Woman dying of cancer cyber-smeared on her deathbed by cyberstalker

[Zaphod ZJ]

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,261916,00.html

To Summarize this very long article:
To summarize the below 1000 paragraphs (there's more to the article, too, I didn't even copy all of it!) Cathy Seipp is dying of cancer. She is on her deathbed. Eliot Stein posts a letter on a site he stole from Cathy, posting the letter AS Cathy. So as people come to visit Cathys site, instead of seeing Cathy's last post on her blog, they see this hate-filled letter written by Stein. Stein wrote in the letter (as Cathy) that all the work Cathy had done in her life was worthless, and said horrible things about Cathys daughter. WHILE THE WOMAN IS DYING OF THE CANCER. While this is not illegal, it's just about the shittiest thing I've heard of in a while. I would like for Stein to suffer.

Article starts here.

Cathy Seipp was dying.

The 49-year-old newspaper columnist and conservative blogger, who had come from Manitoba, Canada, to become the sharp-tongued doyenne of the Los Angeles media scene, was only hours away from losing her years-long fight with cancer, leaving behind a 17-year-old daughter, a lifetime of work as a plucky and plain-speaking wordsmith, and the respect of colleagues from both sides of the political spectrum.

But what was supposed to have been a dignified end for a long-suffering single mom instead turned into what friends called a disgustingly public travesty, an example of the current Wild West atmosphere of Internet privacy issues, and a sordid showcase of just how far a beef can go.

Just hours before her death, “Cathy Seipp” suddenly seemed to undo decades of hard work with an oddly written letter posted on the Web site, www. cathyseipp.com. In what came off as more bizarre rant than heartfelt apology, her supposed “very last blog entry” called her years of journalism a “shoddy,” “despicable” and “irresponsible” career as a “fourth-rate hack.” Her political stance? All a mistake.

The fiery, unwavering supporter of George W. Bush supposedly said she'd done a complete 180 in the past year and was now an implied supporter of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. What was even more perplexing was that “Seipp” was taking mean-spirited potshots at her own daughter, Maia Lazar, whom she called an “obnoxious” and “arrogant” wanna-be “skank” who was “mentally ill.” Throughout the letter, the one person whom “Seipp” seemed most sorry for ever having offended was Maia's 10th-grade journalism teacher, who had frequently clashed with mother and daughter. Finally, “Seipp” said she was probably to blame for her own illness — the “venom” she'd spewed for years was responsible for her terminal cancer.

Friends were horrified. They quickly realized that the letter was the work of an infamous character known as “Troll Dolls” who'd positioned himself as the blogger's archenemy and bought the domain name www.cathyseipp.com years earlier (Seipp's real Web site is www.cathyseipp.net). Troll Dolls is really Eliot Stein, a 54-year-old former online talk-show host and stand-up comedian who hadd taught Maia in a journalism class for a brief period in 2004, and who blamed Maia and Seipp for his departure from the school after only five weeks. Seipp's friends marshaled their resources, creating an impromptu Internet chat room to make their plans, fingering Stein as the culprit, enlisting the help of a lawyer to serve him a cease-and-desist letter, and successfully lobbying Stein's Internet host to take the Web site down permanently.

“He's a genuinely weird dude [who wrote] a rambling, odd, mean, totally cruel series of posts ... designed to trick well-wishers, as Cathy lay dying, into reading a torrent of rage and bitterness against her,” Rob Long, an L.A. television writer and longtime friend of Seipp's, wrote in an e-mail. “Just immensely cruel. It was easy to ignore when she was alive, but as she died it became intolerable — thousands and thousands of people wanted to reach out to Cathy and her family in the days surrounding her death, and this guy tricked, perverted and deeply hurt them. And for what? A years-old grudge?”

There was perhaps one silver lining, Seipp's friends said. They first found Stein's letter on March 20. Seipp died in the afternoon of March 21, never having known what Stein was saying in her name.

Legal observers say that the Seipp-Stein spat demonstrates how the Internet-using public still hasn't figured out the boundaries of good taste and what the reasonable expectations of privacy are in a world where seemingly every other person keeps his personal thoughts in online journals that can be accessed by anyone with a computer.

“The expectation of privacy on the Internet is ludicrous from one point of view, but I don't think there's any bright-line rule about what you can and cannot say in a blog,” said Richard Idell, of Idell & Seitel, a San Francisco firm specializing in media and Internet law. “Whatever socially acceptable rules that may exist are still developing. You're going to get some sharp words — that's what's going to happen — but when does it cross the line?”

And we can only expect to hear about more nasty feuds like Seipp's and Stein's being played out on Web browsers around the nation, according to Rebecca Jeschke, spokeswoman for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to maintaining free-speech and privacy rights in digital media.

“We're definitely hearing more about these kinds of online arguments with public figures,” Jeschke said. “It does seem to be a place where people are using blogs to express themselves. They're a reasonably new mode of communication, and people are feeling where their comfort level is.”

Even Seipp's friends and supporters debate the meaning of Stein's parting shot against Seipp.

“There's no law against being a jerk,” said London-based Internet consultant Jacki Danicki. “But it's the way in which you do it, like taking someone's domain name to do that. And from a human-decency level, it's not right.”

“If he truly felt he was wronged and Cathy had harmed him, then why didn't he stand up and grow a pair and say it, instead of trying to adopt her voice?” said Mediabistro and Fishbowl L.A. blogger Kate Coe. “Most people who disagreed with Cathy had the balls to do it to her face and with their own name.”

But Luke Ford, blogger and onetime columnist on the porn business, defended Stein's actions — even though Ford has himself been a frequent target of Stein's attacks.

“It's not nice, but since when was the First Amendment nice to people?” he said.

Stein is absolutely unapologetic.

And though both would be loath to admit it, he shares with Seipp at least one trait that may have led him to this point — an unwillingness to back down in the face of perceived injustice. He's also endlessly self-aggrandizing, obviously bitter and easily worked into a frothy fury over issues that seem piddling by mainstream standards (for example, not many L.A. high-school teachers would be shocked into speechlessness by profanity). He gets especially worked up by what he sees as his persecution by Maia Lazar and Cathy Seipp.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm perfectly happy doing everything I can to make Eliot Steins life as miserable as possible. Below is the information I got from doing a WHOIS on the domain he squatted: cathyseipp.com:

Domain: CATHYSEIPP.COM

Registrant
Troll Dolls
Cathy Seipp is a Boor Inc. <-- Can you believe this fucker?
trolldolls@gmail.com
666 San Fernando Road
Los Angeles, CA 90210 US
+1.8185556666
(FAX)

Administrative
Eliot Stein

eliotstein@yahoo.com
3727 W. Magnolia Blvd. #803
Burbank, CA 91505 US
+1.8188458400

Thos two numbers are fax machines, any chance someone can pull a real telephone number for him? I'd love to have a chat with Mr. Stein.

[nahmus]

thats horrible. If thats not a real address you can report him to the registrar and they should pull the domain.