The Merits of the Case

Apparently each member of my immediate family is walking around with a big “V” tattooed on our foreheads these days. That’s “V” for victim. Karly’s car was hit with paintballs two nights in a row last week and Randy woke up last Wednesday to find that his car had been broken into during the night. The thief/thieves took his iPod and wallet and he spent the morning cancelling credit cards and talking to the police. My story of victimization, however, takes the cake.

I woke up Thursday to an e-mail from a stranger entitled, “Your pictures have been posted on a porn site…thought you’d like to know.” At first I was convinced that it was just a spam ploy to get me to click on the link enclosed in the e-mail to visit a porn site, but as I re-read the message it began to ring authentic. The message stated that there was a user on this particular website who had been claiming to have cancer. When other members questioned the veracity of her story, she posted bald pictures of herself in her site profile in order to “prove” that she was going through chemo. Several other members did a quick Google search and discovered my blog and posted the link on this porn website as proof that the pictures did not actually depict the user who was claiming that they were her. One woman followed the link, found my e-mail address, and sent me the e-mail.

I checked out the site but discovered that in order to access anything there you had to be a registered user. I was able to find an e-mail address for the site owner, however, so I sent an e-mail asking them to investigate these claims and to remove any pictures of me. As I thought about it some more, I became curious and decided to just go ahead and register for the site. Once I was officially a member of this porn site (I’m not going to post the link here, but if you want to know which one it is e-mail me and I’ll send you the link.), I began looking around. The members of this site can create a blog within the site and it only took me a couple of seconds to find this woman’s blog. She had removed the pictures by the time I visited, but I was able to read the posts on a thread where other members accused her of stealing the pictures and her responses to those accusations.

I immediately sent an e-mail to two attorneys I know who I thought might be able to give me some guidance as to how to handle this situation and then I went about my day. When I was finally able to get back to the computer later in the afternoon, I discovered that the woman’s blog was gone from the site as well as all the posts about my pictures. I discovered another blog, however, where people were talking about this and I decided to go ahead and post a response. In my comment, I talked about the fact that I am not this woman, that I never gave her permission to use my photos, and I suggested that she contact me if she was reading this and that I could give her some links to actual cancer support groups. I also wrote that there were probably better places for her to look for cancer support than on a bondage/s&m website message board.

I documented everything that was still available on the site with screen shots and then I called the police. The officer who came out documented my story, though he didn’t actually file a report. I hoped that would suffice if I needed to subpoena records from the website at some point.

I am grateful to the woman who contacted me, because I would never have known about this if she hadn’t told me. She said that her mother died of cancer and she was therefore disgusted that this woman was using pictures of me with no hair and claiming them as her own. She also offered to let me know if she spots any more photos of me.

And then some interesting things began to happen. Other users of the site began to post angry messages on the blog directed at me. They thought that the fact that I had suggested that this woman look for cancer support somewhere other than this website was my “small-minded” way of saying that the members of this website were somehow bad or flawed and that they couldn’t possibly support someone in need. These people were furious with me and let me know it in no uncertain terms, but I felt that their defensiveness was an over-reaction. In fact, one of the members apologized for the perceived “rudeness” of some of the posters and suggested that they were defensive because the bdsm community is not generally well-received. I returned to the blog again to posted a comment explaining that I didn’t mean to disparage the people on the site in any way and that I was sure they had as close-knit and supportive a community as any other on the internet, and that my intent was really just to offer cancer support resources to the woman who started all of this.

The following morning when I checked my e-mail, I had a message waiting for me from the woman who posted the pictures. She apologized for what she had done and noted that she had retracted her claims and that she had taken the pictures off her site. I wrote back to her, accepted her apology, and told her that as far as I was concerned this was all water under the bridge. I said that I understand that we all make bad decisions sometimes and that we really just have to try to move on from them after the fact. I also offered to share my cancer support resources with her if she needed them. She replied with some very kind words and stated that she was not yet feeling brave enough to explore any cancer support resources.

The most amazing part of this, however, is the number of private e-mails I have received from other users of this website over the past two days. Quite a few people wrote to me to tell me about their mothers or grandmothers or friends who have or had breast cancer. All of these women said that they had clicked on a posted link to my blog out of curiosity and then they started reading my story and apparently it resonated quite strongly for many of them. I find it astounding that out of all of this, a group of women that I would probably never have come into contact with have been moved by something that has happened to me. The internet certainly makes the world a smaller place, doesn’t it?

There is also a lesson here, of course, and that is that you have to be very cautious about what you put out there on the internets. There are a lot of crazy people out there, and unfortunately we take a risk when we open ourselves up to them the way that I have. I knew when I first decided to post pictures that I ran the risk of something like this happening, but I certainly never thought it would happen to me. I plan to leave my pictures up and easily accessible on this blog, but I will be removing the pictures of my kids so that there is no danger of something similar happening to them. (If I have posted a picture of you at anytime and if you want me to remove it from my blog, please let me know.)