Woman indicted in MySpace hoax suicide
Fri May 16, 2008 12:21am BST
by Dan Whitcomb
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A 49-year-old Missouri woman accused of
pretending to be a love-struck teenage boy on MySpace and drove a 13-
year-old girl to suicide with cruel messages was indicted on Thursday
on federal charges.
Prosecutors say Lori Drew and others created the fake MySpace persona
of a 16-year-old boy to woo neighbour Megan Meier for several weeks,
then abruptly ended the relation****p and said the world would be
better off without her.
Meier's 2006 suicide by hanging, just hours after she read those final
messages, made worldwide headlines and prompted calls for social
networking sites like MySpace to crack down on cyber-bullying.
"This adult woman allegedly used the Internet to target a young
teenage girl, with horrendous ramifications," U.S. Attorney Thomas
O'Brien said in announcing the indictment in Los Angeles, where
MySpace is based.
"Any adult who uses the Internet or a social gathering Web site to
bully or harass another person, particularly a young teenage girl,
needs to realize that their actions can have serious consequences,"
O'Brien said.
Experts said the indictment, which was handed down in Los Angeles
after Missouri authorities declined to prosecute Drew, was a first of
its kind and could stretch the bounds of the federal statute on which
it was based.
"We are in uncharted waters here," University of Southern California
law professor and former federal prosecutor Rebecca Lonergan told
Reuters. "This case is unprecedented and it's also a very aggressive
charging decision."
Lonergan said Drew was charged with accessing a protected computer to
obtain information, a statute typically used against defendants who
hack into government computers.
"While I think most people agree that it merits punishment to harass a
young girl to the point where she commits suicide, it's not clear that
this conduct is covered by this federal statute," she said.
A FICTIONAL BOY
Prosecutors say Drew, mother of a teenage girl who had a falling out
with Meier, and several others created a profile for the fictional
"Josh Evans," using the picture of an unwitting teenage boy.
They then contacted Meier, who lived four doors away in O'Fallon,
Missouri, through MySpace as "Josh" and spent several weeks flirting
with her before ending the relation****p on October 15, 2006.
Several hours after the final message, Meier, who had argued with her
mother over the relation****p, hanged herself in the closet of her
bedroom in a St. Louis suburb, still unaware that "Josh" did not
exist.
The indictment charges that after Meier killed herself, Drew had the
phoney MySpace account deleted and warned a girl who knew about it
that she should "keep her mouth shut."
After the incident became widely known, the Drew family was shunned by
members of the community, targeted for abuse on the Internet and their
small advertising business was vandalized.
Drew, who faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison if
she is convicted on all of the charges, was expected to surrender to
authorities in Missouri.
(Editing by Philip Barbara)
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