At least he isn't teaching anymore

While Cathy Seipp was on her deathbed, a persistent, mentally unstable cyberstalker took the opportunity to take cheap shots at Seipp and her teenaged daughter:

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.

[...]

...Stein said that he made several bona fide efforts to end the feud with Seipp, but that whenever he took his site down, Seipp would begin the conflict again with comments about him in her blog. Seipp's friends said that if anything, the reverse was true, and that Seipp was a deathly ill woman focusing on her cancer and her daughter, and never took Stein very seriously. In 2006, Seipp wrote a column in which she lightheartedly referred to Stein as a cyberstalker and compared him to the Star Wars figure Jabba the Hutt. That, Stein said, was the last straw. He later crafted his fake Seipp letter and posted it on his Web site, knowing full well that she was dying but still alive.

“They thought that because this is the Internet they could say whatever they want whenever they want, but they met someone with an expansive education, a pioneer of the Internet with an incredible sense of humor,” Stein said. “They picked the wrong person to mess with.”

When asked if he himself might be accused of abusing the freedoms and power of the Internet to attack someone, Stein said his actions were justified by Seipp's history of “character assassination.”

If the teaching thing doesn't work out, maybe he can get a place at the Huffington Post.

Damian P.

Posted by damian at March 29, 2007 07:15 AM