There's truth in the adage, "What goes around, comes around." A mother charged with cyberbullying her daughter's estranged friend which led to her suicide is now getting a taste of her own medicine.
Last year, Megan Meier, 13, committed suicide after having been dumped by a fictitious boy she met on MySpace. The person behind this charade was the mother, Lori Drew, whose daughter was once friends with Megan. Her intent? To find out what she was saying about her daughter.
When news leaked out that Drew was behind the original hoax, tech-savvy people discovered where she lived and made public her address and phone number. As a result, she received wave after wave of criticism from defenders of Megan. (See
13-Year-Old Teen Commits Suicide After Harassment on MySpace for more details.)
Ultimately, a ray of hope did come out of this tragedy. Law makers put in place laws to address this type of behavior in an effort to keep such Internet harassment from happening again. It also made the spotlight on cyberbullying a little brighter. Furthermore, it also increased awareness on how social networking sites can be abused to the point of changing someone's life forever.
It was concluded that there wasn't enough evidence to prosecute Drew. When this
announcement was made on December 3 of this year, a new blog entered the blogosphere entitled "Megan had it coming," and had this to say:
"It's time I dropped the charade. Yes, I made this blog. Yes, I'm Lori Drew."
This caused an astounding public outcry and generated huge amounts of comments on the blog, a good portion of which, as one might imagine, was filled with hateful commentary.
Drew denies any involvement with the "Megan had it coming" blog and has stated she knows of no one involved in it's creation or maintenance. It is suspected that an Internet "troll" is to blame for creating it.
As it turns out, the laws that came as a result of the original hoax are now something Drew can enjoy as well.
The offending blog is using the popular blogging platform owned by Google called Blogger.com. Impersonating someone on Blogger is against their terms of service. When such claims are made, efforts are made to remove the offending blog, however, no such claims have been made to date.
