For months, the Austrian family doctor Lisa-Maria Kellermayr was insulted and threatened by opponents of vaccination.
Finally, the 36-year-old took her own life.
A new ARD documentary sheds light on her case.
She forestalled her tormentors.
On July 29, 2022, Lisa-Maria Kellermayr ended her life.
For the Upper Austrian family doctor, it was the last resort to escape the months of terror on the Internet.
Senders from the radical anti-vaccination scene described in detail how they wanted to ambush Kellermayr in practice, torture her and "slaughter" her employees.
Cruel emails with death threats that filmmaker and ARD correspondent Anna Tillack "can't finish reading to this day".
In the documentary "The Case of Dr.
Kellermayr – driven to death by hate and agitation”, which the first shows on Monday (March 27) at 10:50 p.m., she looks for the legal consequences, talks to politicians and people who are also affected by terror on the Internet.
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Commemoration in Vienna: Kellermayr's death affects the people on Stephansplatz
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Like the Austrian political scientist Natascha Strobl, who specializes in right-wing extremism.
She, too, is the target of a scene obsessed with violence, which recently asked her to "do Kellermayr".
When the threats spread to her young children, she disappears.
“There is so much anger and hate.
The people who write something like this seem to completely forget that they are dealing with a human being.
With someone who has family and friends and who they don't even know," she says in the film.
But how do you protect yourself against an invisible, unpredictable enemy?
In the Kellermayr case, the state police department explained to the doctor that they could not identify the sender of the hate mail because their traces were lost on the dark web.
The desperate doctor decided to help herself: she invested a lot of money in the security of her practice, hired security guards, installed an alarm button and set up a panic room.
"Are you afraid when you go home after work?" Tillack wants to know in the last interview before Kellermayr's death.
"I'm not going home anymore.
I sleep here," she says.
A month before her suicide, she closes the practice because she can no longer guarantee the safety of her employees.
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Candles, flowers and letters are reminiscent of the doctor.
Their tormentors are still hiding on the dark web
© DPA
Kellermayr is not the only one.
Many colleagues in healthcare professions have been threatened since the corona pandemic and the resulting vaccination debate.
Til today!
They do self-defense courses and install emergency call systems.
Very few want to speak openly.
The police also advised Kellermayr, who vaccinated out of conviction and was active on Twitter, to be “more silent and less active on social media in order to reduce interaction with aggressors”.
But doesn't allowing victims to be muzzled give the perpetrators even more power?
Filmmaker Anna Tillack visits the Attorney General's Office in Munich.
In the Kellermayr case, a 59-year-old from Bavaria is being investigated here.
Section 238 of the Criminal Code is the section on stalking, which criminalizes separately if the perpetrator causes the death of the victim.
"We therefore have to check whether our accused is ultimately responsible for her suicide," explains prosecutor Theresa Ott in the film.
However, our society also has a great responsibility, which, as the ARD documentary makes clear, must decisively combat hate and hate speech on the Internet if there are to be no more victims.