Amazon rape T-shirts which advocated sexual and physical abuse of women have been withdrawn from the list of offerings on the website after an uproar caused by the provocative slogans emblazoned on the T-shirts. Amazon, which is famous for best deals on Black Friday and Mega Monday, had offered the T-shirts sold by the Solid Gold Bomb company with outrageous slogans such as “Keep Calm and Hit Her”, “Keep Calm and Rape a Lot”, “Keep Calm and Rape Them” for £14.99–£16.99. Hundreds of angry complaints forced Amazon to pull out the ‘rape’ T-shirts from its offerings by mid-morning on Saturday.

“Hit Her” tops that had remained for sale on some international Amazon sites, including the version in Germany, after the UK ones were pulled were also unavailable for purchase by early evening on Saturday. The German site had offered the shirt for a price ranging between 16.90 euros and 18.90 euros and were also available to non-resident account holders.Solid Gold Bomb apologised for the rape T-shirts, but Amazon continued to allow Solid Gold Bomb to sell other shirts with variations on the same theme.

Amazon failed to answer additional questions, including how long the garments had been on sale or when the decision was made to take them off the site. While issuing a public apology on its website for the offensive T-shirts, Solid Gold Bomb company posted a statement, which said, “We have been informed of the fact that we were selling an offensive T-shirt primarily in the UK. This has been immediately deleted as it was and had been automatically generated using a scripted computer process running against 100s of thousands of dictionary words.”

But much of the damage was already done with angry messages flowing through on Solid Gold Bomb’s Twitter account, forcing the company to deactivate its account, with no information as to when the accounts would be up again. One of the scores of messages said, “Rape is not a joke.” Solid Gold Bomb is even said to have received death threats. Harriet Harman, a customer, suggested that the profits that Amazon made out of the rape T-shirts sale should be given to a women’s refuge, strongly stating that domestic violence and sex offences are not matters out of which people should make money from.