What It’s Really Like To Be Trolled By The Beyhive

In 2015, reporter Charles Manning wrote a couple of stories comparing Beyoncé and J.Lo's outfits. One was about all the times J.Lo wore something Bey had already worn. The other was about all the times Bey wore an outfit J.Lo had worn before. You can probably guess whose fans went ballistic.

In light of the online furor the Beyhive unleashed on Rachel Roy and her daughter Ava this week after the whole "Becky with the good hair" debacle, Manning wrote a piece for Cosmopolitan about his experience being trolled by the Beyhive last year. Manning is careful to point out he did not say anything derogatory or negative about Beyoncé. "All I had done was present side-by-side images of Beyoncé and J.Lo with dates to prove which of them appeared in the outfit first," he writes. Nonetheless, the Beyhive descended upon Manning's Instagram in a rage."Within hours of posting the original article to the site, my Twitter mentions were blowing up and there were bees all over my Instagram. At first, I took it in stride. Even when they wrote nasty things about my mother on Instagram, I brushed it of," he remembers.

However, it got worse. "I tried to ignore the death threats and homophobic slurs bombarding me on social media, blocking the most violent-sounding offenders and deleting the most vicious comments, but it was difficult. I felt threatened. The response was completely out of proportion with whatever supposed 'wrongdoing' I had committed. The viciousness of it reminded me of being bullied as a kid — called a faggot, spat on, beaten up, and even pushed in front of an oncoming ambulance... I wasn't hurt. I was pissed off. I was angry as fuck."

But we already knew how troublesome the Beyhive can be, and can imagine how much it would suck to be the target of its vitriol. What piques my interest about Manning's post are the questions he poses. "Did the people trolling me think Beyoncé gave one flying fuck about my post?" We're guessing she didn't. "I wondered if Beyoncé knew about all the vicious hate people spewed in her name." I mean, it's hard to imagine she hasn't heard of the Beyhive's widely reported, aggressive antics. "Did she find it justified? Did it make her cringe?" I doubt Bey would ever support that kind of nastiness — but the notoriously private star has never spoken on it.

"I found myself wondering what it would actually take for her to say something against this kind of behavior, for which the BeyHive has become notorious." Now, I can't imagine Bey getting in the middle of a random journalist's situation (which Manning clarifies he never expected). But what about Rachel Roy's daughter? Will the Beyhive madness ever reach a fever pitch, one at which Beyoncé feels it's her responsibility to tell them to stand down? They're not her people, they're not her responsibility, and she has never condoned that kind of behavior in any way. That being said, they believe they're being fiercely loyal fans by bullying innocent strangers under her banner. It's scary when people start attacking innocent teenagers. So we're torn. But I definitely don't expect Queen B to break her silence anytime soon.