online rhetoric seen as unhealthy and potentially dangerous to LGBTQ+ people.

However, her public position has caught her in the crossfires of numerous attacks. She has been doxxed, swatted, and targeted with harassment for months while streaming on the platform. Through platform bans and all the rest, she’s managed to keep it together ⁠— although one swatting incident on August 5 finally forced Sorrenti to move out for her privacy.

Since that attempt though, Keffals has been the target of more attacks as she tries to find a permanent home. This includes people sending pizzas to the hotel she was staying in while using her dead name on the orders.

They found out where she was staying by “looking at the bedsheets, cross-referencing them with every hotel in my city until they found a match,” she said on August 18. The information was then spread across Kiwifarms, an online forum, with her address being plastered publicly.

“Obviously, the pizza itself isn’t the problem ⁠— it’s the threat they send by telling me they know where I live and are willing to act on it in the real world. My fiance and I promptly checked out and are now staying at an undisclosed location.”

Numerous others have been caught in the crossfire, according to Keffals. An elderly man in Toronto was reportedly swatted after doxxers thought she was at his house because they share a last name. A graphics artist that works for her in Texas was also targeted.

So, in the interim, Keffals is staying as private as possible. She is “living in Airbnbs that have been rented by a third party so I do not have to give out my name.

“Every week I’m going to move to another one, and use a VPN to make sure no one can trace my IP. To ensure that no one is able to identify the furniture in the houses I am renting and match it with local listings in order to dox me, I am also using a greenscreen. I invested in a portable setup I can fit in a backpack so I can stream anywhere, and by doing all of this, no one can locate me and I can go back to streaming regularly. 

“I do not want to live with the constant fear of being located and having threats escalate, especially when I know some of the people involved live in the same city as me.”

A GoFundMe she set up to raise funds to move out is nearing $100,000 CAD ($77,000 USD) at the time of publishing, and is now being directed towards a legal fund which she will use to “seek justice” for “blatant violations of the Human Rights Act and discrimination against me on the basis of gender identity and expression.”

This discrimination is not only coming from doxxers online, but also the London Police Service who originally mistreated the streamer when she was first swatted. The Chief of the service has since apologized, and Keffals is going to work with them “to the best of [her] ability” to find the people attacking her.

And instead of turning her back on activism and speaking out against her critics, Keffals is vowing to double down and continue exposing them.

“We need as many people to see this story as possible, because it is the only way to seek justice for me and for countless others who have been victimized by them but do not have a platform to fight back. 

“Kiwifarms has been able to get away with the things they have because they are relatively unknown outside of the internet. We need as many people as possible to know who they are if we want to fight back.”