Saturday, May 17, 2008

We Should Choose Our Words Carefully

Farhad Manjoo of Salon gives us the following information about the MySpace mom case-

"In 2006, according to law enforcement officials, Lori Drew, a 49-year-old mother in O'Fallon, Mo., created a fake MySpace account under the name Josh Evans, whom she cooked up as a 16-year-old boy new to town. Prosecutors say Drew used the phony profile to set up an online relationship with Megan Meier, a 13-year-old classmate of Drew's daughter."

He goes on to say how "Evans" viciously dumped Meier, after telling her the world would be a better place without her. The distraught Megan Meier committed suicide.

Manjoo warns that the on-going drive to prosecute Lori Drew might be misguided, if understandable, and could constitute a slippery slope. Of course, anytime you log onto MySpace is a potential slippery slope, but that's a whole different story.

Here is a different take on the subject.

I have mixed feelings about it. I think the woman should certainly be punished severely, but at the same time, I fear the precedent it might set could potentially result in a lot of ill-founded, spurious, and even malicious lawsuits. Caution is advised.

Now if someone wants to get the bitch out and tar and feather her or boil her in oil, be my guest. Not that I am seriously advising anyone to do that, mind you. After all, that might well be construed as an internet cyber-threat and what-not. Therefore, let's just pretend I'm kidding to make a point.

Which is what I'm doing, of course.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sorry, but if you kill yourself, you kill yourself. No one "makes" you do anything. If this woman is prosecuted, then there will be a whole bunch of people going to jail for looking at a suicidal person wrong before they did the deed.

SecondComingOfBast said...

I tend to agree, but in her case you can make a case for harassment and intentional infliction of emotional distress. What she did was really over the top, especially when you consider this was a teenager, and the offending woman was the mother of one of the girls schoolmates. There's a story there by the way that hasn't been told yet, and I would be very curious as to what it is all about.

I don't think there's legitimate grounds for a wrongful death lawsuit, though, but I think this is where this might lead. Now that could be a slippery slope.

Anonymous said...

I agree with you about these. Well someday Ill create a blog to compete you! lolz.