When I speak to Zoe Quinn, she’s worried.

The game developer is in Los Angeles for the west coast leg of her book tour, but she’s just had a serious threat made against her, directed at her next tour stop. She has to decide what to do. This comes on the heels of an appearance at New York’s historic bookstore the Strand, where Quinn gamely handled a man who jeered at her from the audience.

“He had to take the elevator three floors up to get to the event, and he didn’t realize he had to take the elevator back down,” Quinn tells me. Her heckler was stuck riding with Quinn’s fans and supporters.

Such is the life of a woman trying to take down online abusers.

Quinn’s book, the newly released Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate, outlines how an act of domestic abuse by a former partner became a cultural phenomenon and put her on the run – literally.

In 2014, a man Quinn used to date published a nearly 10,000-word manifesto online designed to do as much damage possible to Quinn’s reputation while riling up an online mob. He made baseless claims about her sex life and relationships, and falsely accused her of having a relationship with a video game journalist for good reviews of her own games.

Before long, Quinn was fielding rape and death threats, was being doxxed, and people were even hacking into her voicemail. Someone changed her Wikipedia page to read that she died on 13 October, the date of her next speaking appearance.

Gamergate, as we now know it, was born. It was stalking gone viral.

Despite Quinn’s reservations about the criminal justice system, she went to law enforcement – at the very least to start a paper trail. But the police weren’t equipped to handle online abuse and threats.

“You need to put more personal information about yourself on the police report,” Quinn says. “So if you haven’t been doxxed yet, that’s a really easy way to be doxxed because police reports are public records.”

Quinn showed up with a zip drive, but the police didn’t know what to do with it. They wanted everything printed, even though some of the evidence Quinn was bringing them consisted of audio and video files. She did her best, though, and broke her friend’s printer in the process from overuse. There were also jurisdictional issues – where do you report a crime that happened online? – and the often impossible task of finding someone using just their username.

Quinn also says that the only reason she was able to navigate all of this was that she had pro bono help; the paperwork in itself is a full-time job. Someone with fewer connections or a smaller profile than Quinn would almost certainly not be able to do all the work involved in reporting extensive online harassment.

Still, it’s not as if the harassment ever really went away. Years later, Quinn still gets abuse.

To critics or novices who would offer that Quinn should simply get offline, shut the computer, log off Twitter – she points out that’s not really an option.

“I’m an independent game developer – there’s not exactly an offline version of that,” she says. “This is where my community is; everybody I’m close to I know because of the internet.”

Besides, the internet is the new public square. In the same way we wouldn’t expect a woman to prevent street harassment by never leaving her house, we cannot advise people to prevent online threats by just staying offline. And, really, Quinn says, do we want to just give it up?

“If that’s the solution to online abuse, what we’re saying is that we’re going to cede the internet to whoever screams the loudest at the most people, and just hand over this amazing technological achievement to the nastiest people,” she says.

And the truth of it is that today, online abuse and offline abuse meld together. Consider the threat to Quinn’s book event – the heckler yelling out at her from the back of of her New York talk. And with the rise of Donald Trump, a lot of the same people who used to spew vile racist and sexist threats anonymously on the internet feel emboldened to voice their hate openly. There is a reason many “alt-right” protesters are organizing online and showing up to events waving signs based on internet memes.

Quinn sees a connection too, between Gamergate and Trump’s online grassroots supporters.

“In terms of where the fake news was coming from and the infrastructure that was being used to propagate and spread stuff virally, a lot of it did come from the same people who were responsible for what happened to me,” she says. Quinn brings up the fact that Breitbart had her name as a keyword and art depicting her on the site.

Quinn’s critics see women like her in gaming and in online spaces – those who’d like to change the industry and online spaces to be less abusive – and believe their work amounts to infringement of free speech. As if a constant barrage of threats and abuse is simply an opinion they have every right to share.

But as Quinn writes in her book: “What about my father’s home address was an opinion?” This wasn’t free speech, but targeted silencing of Quinn.

A big theme of Quinn’s book is resilience – which makes sense, given how much she’s been through since the day her ex published his stalker manifesto online.

That’s why it’s so important that Quinn doesn’t just write about the difficulty of her situation, but also of others’. Marginalized communities – especially women of color, as well as LGBT community members – are more likely to be harassed online, and Quinn wants to make sure solutions are being offered as a way forward.

Since Gamergate, Quinn has continued to develop games and has launched an organization, also called Crash Override, to help victims of online abuse. She wants people to know the steps they can take to protect themselves online, but also ways they can help others who are being targeted.