Jodie Burrage receives WTA support after death threats following Chennai Open defeat

A return match ends in a flood of abuse

Jodie Burrage, 27, returned to the WTA main draw on Tuesday, 3 November, for the first time in 16 months and lost her first-round match at the Chennai Open. The Briton, who was ranked 85th in September 2023 and is now listed 474th, went down 3-6, 6-3, 7-5 to India's Vaishnavi Adkar after leading 5-3 in the deciding set and then losing four games in a row. Once the match ended, her social media accounts were flooded with insults, with some senders calling for her to quit the sport and others sending death threats. Burrage shared an Instagram story showing a selection of the messages she had received.

Her appeal and the reactions

Burrage tagged the WTA into her post and asked when action would be taken against abuse. She captioned the screenshots with a pointed remark:

“Nice welcome back to the tour. I remember why I left.”

Germany's Eva Lys shared the appeal and tagged the WTA, demanding concrete measures. Burrage had already spoken about online abuse after her first-round Wimbledon exit in 2025, so the Chennai messages followed a pattern rather than a single episode. On Wednesday, 4 November, she and the American Robin Montgomery won their last-16 doubles match at the same tournament.

What the WTA says it is doing

The WTA said it has staff on the ground in Chennai offering Burrage support, alongside its player welfare team and the Threat Matrix team. Its statement set out the principle behind that response:

“Protecting players and the wider tennis family from online threats and abuse is a key priority for the WTA.”

Because most abuse reaches players through direct messages, the governing body gave Burrage a private route for reporting those messages. It also introduced filtering that hides hostile public comments before she sees them. Threat Matrix is reporting the abuse to the platforms involved, and investigations are under way to identify the people responsible. Where the abuse is linked to betting, the accounts are to be added to a Bad Actor programme so that betting operators can act against them.

Threat Matrix and the gambling link

The WTA says Threat Matrix uses AI-led detection to identify people behind threatening accounts, which can lead to investigations and potentially legal action. The system was established in 2023 and is delivered by Signify Group alongside World Tennis. Threat Matrix data showed female players faced more than 12,000 abusive posts and messages on social media in 2025. Angry gamblers were responsible for 42% of verified abuse and 59% of serious abuse that year, and a 2024 Signify report had found they were behind 48% of posts deemed abusive.

2024, share of posts deemed abusive48%

2025, share of verified abuse42%

2025, share of serious abuse59%

2024, share of posts deemed abusive

48 %

2025, share of verified abuse

42 %

2025, share of serious abuse

59 %

Data from the article text

A WTA report released in July said 66% of serious abusive posts and comments identified by the programme had been removed, and 35 accounts linked to 12 individuals had been escalated to law enforcement. The same report found that 89% of accounts responsible for serious cases in 2024 did not reappear in 2025. Burrage's case shows the gap that remains, since the abuse she received came in private messages that the public moderation tools cannot reach.