Posted on 06/16/2008 7:50:14 PM PDT by khnyny
A 49-year-old woman pleaded not guilty to charges arising from her role in a MySpace hoax that ended with a 13-year-old girl committing suicide after being spurned by a fictitious boy. Lori Drew, 49, of Missouri, denied charges of conspiracy to inflict emotional distress and accessing MySpace computers without authorization. She will fact trial on July 29.
Prosecutors say Drew set up a fake account on the social networking site and posed, with others, as a 16-year-old boy "Josh Evans" to target a classmate of her teenage daughter, Megan Meier.
Meier hanged herself in October 2006, shortly after receiving a message from "Josh" saying amongst other things that he had no interest in a romantic relationship with her and would be better off without her.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
The people in that town should have tarred and feathered this vile excuse for a human being. She should spend the rest of her life shunned by all decent people.
You appear to repeatedly miss the fact that electronic stalking and harassment are violations of FEDERAL LAW.
Have you ever used MySpace, or observed the way it works? Remember, things were going very well and Megan was having a pleasant experience with her friends on MySpace, under her parents' close supervision, until Lori Drew quite suddenly stuck the knife in her. Megan hardly had a chance to log off.
Its a sick story and lori drew sucks but we don’t want legal precedent set on this.
The legal precedent was already set some years ago. Drew is being prosecuted based on previous case law established in many prior e-harassment cases across the US.
You know, it's not even immaturity; it's sociopathy. Drew is completely unapologetic. She has even continued to be hostile toward Megan's family. She considers that she has done nothing wrong. This is a classic illustration of a socipath (what we used to call a psychopath). Sociopaths function very well and can be very charming, attractive people, but they have zero understanding, empathy, compassion, or sense of guilt.
When CBS had their Rather problems, they assigned a team of researchers, not to find out where the fake documents came from, but to find out who Buckhead and TankerKC were.
So aside from the fact that this story has a dead white girl in it, there are elements of it that could influence us here on FR.
You are not committing fraud by signing on with your screen name, as long as you don't commit a crime while doing so. A few court cases like this one, though, and it may become a crime to represent yourself online by any name but your own.
I want this sick bitch Lori Drew to rot in jail.
“Prosecuting this would place billions of people under the wheels of the law.”
Which may be the main point. As I stated above, the Powers That Be dislike Web anonymity for a variety of reasons.
Hey, V wore a mask for a reason and look what he (fictionally) did.
Especially these days. Kids today are dumber and more superficial than I can ever remember.
Hyphens are usually needed (dare I say required?) between an adverb and adjective forming a compound adjective when the adverb does not end in ly.
That’s not quite the whole truth either. After she received that message, she then got into a fight with her mother who caught her using the computer while the mother was out. I believe she yelled to her mother that her mother just didn’t understand, and THEN she ran to her room and killed herself.
I wondered why Megan's mom allowed her to have an online relationship with a boy years older than her -- I would NEVER let my daughter have a boyfriend like that. But I also would never have stooped to setting up a fake myspace account to spy on a 13-year-old.
Of course, in THIS trial the issues are more mundane. Did the mother lie when setting up the myspace account? Did she use the account to purposely mislead others and commit a fraud? It seems SOMEBODY did, the mother claims a friend of hers did so, and her young friend (actually I think it's more a co-worker) admits to sending a lot of the messages, and the last cruel message).
Of course, Megan lied for HER myspace account as well, since she was not 14 at the time. In fact, there are probably LOTS of myspace accounts that were formed as a lie.
I told my daughter if she had an account, I had to be able to monitor it. But she didn't want to have her father as a friend, so instead she just gave me her password. Technically that might be a violation of the myspace agreement. If the government decides to prosecute people for lying to get accounts, a LOT of us could be in trouble.
She told Megan she would be all over this account, monitoring it. Megan didn't always make good choices because of her ADD, Tina says. And this time, Megan's page would be set to private and only Mom and Dad would have the password.
Monday, Oct. 16, 2006, was a rainy, bleak day. At school, Megan had handed out invitations to her upcoming birthday party and when she got home she asked her mother to log on to MySpace to see if Josh had responded.
Why did he suddenly think she was mean? Who had he been talking to?
Tina signed on. But she was in a hurry. She had to take her younger daughter, Allison, to the orthodontist.
Before Tina could get out the door it was clear Megan was upset. Josh still was sending troubling messages. And he apparently had shared some of Megan's messages with others.
LOL!! ITA. I'm silly enough, I don't need to create a character on top of that!
I thought this part was interesting:
Q: What types of messages did people leave?
"The voice and text messages were very similar to what Aubry was showing on the news. Examples: a) Go kill yourself b) Murderer c) I can only hope your family name is abused and embarrassed publicly as you deserve. d) God is watching ur every move. Ur a sinner and u will go to hell 2/2 because that's exactly wat u deserve."
Q: What impact did this have on you and your family?
"It was extremely disruptive and we were concerned about whether this would escalate to behavior that would jeopardize the safety of our family. This was going on at the same time as the companies I did business with were also being harassed, so I was also concerned about their well being."
I am more concerned about her own teen daughter, and how that girl is handling the suicide of her former friend, knowing that her own mother engineered it all. What a burden for a young girl!
“This woman isnt guilty of a damn thing except using the internet. “
And what if she had mailed a letter to this girl, instead of using the internet?
This mother is the same type of person that would break another ice skater’s legs so her daughter could win.
What kind of adult would use the internet to mentally abuse a child?
If she would commit mental abuse, how much further would she go?
Had the girl not committed suicide, would the mother have tried a hit and run?
IIRC, this ‘mother’ got other families in the neighborhood together and tried to ‘oust’ the dead girl’s family, for daring to file a lawsuit.
Bingo. Lori Drew even attended the funeral and the family wake at home without showing any sign of guilt. But she knew that the troubled 172 lb. girl with ADD and a history of depression had hung herself immediately after 'Justin's' last messages.
It took the guilty conscious of a neighborhood girl who had joined in the MySpace deception to confess to her mother, who then had the decency to tell Megan's family the whole truth.
It's just absolutely stunning how Lori Drew has never admitted to feeling any guilt or responsibility. Of course, if you're nuts enough to start such a project, teaching your own daughter and her friends that it's funny to pick on a defenseless lonely 13 year old, then why should we expect such a sociopath to develop a conscious?
It would appear that Lori Drew will go through the rest of her life feeling like a victim, and never understanding why most people despise her. But that's a sociopath's mentality.
Sorry, that should be Josh’s last messages, not ‘Justin’s’.
Yeah, take that, Arguendo! I was just about to post the very same thing! < /lie> You've been out net-nannied!:D
These are federal felony charges for 'lying to the MySpace computer servers'.
Do you understand? And do you understand what this could mean?
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