The subsequent uproar over her tweet cost Tynes her original book deal and pushed her to the “brink of suicide,” according to a new lawsuit Tynes filed against Rare Bird Books, the publisher for her book about the murder of a Jordanian student in Maryland.

The tweet went viral, inviting fierce backlash from people accusing Tynes of being “ anti-black ,” “ entitled ,” and a “ terrible person .”

Then, on May 10, Tynes — a self-described “social media maven” — tweeted a photo of a black DC Metro employee eating on a train, calling her out for breaking the transit authority’s rules.

Before May 10, Natasha Tynes, a Jordanian American writer, a mother of three, the sole breadwinner of her family of five, and a communications officer for World Bank Group, was looking forward to the June release of her new book, They Called Me Wyatt . She’d worked on it for four years.

Tynes is suing Rare Bird Books for $13 million, alleging, among other things, that the California-based company breached its contract and defamed her with false public statements that caused her “extreme emotional distress.”

According to the lawsuit, filed in the Superior Court of California, Tynes was hospitalized with chest pains and anxiety and was forced to temporarily leave the US after her family was subjected to death threats and racial slurs in the tweet’s aftermath.

The lawsuit said that the issue of race did not occur to Tynes, an immigrant woman of color with a “prominent accent,” when she sent her tweet.

In a statement Sunday, David Eisen, an attorney for Rare Bird Books, called Tynes’ lawsuit “baseless.”

Referring to the $13 million Tynes was seeking in damages, Eisen said that fewer than 50 copies of her book had been preordered and “only a few hundred scheduled to be printed.”

“It is ironic that, having taken advantage of her First Amendment rights with an ill-advised tweet, Ms. Tynes now seeks to stifle and punish use of those very same rights of a respected book publisher who legitimately expressed its opinions of her conduct, rather than take responsibility for her own actions,” Eisen’s statement said. “Ms. Tynes would have been better served to have simply let this episode disappear into the annals of history,” he said.

The union for Metro workers at the time said riders like Tynes are often unaware that bus operators have an average of 20 minutes to eat and get to their next access point to ensure buses and trains run on time. The unidentified Metro worker did not face any disciplinary action for eating on the train, but was “hurt and embarrassed” for being blasted on social media, according to her union representative.

Tynes said her schedule, as a novelist and mother of three young children with a day job, meant that she often did not get a chance to eat before work and commuted on an empty stomach for fear of being ticketed by a Metro employee for eating on the train, according to the lawsuit.

After the furor over her tweet, Tynes deleted it and issued an apology. She later deactivated her Twitter account and took down her personal website.

Soon after her tweet started getting attention, Tynes informed her publishers that she had contacted WMATA to ensure that they would not discipline the Metro worker, the lawsuit said.

She explained to her publishers that “having not grown up in the United States, the issue of race had not even occurred to her when she made the tweet.”

But in the midst of the Twitter outrage, Rare Bird Books issued a statement announcing that it had canceled her book’s distribution because Tynes “did something truly horrible today.”

