Woman says she's been flooded with hate after being called out by fitness influencer
Ali Condon
Featured Image Credit: TikTok/@thejoeyswoll
A woman has been plagued with online hate comments after calling out a guy she claims was a 'gym creeper'.
Nora Love posted a video of a man in regular clothes who was allegedly 'staring at girls' while they were working out, and the video didn't go down well in the fitness community. At. All:
Nora was working out in her local gym when she spotted an older man sitting on one of the machines wearing jeans and a t-shirt.
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Posting a video of the man to TikTok for her few thousand followers, Nora described the man as a 'gym creeper' who had allegedly been 'staring at girls' while they were exercising.
"I literally stood next to him for so long and he didn't even notice me," she told viewers. "This is so annoying, we come to work out, not to be leered at."
But it wasn't long before Nora wound up getting called out herself by bodybuilder and fitness influencer Joey Swoll.
Joey was furious with Nora for filming this gym-goer without his permission and accusing him of being a 'creeper'.
Posting his own TikTok video, where he boasts 6.4 million followers, Joey said: "Could you imagine if this was the other way around and he did this to you? What the response would be? And it's not illegal to wear street clothes to the gym."
He also pointed out that 'there could be a lot of reasons' why the man in the video wasn't working out in gym gear like everyone else, whether he was waiting for someone else in the gym, or was 'just lonely'.
"I've been training in the gym for 20+ years. I've seen so many elderly folk that come to the gym just so they can feel social," he claimed.
Given Joey's massive following, it wasn't long before people started targeting Nora over her video, and it's forced her to her social media accounts - even her Pinterest account.
Nora told Insider that she, her coworkers, and her friends have been hit with hundreds of hateful messages and death threats.
Because of her job as a real estate agent, her phone number was available to the public, so even deleting her social media accounts hasn't stopped the hate.
I was getting incessant phone calls," she said. "They were going hard to try to find me with the intention of … making me lose my source of income, making me fear for my safety."
In one truly terrifying instance, Nora says a stranger showed up at a studio where she had recorded a podcast once and asked to see her.
"I've never had more panic attacks in my life," she said.
"These last two weeks of my life have been a living absolute nightmare."
Joey has responded to claims that his content might be having a negative impact on female gym goers - making full use of Twitter's new 4,000 character limit.
"If you actually go to my page you’ll see I’ve done an equal amount of videos on men and women because gender has nothing to do with it," he wrote.
"I have no agenda other than making the gym a safer place for EVERYONE. Period."