Have you all heard about the joke some 47-year-old woman played on an overweight clinically depressed 13-year-old neighbor who also suffered from ADD?
Basically, she made a sock puppet on myspace, who could only have hailed from the gods of cute teenage boys, and sent the girl a friend request, saying she was pretty.
Quite conveniently, young “Josh Evans” was new to the area and homeschooled, so it was no surprise that no one had ever met him or heard of him. He also didn’t have a phone yet, so she could only talk to “Josh” online.
Now, this is not quite as funny unless you know that the mother who played this knee-slapper (Lori Drew) knew for a fact that the young girl (Megan Meier) was depressed and socially awkward. In fact, young Megan had formerly been friends with her own daughter, and Megan had even gone on overnight trips with their family. Since Megan had been treated for depression and ADD since third grade, Lori definitely knew about it. Megan had no way of knowing adults had such a great sense of humor, unfortunately.
After about six weeks of lovey-dovey emails (some of which turned sexual) Lori Drew told Megan (while pretending to be Josh) that she had heard Megan wasn’t very nice to her friends. Megan had no idea what “Josh” was talking about. It wasn’t long before “Josh” was distributing Megan’s private emails to other teenagers on MySpace, and young Megan was being barraged by messages saying “Megan Meier is fat”, “Megan Meier is a slut”, etc.
That same day, the endlessly comical Lori Drew (still pretending to be “Josh”) sent one last message to Megan, saying “Everybody in O’Fallon knows how you are. You are a bad person and everybody hates you. Have a shitty rest of your life. The world would be a better place without you.”
Megan became hysterical as teenage girls that age are wont to do when confronted by such extraordinary humor, and immediately ran upstairs to her room and hanged herself to death.
Is that hilarious, or what?
It gets funnier, though. The cops said there was no law against what Lori Drew did, but eventually word got out about her fantastic sense of humor. Not surprisingly, other jokesters on the internet, not to be outdone, decided to become involved.
Some of them posted Lori’s personal information online, including address and telephone number (including cell phone), and now she’s getting calls all hours of the day and night so she knows just how much people appreciate her sense of humor. Some of them posted her business information, including names of customers (she has had a coupon booklet business), while others contacted those businesses to make sure they knew what a great sense of humor the crazy coupon woman has. Her customers must be humor-challenged, though, because it appears that pretty much all of them have stopped doing business with her.
Others decided on a lark to contact her real estate agent husband’s employer, Coldwell Banker, so they’d know what a fine addition he was to their team, since after all he had the foresight to marry someone as funny as Lori. I guess they didn’t get the joke either, because they fired him.
A few took it further, though, just to make sure Lori Drew understands just how much everyone appreciates her sense of humor.
Hackers broke into her voicemail, and changed it to announce that she was an unrepentant child murderer. Someone else called the cops and said a murder had occurred in her house, so about 15 cops busted in with guns drawn. I bet someone with a sense of humor like Lori’s really busted a gut when that happened!
And the story just broke less than two weeks ago. I can only imagine the monumental pranks which have yet to be played on Lori, pranks which we will most likely still be laughing about years from now.
After all, everybody loves a good joke, and anybody who dishes it out should be able to take it …. right?
On Wednesday, October 21st, city officials wasted no time enacting an ordinance designed to address the public outcry for justice in the Megan Meier tragedy. The six member Board of Aldermen made Internet harassment a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a $500 fine and 90 days in jail.
Does this new law provide any justice for Megan? Does this law provide equitable relief for a future victim?
The Vice rejects the premise of this new law and believes it completely misses the mark. Classifying this case as a harassment issue completely fails to address the most serious aspects of the methods Lori Drew employed to lead this youth to her demise. The Vice disagrees that harassment was even a factor in this case until just a couple of days before Megan’s death.
Considering this case a harassment issue is incorrect because during the 5 weeks Lori Drew baited and groomed her victim, the attention was NOT unwanted attention. Megan participated in the conversations willingly because she was misled, lured, manipulated and exploited without her knowledge.
This law willfully sets a precedent that future child exploiters and predators might use to reclassify their cases as harassment cases. In effect, the law enacted to give Megan justice, may make her even more vulnerable. So long as the child victim doesn’t tell the predator to stop, even a harassment charge may not stick with the right circumstances and a good defender.
Every aspect of this case follows the same procedural requirement used to convict a Child Predator. A child was manipulated by an adult. A child was engaged in sexually explicit conversation (as acknowledged by Lori Drew herself). An adult imposed her will on a child by misleading her, using a profile designed to sexually or intimately attract the 13 year old Megan.
Lori then utilized the power she had gained over this child to cause significant distress and endangerment to that child. She even stipulated to many of these activities in the police report she filed shortly after Megan’s death.
City officials who continue to ignore this viable, documented admission and continue to address this issue as harassment are intentionally burying their heads in the sand, when the solution is staring them right in the face. Why?
There are several other child exploitation laws on the books. To date, none of them have even been considered by City, State and Federal officials in this case. The Vice is outraged that a motion was never even filed, so that the case could at least be argued before a judge or jury.
Danny Vice
http://weeklyvice.blogspot.com
Hi, Dan, and welcome to my little corner of cyberspace.
Since your comment addresses a separate but related issue, I responded to it in a new entry at http://elfninosmom.wordpress.com/2007/12/03/clarification-of-my-stance-on-megan-meierlori-drew/
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I think its interesting how some of the news outlets were refusing to print Lori Drew’s name, even though she’d already confessed and tried to shrug it off as unimportant, despite Meier’s suicide. Now that she’s under inditement, they HAVE to print it. Hahaha.. fuckers