ASIA, or Asian Students in America, hosted a Zoom call with speaker Dr. Grace Ji-Sun Kim to celebrate AAPI month when the call was bombarded by trolls who played pornography loudly over their video feed.
The identity of the infiltrators is unknown, and will likely remain that way due to the nature of Zoom’s in-and-out video platform.
Jasmine Rupani, leader of ASIA and organizer of the event, expressed deep sorrow after the attack. In a statement to the Tartan, Rupani said:
“Zoom-bombing is real and it happens, and it was really unfortunate that this event was at risk. I deeply apologize to our speaker and everyone who was present at the event who had to witness what they did. I know I was pretty shaken up and just deeply hurt by this display of how broken our world is. I really don’t understand why anyone would do something like that. I regret not being more prepared to handle a situation like this. Our speaker displayed grace and wisdom.
We are working with administration and CTS to ensure something like this doesn’t happen again. I hope that the words of our speaker are what resonate in the students’ hearts and not these images. We would love to invite Dr. Kim back in the future. In doing more research about Zoom hacking, it has been a trend that events related to religious or minority organizations have been targeted.
I cannot know the intentions of who did this, but I do know the pain and confusion it is causing.
Thank you for those of you who came, and to those of you who reached out to us. Check in with your friends who might have been present there. And thank you to my team, Yicaury Melo, Dan Tymann, CTS, and GCSA for working so hard to ensure our safety and providing resources to students.”
Dan Tymann, Executive Vice President for Campus Life, responded to last night’s events in an email to the campus. This story will be updated with more details as they come.
at least i can only speak from my heart and if anyone sees this and there's anything i could do to help or be of support lmk/look me up on email
I'm so disgusted to hear about that happening,i hope that ASIA and attendents of this program know there are plenty of people like myself who care and would never want anyone to go through that....i hope it is not fellow students targeting fellow students- hopefully it was just some one random :/ idk. My heart goes out to ASIA and anybody on campus who represents different ethnicities and minorities, we need diversity at Gordon, in the world, and i hope none of this drama leads a student to feel unsafe or unsupported here or leave. Which is obvs already the case- wish there was something i could do and im sure many people feel the same and i'm just writing this so the student who feels like everyone is against them can know that what happened is not demonstrative of the whole picture of the students here....like more students at Gordon want this to stop than for it to continue