‘We’ll Kill Your Family’: Tennis Star Makes Urgent Plea At The U.S. Open Following Violent Threats

Italy’s Matteo Berrettini called on tennis organizers Monday to better protect players against online abuse from gamblers after revealing that his family received death threats during his run at the French Open.

Asked about the U.S. Open and the U.S. Tennis Association’s recently announced partnership with the online prediction market Kalshi, Berrettini told journalist Ben Rothenberg that his brother received threatening texts at Roland-Garros before reporting them to the Association of Tennis Professionals.

“I won a match and they were writing things like, ‘Matteo is so rubbish that, if you don’t tell him to lose,’ or something like that, ‘we’ll kill your family,’ or, ‘we’ll do this,’” Berrettini told the media after his first-round win at the U.S. Open, per a report by UbiTennis.

He added later, “We’re 30 years old, we’re adults; but when I think of the girls and the younger players, receiving this sort of message can be frightening. We’re tennis players, so it’s important to protect ourselves.”

Multiple studies have found that gamblers are responsible for much of the online abuse hurled at players. In March, Italian women’s tennis star Lucrezia Stefanini revealed that she and her family were met with death threats from an apparent gambler before a qualifying match at the Indian Wells Open.

He went on to emphasize that the tennis community needs to have “stronger” safeguards to protect players.

In 2023, the USTA — the governing body of tennis in the States and organizer of the U.S. Open — partnered with World Tennis and other top organizations in the sport for an initiative that uses an AI-powered system, ThreatMatrix, to flag abuse and threats aimed at players.

The following year, the organizations announced that some 12,000 posts were reported to social media platforms and nearly three dozen accounts were flagged to law enforcement.

In July, a separate report from World Tennis and the Women’s Tennis Association found that a majority of accounts responsible for abuse and flagged by the system in 2024 did not reappear in 2025.

In a statement to HuffPost, U.S. Open spokesperson Brendan McIntyre said the tournament is continuing to use ThreatMatrix and that representatives behind the system (the London-based Signify Group) are on site to make it easier for players to work with them.

He added that the tournament is able to identify potential threats through the system and, if necessary, work with law enforcement.

McIntyre, when asked if the Open plans to work with Kalshi in its efforts to combat threats, said that although the partnership isn’t “directly tied to online abuse mitigation,” the USTA is collaborating with the company to define certain trade categories while simultaneously banning trade that could “conflict with public interest or undermine the integrity of the sport.”