"But journalists are at the coal face of debate and controversy and so people think we are an easy target, and I've had my fair share of it online," Sully told BuzzFeed News. "I just hit delete, mute or block because if you don't pad up, you can't play."

Sully said people online have said some "pretty foul things" to her, often about rape and murder, but that men also said "pretty foul things" to each other.

"Keyboard warriors lurk and loiter in the depths of grime really," she said. "I only engage if I'm feeing playful."

Cottrell was a "low life" to target a female journalist who didn't even interview him, she said.

"[Laura Jayes] is a highly competent and skilled journalist and to single out the only female and go hard and go ugly, well that is what bullies do, particularly misogynist ones."

Junkee music writer Jules LeFevre wasn't surprised by Cottrell's tweet.

"Rape threats are rained upon female and non-binary journalists like confetti, they are disgustingly common," LeFevre told BuzzFeed News.

She said she doesn't go a week without receiving some sort of abuse and has put her Twitter account on private multiple times.

"I had to do that last weekend, after one of my articles was shared to a libertarian Facebook page and all of sudden I was bombarded with hatred from Jordan Peterson fans," she said. " I was incredibly worried trolls would find my personal Facebook and my photos and that they would find ways to dox me. That was the first time I felt fearful about real world consequences for the abuse I get online.

"Under nearly every article I write there is some drongo telling me I'm pathetic, that I'm a feminazi, that I'm a 'cultural Marxist warrior', that I'm the reason Music Junkee is failing, that I'm ruining music. That I should kill myself."



LeFevre has a few trolls who follow her and send messages about most of her articles.

"It's like having fans except it makes me feel like shit."

The abuse is almost always gendered, she said.

"'This is why women shouldn't write about music' is a message I've received so many times," she said, adding that she's repeatedly called pathetic and been told to "choke" before.

It doesn't take long for the abuse to become disturbingly sexual.

"I received rape threats after writing an article critical of John Mayer's latest album, death threats as well."

Freelance journalist and anti-sexual assault advocate Nina Funnell said she is most likely to receive rape threats online when she has just published a story about sexual violence.

"The viciousness and the backlash that journalists receive is undeniably gendered and while men do experience harassment and abuse online, it is rarely laden with that sexual threat," Funnell told BuzzFeed News.

"The worst comment I ever got was after I had just come out as a sexual assault survivor in the media and I can still remember it word for word," Funnell said. "It said: 'What a conceited bitch for even thinking she's worth of being raped. The guy just probably wanted to give her a good bashing in which case job well done.'"

Funnell said her assault was a "very atypical stranger danger assault" in which she was held with a box cutter against her throat.

"Another man replied with a comment which said: 'I wouldn't even bother raping her from behind with a box cutter'."

She said as a freelance journalist she struggles to deal with the backlash in a home office "without those boundaries between work and home".

"I have this original trauma of my own sexual assault and then I hear constant disclosures of sexual assault as part of my job, and then there is this third part where I'm dealing with backlash, which is aggressive trolling and legal threats."

ABC radio presenter and current affairs journalist Patricia Karvelas said threats of sexual violence were a "disturbingly common experience" for women in Australia's public sphere.