Star Wars’ Kelly Marie Tran leaves Instagram after months of online harassment

Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, has taken herself offline after experiencing months of social media harassment.

On Monday night, Star Wars fan account @SWTweets alerted that Tran had deleted all of the posts from her Instagram page, leaving just a black and white profile photo and a bio that reads “Afraid, but doing it anyway”, reports variety.com.

The actress, who was the first lead female character of colour in the iconic series, had been criticised by “Star Wars” fans for her performance, looks and Asian ethnicity. Paul Ray Ramsey took aim at her appearance publicly, and the “Wookieepedia” page for Tran’s character was altered by contributors with offensive and racist language.

At the Last Jedi premiere in December, Tran said that bringing diversity to the Star Wars world has “been both an honour and a responsibility. I feel so overwhelmed”.

I totally embarrassingly fanned out when I met Kelly Marie Tran. Rose Tico was unequivocally one of the highlights of The Last Jedi. You’d have to be an idiot to disagree with that.

— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) June 5, 2018

She added: “A lot of ‘Star Wars’ fans who are specifically Asian never had a character they could dress up like, or they would and people would always call them ‘Asian Rey’ or ‘Asian fill-in-the-blank.’ I get very emotional when I see people who are able to identify with this character. That means a lot to me and I don’t think it will ever get old.”

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