Since I’ve been getting more traffic here, I think it’s a good opportunity to set the record straight.
Here’s the deal. If you have a personal grudge against me for an altercation on LJ, that’s you own beef. For the most part, I try to be pleasant and civil in online debates, but anyone can have a day when their emotions get the better of them and they don’t hit the *DELETE* key but rather the *UPDATE* one, especially when it’s something they feel strongly about.
However, the person behind the website Livejournal.us, has a personal vendetta against me for no reason. He trolled through to my journal and posted vicious, racist, sexist, and defamatory commentary. Then, when I and my friends became, as he intended, angered at his antics, he began a cyberstalker campaign against us.
For the record, for anyone who might be of the “it was all in good fun, y’all overreacted” camp, here’s some background and a few direct quotes from this individual, who, incidentally, has had at least three accounts suspended by LJ Abuse for the nature of his posts. And not just to me and my friends, but to a large number of LJ users.
How it began:
I posted in my journal that I was four rejections away from my 100th, which, as most writers know, is a milestone. Not the nicest milestone in a writer’s career, but one nevertheless.
His reply:
“More practice required must be pretty awful writing if you’re getting scores that bad.”
I responded. Let me ask you, if you did something you cared about, wouldn’t you be angered at someone who you’d never met before, never heard of, who came wandering by and told you that you sucked? Out of the blue? I’m human. I did. I told him to, amongst other things, go away.
One of my friends, mouseferatu responded to him in like kind as well.
He then went to mouseferatu‘s journal and posted more abuse. Neither of us saved that, but in some strange attempt to escalate this–to get between us, perhaps?–this cyberstalker used HTML to overlay anonymous posts so that they appeared as though his comments came from mouseferatu.
We both banned him.
Any normal, non-stalker person would have gotten the clue that he was not welcome and would have left us alone.
Instead, he surfed to an LJ community I’m a member of until he found an entry I had responded to and accused me of being such a poor writer that I was a plagiarist and then went to my homepage’s guestbook to reiterate his accusation. It should go without saying that I’m not a plagiarist. When confronted for evidence to back up this defamatory accusation, he had nothing to say.
It turns out that he also accused xxsuigenerisxx of plagiarism. Her crime? Posting a thank you note in her journal to her friends. According to this cyberstalker, thank you notes have been done before, so anyone who writes one now is a plagiarist. This dialogue was taken up in his journal, the one which he kept as abdulsharif, and when it was obvious that even his friends disagreed with his definition of “plagiarism” he deleted the whole comment history and made his entry “no comments.”
He then then went through my friends list, and when he found a post from silicates in her journal, to me, he commented “Eugie is an idiot. An idiotic bitch!”
Since this cyberstalker’s accounts were suspended, much of his word-for-word vitriol has been lost. But some of his victims kept a smattering of evidence backed up.
So, here are some direct quotes from this individual directed to myself and my friends. All in good fun, or mean, spiteful, hate-filled, racist, and sexist? You decide.
Re: Asians and Asian women
“They’ve lived up to every stereotype image that I know of: physically, intellectually and socially”
“You react to criticisms like a typical Asian-immigrant woman who gets offended when her English is even slightly criticized.”
“I’ve never seen an asian goth and YET you try to be one. What’s that loser goth conference you attended and wrote about? Try to stay within your cultural boundaries and don’t be what you’re not. Put on a bright red dragon suit and prance around the streets of chinatown. That’s more like it.”
Racism in general:
“I would be just as disgusted and say the same thing if I saw a white guy working as a chef at a Mexican restaurant.”
General abuse:
“Do you feel like you always have the last say? Have you ever had a boyfriend?”
“And you’re so fucking ugly.”
“She likes to “pretend that she’s a writer but that’s a farce. She picks out words from a dictionary, throws them in a blender and then dumps the mixture out on a plate and then tries to form coherent sentences out of the slop. That’s her style of writing. In other words…… it’s all bullshit and doesn’t make any sense, they may as well be bad haiku written in kanji.”
“Sounds like a dog’s name, btw” (That would be with regard to my name, incidentally.)
And then there was the email spamming of obscene pictures to threads I had either begun or responded to in LJ communities I am a member of.
Let me state again that this individual sought me and my friends out, apparently looking to get a rise out of us. We didn’t attack him; we defended ourselves.
I’m disabling comments on this. I’m not trying to garner opinions or support, and I’m certainly not looking for more abuse. What I want is for this cyberstalker to leave me alone.
The one good thing that has come out of all this ugliness is that I have realized that there are some wonderful people out there. Despite what this cyberstalker has said to the contrary, I did not ask my friends to rally to my defense. They did so out of a sense of indignation, loyalty, and decency. I am grateful to have such a group of people that I may call friends.
I need to finish something. I haven’t completed a story in weeks and weeks! *kicks muse*
