The Dame Speaks – Etiquette Hell

Online Bullying, Part 5: Doxing The Trolls (Or “Denying the Privilege of Anonymity To Trolls Who Threaten People”)

April 22, 2019April 23, 2019admin34 Comments

I respect Rebecca Watson. She is the founder of Skepchick.org and while I don’t agree with everything she writes, Watson is a principled person. Despite personally hating Monsanto, she nonetheless wrote a scathing criticism of the “Round-Up Causes Cancer” study that recently made the news. So when she wrote about doxing in a post titled “Why I’m Okay With Doxing”, I paid attention.

Watson, like many online personalities with an opinion, has been the target of threats, harassment and cyberbullying.

What good Internet citizen could possibly defend that most heinous of acts, the doxing?

Me. I seriously would not care.

I’m frankly tired of the black and white thinking that goes along with any discussion of doxing, as though an aggressive act is inherently evil regardless of who the target is and who the perpetrator is. Doxing is one of those acts that can be used for good or for ill. Like punching.

If someone sends me a threatening or harassing email, I see no reason to protect their identity.

I am, morally, 100% okay with this. Feminists owe these pieces of human garbage absolutely nothing. And while they go out of their way to investigate us, to find our addresses and publish them because we have the temerity to exist on the Internet, they can easily protect their own identity by simply not emailing us threats and harassment.

So, let it be known that I am a filthy doxer. If you harass women online, calling them slurs and threatening to rape and kill them, and if I find out your real name, I will publish it. If you tell me to kill myself on Twitter and I can link it to your Facebook, I will tell your uncle.

You should read the entire article. Watson’s comment about “punching” as an act used for either good or evil is a reference to a story she tells of how astronaut Buzz Aldrin belted conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel outside of a hotel after Sibrel refused to leave Aldrin alone as requested. Watson is a “person who understands that for some acts, the context matters in determining whether it’s a good or a bad thing. So it is for doxing. And if you follow me around calling me a liar and a coward, I will punch you in the face. ”

“Ignore the troll” has been the often advised, defacto remedy for dealing with online bullying and harassment but as people have discovered over the decades, it is an ineffective and unsatisfying resolution to the problem that ultimately stifles free speech of the victim. And so comes the urge to reach through the Internet abyss and — metaphorically — smack the trolls back.

Victims are taking it to a new level. Doxing their harassers isn’t enough. I found numerous cases of people exposing the identities of their harassers and then contacting family members as a method of applying even more pressure on the harasser. Rebecca Watson mentions having contacted the uncle of one of her harassers. Mary Beard rallied her followers to contact her harassing trolls’ mothers; Pennsylvania state lawmaker, House Rep. Brian Sims, hit back at an internet troll who called him the n-word and a “fa—-” by calling his grandmother and telling her what her grandson had done. Leo Traynor wrote a fascinating article about confronting his harasser who had terrified him and his wife…it was a friend’s 17 year old son. Amanda Kleinman is the subject of a Washington Post article, “There’s no good way to deal with trolls, so you might as well tattle to their moms”, describing how she contacted the mother of a harassing troll.

Contacting family members is not the only weapon in victims’ arsenal. There is a 9% chance your co-worker is an internet troll according to recent surveys. Accessing social media, like Facebook, for personal use while at work and misusing company resources while engaging in harassment is a violation of a company’s code of ethics or internet usage policy which can result in employment termination with just cause. Even an employee’s off-duty social media activity may reflect poorly on the business and ultimately cost them their job. The cyberbully employee is too much of a liability. In the United Kingdom, employers can be liable for the actions of their employees on social media that has been accessed using company equipment on company time. Since cyberbullying is a power game, knowing your harasser’s name and place of employment shifts the power to the victim.

If your harasser lives in England or Wales, there may be even more avenues of remedy available to you. In 2015, the Malicious Communications Act was updated with a new law, Criminal Justice and Courts Bill which quadrupled the then maximum six-month sentence for “crude and degrading” abuse. Justice Secretary Chris Grayling : “These internet trolls are cowards who are poisoning our national life. No-one would permit such venom in person, so there should be no place for it on social media. This is a law to combat cruelty – and marks our determination to take a stand against a baying cyber-mob. We must send out a clear message – if you troll you risk being behind bars for two years.”

So what are the contexts are we talking about whereby doxing is a good thing? Watson already supplies one parameter: It is good to dox people who send messages that threaten rape, death, or harassing emails.

Few, if anyone, thought Curt Schilling’s doxing of the nine men who posted very vile comments about his daughter Gabby was a bad thing to do. Schilling, a former Red Sox pitcher and ESPN analyst, had tweeted the news that his 17-year old daughter had been accepted to a college and would be playing on their softball team. What transpired next in the comments section of Schilling’s Twitter account was nothing short of vile, evil wretchedness as nine men posted violent sexual comments and threats (using baseball bats as a sexual device) aimed at his daughter, Gabby. Schilling reacted like any dad would do in this kind of situation: He doxed the hell out of the two worst offenders and encouraged all other outraged readers to hunt down the rest of them. Here is an excerpt from Schilling’s blog post:

My daughter comes to me beyond upset. She didn’t do anything, she never said anything, yet she’s now receiving personal messages with guys saying things to her, well let’s just say I can’t repeat and I’m getting beyond angry thinking about it. Her boyfriend, a wicked good hockey player who has a fighting streak I absolutely love is going out of his mind to be let off his leash but unlike the athletes tweeting this stuff he understands the potential consequences of his actions and knows the time and place will hopefully come when he can make it right on his own terms.

These boys have yet to understand one of life’s most important lessons. In the real world you get held accountable for the things you say and if you are not careful that can mean some different things.

You want to know the scariest part? Some of their idiot friends, as I am sure some of you, are contacting me with “Dude lighten up, they’re just joking” and “Why are you saying things that might ruin someone’s life”?

A mistake is tweeting once and saying “damn, I’m an idiot” and taking it down. These guys? They’re making conscious choices to cyberbully an amazing and beautiful young woman on the internet, that none of them know by the way, because they don’t like her dad or they somehow think saying words you can teach a 5 year old is tough?

Both doxed men suffered severe reputational fallout: one was fired from his job with the New York Yankees, and the other was suspended from his community college. Schilling knew the remaining seven men’s identities:

“Worse yet, no less than seven of the clowns who sent vile or worse tweets are athletes playing college sports. I knew every name and school, sport and position, of every one of them in less than an hour. The ones that didn’t play sports were just as easy to locate.”

Schilling appears to have contacted those seven athletes’ coaches/schools as well:

“I found it rather funny at how quickly tone changed when I heard via e-mail from a few athletes who’d been suspended by their coaches,” Schilling wrote. “Gone was the tough guy tweeter, replaced by the ‘I’m so sorry’ apology used by those only sorry because they got caught.”

It should come as no surprise that I consider doxing children and/or threatening them with injury and death to be yet another parameter to define what “good doxing” would be.

Marco Arturo is an articulate 13-year-old kid on the autism spectrum. He self-made a video that was pro-vaccine and which debunked vaccines as the cause of autism. The reaction by the anti-vac people was harsh. Dr. David Gorski documents the actions of one “particularly odious antivaccine warrior”, a female blogger who uses the name “Levi Quackenboss”, who, under the cover of anonymity, attacked Marco. Marco himself documents this harassment in a Facebook post citing that his full name had been doxed, his parents’ full names, their address, his father’s place of employment, birth dates, photos of his family including his 1-year-old sister. “She is not just another troll, she is doing something that’s illegal to try to keep me silent.” What followed after Quackenboss’s blog post was a torrent of abuse and threats, including death threats, from anti-vaxxers who have written such things as:

“This kid should have been aborted.”
“This kid deserves autism.”
“I want to throat punch this kid.” (This would be a death threat since this action can kill someone.)
“Does anyone know who this kid’s parents are so we can get to them?”
“I want to punt Marco in the jugular.”
“I want to punch this kid in the face.”

Marco asks the obvious question, “Since when is it morally acceptable to dox a kid and his family?”

But notice that Marco says he knows Levi Quackenboss’ real name. He doesn’t reveal it but the implied threat to dox her is there. Within days of Marco’s Facebook post, Quackenboss deleted all five blog posts about him.

Curt Schilling’s advice applies: “In the real world you get held accountable for the things you say and if you are not careful that can mean some different things.”

Online Bullying Series, Part 4: Advice for Adult Victims of Cyberbullying

April 8, 2019admin31 Comments

You’ve been bullied online. Now what? The following suggestions for how to respond to online bullying comes from https://cyberbullying.org in an article titled, “Advice For Adult Vicitms of Cyberbullying“:

First, it is important to keep all evidence of the bullying: messages, posts, comments, etc. If there are ways you can determine who exactly is making the comments, also document that. Second, contact the service or content provider through which the bullying is occurring. For example, if you are being cyberbullied on Facebook, contact them. If you are receiving hurtful or threatening cell phone messages, contact your cell phone company to obtain assistance. Along those same lines, familiarize yourself with the Terms of Use for the various sites you frequent, and the online accounts you sign up for. Many web sites expressly prohibit harassment and if you report it through their established mechanisms, the content and/or bully should be removed from the site in a timely manner. To be sure, some web site administrators are better and quicker at this than others.

Also, please be careful not to retaliate – or do anything that might be perceived by an outsider to have contributed to the problem. Do not respond to the cyberbully except to calmly tell them to stop. If they refuse, you may have to take additional actions. If the threats or comments are detrimental to your health, safety, or occupation, you might want to consult with an attorney who specializes in harassment, defamation of character, false light, intentional infliction of emotional distress, or similar types of civil action. A letter sent from an attorney (on law firm letterhead) to the bully may be all that is necessary to get the bullying to stop.

In 25 years of having an online presence I’ve done all of the above…and a few others things that aren’t on this list. Read on… EtiquetteHell started about 22 years ago as a joke in a Usenet wedding planning group. Usenet was a wild and crazy anarchy of no rules, no filters, no moderation where the only hope of having a civil group lay with applying peer pressure. This was also an era where you could complain to the ISP about trolling, bullying and the ISP would actually do something about their wayward client. Usenet wedding planning groups attracted not only brides but numerous wedding vendors, some of whose behavior fell far below what anyone would consider to be professional. To separate the good vendors from the bad, I created a Vendor Hall of Shame on my personal web site that predated Ehell by at least a year. Vulgarity, insults, lying, bad BBB reports all earned dozens of vendors a spot on my site. And they didn’t like it one bit, particularly the photographers who declared war. My first attorney I hired was Lloyd Jassin, author of the then best-selling book, “The Copyright Permission and Libel Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide for Writers, Editors, and Publishers”. Jassin was a firm advocate of the right of the libeled to defend themselves with published rebuttals. Wired Magazine ran a very interesting article in 1996 titled “Libel Law: Let It Die” in which author Mark Godwin makes the case that internet libel lawsuits will go the way of the Dodo bird because of the internet culture of refuting speech with speech.

“It may be that the Net kills libel lawsuits – partly because the Net turns many more of us into public figures, and partly because our ability to use the Net to rebut charges is a much more satisfying remedy.” Mark Godwin

Jassin suggested that I respond to the fallacious statements being made by disgruntled vendors by publishing point-by-point, factual, data verified rebuttals. It was advice right in line with what the Wired Magazine article was advocating:

“The comparative openness of the Net means that more people who feel they’ve had their reputations besmirched have access to self-help. If some bozo writes 100 lines of false statement and innuendo about your sex life or personal habits, you can write 500 lines of point-by-point refutation. It’s a “day in court” that comes cheap.” Mark Godwin

Cyberbullying.org’s counsel to not retaliate against online bullies must come with a caveat. There is a moral, ethical and legal right to defend yourself against bullies who would destroy you by any means available to them. Point-by-point refutations have the effect, as Mark Godwin noted, of “leveling the playing field”. Godwin sums it up so well: “After all, it’s much more satisfying to use the Net to correct the record and to flame your defamers. And this remedy doesn’t take years – it takes only minutes.” I ended up publishing four such documents, created as FAQs, during my tenure on Usenet. FAQs 1 and 2 involved 2 wedding photographers, a female photographer and a male photographer who defended her endlessly. I concluded about a decade ago that, if I had to do it over again, I would not have created the Vendor Hall of Shame or used so much energy trying to expose unethical vendors because, in the end, those efforts, while well-intentioned to protect consumers, did not dissuade brides from hiring them. The female photographer was hired by at least 12 Usenet group members, all of whom reported significant issues with getting their photographs. After paying $3000-5000 for her wedding photography packages, many of them could not reach her and they did not have their wedding photos. At least 2 filed lawsuits and won. Clients followed her all over the Internet trying get her to talk to them about their missing photos. She was featured on an episode of the Clark Howard Show, her business partner sued her and won, among other things. At least four other photographers and videographers on the Vendor Hall of Shame page skipped town leaving clients with having paid thousands of dollars and received nothing, unable to find their vendors. FAQ 3 pertained to a man named “Steve” on the Usenet wedding groups. Steve had a witty humor that lured you into private email conversation with him. Once hooked, he made sexually inappropriate requests, asking for nude photos. When Melissa Z reported to the group that he had done this to her, he threatened her with a lawsuit. Three more women came forward claiming to have also received sexual requests from Steve and I was one of them. He retaliated against anyone who complained to his ISP. In one case he accused a photographer of creating pornography in his studio, and a wedding florist by the name of Paul was repeatedly framed by Steve to appear to be racist by replying to Paul’s posts but changing the content of the quoted material as if Paul had originally written it to be racist. Steve’s retaliation against me included writing Usenet posts that appeared to be written by me, changing just one letter of my name, and which made me look like a raging racist claiming, for example, that I homeschooled my kids “to keep them separated from n*ggers and jews”. ( In February 2014 Gawker reported the case of a woman’s ex-boyfriend public shaming her by framing her as a racist and posting the evidence to Racists Getting Fired as if this was some new phenomenon. ) I wrote the Steve FAQ to document everything Steve had done to various people including me and to refute the libel he had stated against various people. His retaliation for my FAQ was to make a threat that was so credible I filed a police report with the Granville County, NC Sheriff’s Department who forwarded it to the FBI. I included in the police report a copy of the FAQ as well as print-outs of Steve’s posts documenting that he had used the same ISP address and posting path in all his posts, including the threats and the posts that had framed me and others as racist. Several months later I received a phone call from the detective assigned to my case informing me that 1) after subpoenaing uu.net and earthlink.net, I had been correct in Steve’s full name as well as the city where he lived; 2) an FBI agent had paid a visit to Steve and had a chat with him; and 3) I would never be bothered by Steve ever again. And I haven’t. FAQ 4 was the most heavily researched document I’ve done to date regarding two 2 women – Sue Bishop and Shirley Beard aka Shirley Hart, aka Shirley Whisler. Bishop had a reputation on Usenet of attacking individuals who disagreed with her by calling them child abusers or contacting their employer trying to get them fired. I came into her radar when I questioned her claims about Ohio’s laws pertaining to animal welfare and rescue and in retaliation she contacted my husband’s employer trying to get him fired despite the fact that he had not been involved in the debate at all. To make a long story short, Beard was an animal control director in Ohio having obtained that position by falsifying her credentials in her resume. Bishop was her volunteer sidekick. Both Bishop and Beard exploited a weakness in Ohio’s then law that allowed animal control officers to arrest offenders and to sell confiscated animals. Beard and Bishop would trespass on farms without a warrant, take photos of horses and return days later claiming the animals were neglected and threatening arrest if the owner did not surrender the horse(s) to them. The horses, some of them registered show animals, would then be sold to a buyer, in some cases competing breeders, with Beard and Bishop pocketing the money. By the time I was researching this, the county district attorney’s office already knew of the problem, Beard had been exposed as a fraud and had skipped town, and Ohio’s laws were in the process of being changed. A year after Beard skipped out leaving her property in foreclosure, the new owner discovered a horrifying site. Left in the house was a cat in a crate and a dog tied to a tree, both dead of starvation. I spoke to the new animal control director who had investigated the deaths and his disgust, anger and sadness were palpable. I still grieve 20 years later thinking of a lonely dog, tied to a tree and left to die a miserable, ugly, slow death. Two years after I published the FAQ on Bishop and Beard, Bishop hired a lawyer threatening a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) lawsuit, a legal form of bullying people into silence that is being increasingly banned in many states. Not content to let her attorney handle the case, Bishop emailed me with specific threats which included a threat to harass me at my home. Bishop’s attorney, upon being given this information by my attorney, backpedaled furiously and abandoned her client. Sue Bishop is now deceased. Once I made the decision to turn EHell from a hobby into a licensed corporate business with a registered trademark and copyrights, it was time to have a lawyer on retainer. My attorney for the past 15 years is a “Super Lawyer”, a bar association Certified Specialist in trademark law and former chair of the American Bar Association’s Trademark Litigation and Trademarks and the Internet Committee. Hire the best attorney you can afford. The vast majority of EHell’s legal expenses pertained to trademark registration, defending the trademark against infringers (successfully I might add), copyrights, grant of rights, etc….boring but necessary stuff. When you own a website where your comments and opinions are published, it is expected that there will be dissenters, detractors, people who hate your guts and that’s just part of the package. But there were a few legal dramas arising from people taking things too far and which necessitated engaging the lawyer in fixing the problem. The most notable legal issue occurred when the forum was being hosted on DelphiForums.com. Delphi staff had published a statement that I was committing a crime in the way I acquired stories for my books, that I was violating copyright law. Had this statement stood uncontested, it would have damaged my ability to acquire new stories and damaged people’s trust that I was following the law. The process by which I acquired the grant of rights to use those stories had been vetted by my lawyer and by the publisher’s legal department and involved acquiring the signatures of every person whose story appeared in any books in grant of rights documents. It took months to get all of the grant of rights documents signed and I still have the originals. Accusing anyone of a crime they did not commit is legally known as “libel per se”, meaning the false statement is so libelous on its face that no proof of damages is needed, the damages are assumed. My attorney wrote a demand letter to the CEO of Delphiforums.com, I received an apology and retraction letter that, according to the settlement agreement, I am allowed to publish anywhere I desire, and a settlement I am not allowed to talk about other than to say I’m happy. The moment we knew the settlement agreement had been signed and was in my lawyer’s possession, we hit the button on closing the Delphi EHell forum, then ranked #1, and moved it to a dedicated server that same day. Sweet revenge. I credit the Delphi libel issue with awakening me to the advertising earning power a large forum has.

Retractions Matter

The Delphi Forums case brings up a very interesting aspect of fighting defamation and libelous cyberbullying. To win most defamation/libel lawsuits, you may likely need to prove “malice” which is legally defined as “a conscious, intentional wrongdoing of a civil wrong like libel (false written statement about another)”. Traditionally, a person’s retraction of the false statement has served as evidence of an absence of malice as revealed in both case law and state statutes. From the University of Chicago Legal Forum: “Similarly, a refusal to retract has sometimes been used to buttress allegations that a defendant published a defamatory article maliciously. Although some courts have held that a failure to retract does not establish actual malice, most authorities suggest that a failure to retract, in conjunction with other circumstances, may be used to establish the requisite level of malice.” So, present your evidence in a factual, data referenced rebuttal, have an attorney vet it and include a demand for a public retraction. If the person publicly retracts the false statement, you both win. You get vindicated and neither of you is spending thousands of dollars on legal fees when spending it on a trip to Hawai’i would be so much better. If a retraction is not forthcoming, you have laid the groundwork for a better outcome should you pursue a lawsuit as a remedy.

Attorneys Can Be The Worst Bullies

I’m convinced that rogue attorneys can be some of the worst bullies online because there is an implied trust that they know more about the law than the average person therefore they are more credible. One of the EHell forum moderators was an attorney and people claiming to be attorneys and dispensing legal advice online without a disclaimer was one of her pet peeves. The forum rules banned legal advice so as to protect alleged lawyers from ethical lapses and to protect forum members from being misled. And yet two of the worst incidents of cyberbullying on EHell were perpetuated by lawyers. The first lawyer case involved three women who had banded together to contact EHell’s hosting provider in order to claim that there was a copyright infringement on the site. They did not file a Digital Millennium Copyright Act Notification nor had they contacted me. A DMCA Notification is a legal document filed under penalty of laws against perjury stating that the filing party is or represents the copyright holder, that they have a good faith belief that infringement is taking place, and identifying the infringing content. The owner of the hosting service refused to recognize their complaint since it was not filed correctly and he refused to take down the Ehell site. When they began to threaten him personally he contacted me asking for help and EHell’s lawyer was brought up to speed. The spokesperson for the three women was a lawyer who threatened a lawsuit if the alleged copyright infringement was not removed (still no legal DMCA notification). When we discovered that the “lawyer” had not been licensed to practice law in the state she had lived for the previous 8 years, my lawyer sent her a scathing letter. Never heard from the three of them again. This incident changed EHell’s policy on copyright infringement reports (http://www.etiquettehell.com/?page_id=791). While I have removed stories at the request of the original story tellers, I do not tolerate bullying by people trying to shut down the site by use of bogus copyright infringement claims. The second interaction with a bully lawyer occurred recently. When I announced the impending closure of the EHell forum in May 2018, every troll wanted to get their last licks in and this one attorney was right in the thick of it. She had joined the forum several years ago, credited it with helping with her wedding plans, she had never been moderated and she and I had never interacted either online or off. In other words no one associated with Ehell harmed her during her tenure on the forum. She was intent on harming me however. When a question was raised as to whether the words “Etiquette Hell”, “ehell” or “ehellion” could be used in the title of a new, off shoot forum, I had replied that these were trademarked words and I did not give permission for them to be used in that manner. Ms. Lawyer chose to post in a private Facebook group of about 400 people that 1) she was a trademark attorney and 2) my trademark was “bullshit”, “worthless” and “good luck to her if she ever tried to enforce it” thus implying that people were free to use the trademark without fear. The members of that group egged her on to post that information in the Ehell forum and she did so along with stating that I had a “lack of understanding of intellectual property law”. The irony of her actions is that the Facebook group she had posted her wayward legal advice to had violated my trademark years earlier by naming the group “Etiquette Hell”. One complaint to Facebook with the proof that I owned the trademark in the name and POOF! A Facebook agent named Paula deleted that entire group. (This, btw, brought out the crybullies who whined that I had not asked them to change the name while ignoring the obvious fact that they had not asked my permission to use it.) Ms. Trademark Lawyer was found to have registered as a member of the EHell forum via her employer’s server, a law firm. The trademark post she made to the forum was also found to have been sent from the same law firm’s server during business hours so the decision was made to address our legal demands directly to the managing partner of the law firm since it was apparent his employee was declaring herself to be a lawyer and giving detrimental legal advice on the law firm’s time and server. I know this decision may cause some readers heartburn but the suggestion came from my attorney who is also the managing partner of his law firm. Below is an excerpt from the letter a bar association certified specialist in trademark law and former chair of the American Bar Association’s Trademark Litigation and Trademarks and the Internet Committee writes to a lawyer who thinks she knows trademark law:

Recently, Ms. Jeanne decided to temporarily close the current Etiquette Hell forum, but not her blog, in order to restructure her offerings. After announcing this decision in early May 2018, a forum member asked if they could start a new forum using “Ehell” or “Ehellion.” Ms. Jeanne explained that she has trademark rights in ETIQUETTE HELL, EHELL, and EHELLION, and that the forum member would need to choose a different name if they wanted to start their own forum. Later that same day, Ms. Lawyer decided to weigh in on Ms. Jeanne’s request not to use her and EHL’s trademarks. Ms. Lawyer posted in an anti-Etiquette Hell group:
The Etiquette Hell trademark is bullshit, btw. It’s registered for “publication of wedding stories” and the exclusive right to use ETIQUETTE is disclaimed, so basically it’s a worthless trademark registration for general message board purposes and good luck to her if she ever tried to enforce it (yes I am/was a trademark attorney, haha).
When someone suggested Ms. Lawyer repeat that information to Ms. Jeanne, Ms. Lawyer replied, “That would ensure me getting banned for legal advice.” Ms. Lawyer then went onto the Etiquette Hell forums and posted:
Curious, where are the Ehell and ehellion terms registered as trademarks? I only see Etiquette Hell at the USPTO and that’s only registered for “wedding stories” (with the exclusive right to ‘etiquette’ disclaimed).
She later stated:
Not sure if it’s purposeful misstatement or a lack of understanding of intellectual property law. In any case, once you stop actively using a trademark you lose rights in it. The more you know!
Ms. Lawyer’s statements, and her describing herself as a “trademark attorney” who provided “legal advice,” are problematic. Individuals reading Ms. Lawyer’s statements are likely to mistakenly believe that they may use Ms. Jeanne’s and EHL’s marks without permission and that such behavior would be legal. Unfortunately, Ms. Lawyer either misstated or lacks an understanding of trademark law. A trademark attorney should be well aware that registration is not required for enforcing trademark rights in the United States. Trademark rights in the United States spring from use in commerce. Ms. Jeanne and EHL have over twenty years of exclusive use in commerce of their ETIQUETTE HELL, EHELL, and EHELLION marks in conjunction with online forums (i.e. “message board purposes”). Ms. Jeanne and EHL own common law trademarks in ETIQUETTE HELL, EHELL, and EHELLION for online forums. Using any of those marks to offer a competing forum would be trademark infringement. 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a). A trademark attorney should also know that abandonment does not occur the moment a mark ceases being used in commerce, particularly where use continues in related areas of commerce. Nonetheless, Ms. Lawyer told members of the Etiquette Hell forums that Ms. Jeanne and EHL would lose their rights “once [they] stop actively using” their marks. The Lanham Act, however, makes clear that abandonment requires discontinued use with intent not to resume such use. 15 U.S.C. § 1127. It further explains that “nonuse for 3 consecutive years shall be prima facie evidence of abandonment.” Id. Three years have not passed since May 2018. Ms. Lawyer also failed to properly state the law that abandonment requires not only discontinued use but intent not to resume use. Importantly, Ms. Jeanne is continuing her blog publications under the marks. Third parties are likely to believe Ms. Lawyer is providing them with an accurate statement of the law. Ms. Lawyer held herself out as a trademark attorney and is associated with a reputable law firm. She then provided misstatements of trademark law that give the impression that Ms. Jeanne’s and EHL’s trademarks are free for anyone to use. This, in turn, is likely to lead to increased infringement and increased legal fees for our clients, who will need to enforce their marks against these infringers. Ms. Lawyer is an associate of your firm. Your website identifies her as practicing “intellectual property matters” and she is holding herself out as a trademark attorney. Nonetheless, she is either intentionally misstating the law or she is committing malpractice. Her acts further amount to unfair and deceptive trade practices and intentional interference. As she is acting in her capacity as an attorney, and as her employer as an attorney is your firm, please be advised that Law Firm may also face liability for Ms. Lawyer’s behavior as she is ostensibly providing legal advice within the scope of her employment with your firm.

Ms. Lawyer did respond. She deleted the thread in the Facebook group, removed herself from that group and replied to the above with a letter of her own written in a manner my attorney described as an attorney’s version of skulking off the field of battle with her tail tucked between her legs without actually admitting she was wrong. Ms. Lawyer declined to make a settlement agreement and in my opinion this is not a prudent choice. If cyberbullying is about having power over another person, Miss Manners’ advice in the first installment of this series applies, i.e. be careful who you bully because they may be more powerful than you think. Failure to reach an equitable settlement that makes both of us happy leaves me holding all the power. I am free to publish, disperse, disseminate the factual details of this incident to whomever I want, whenever I want for the rest of my life. Twenty years from now, if she’s been nominated to a high court position or is political candidate for office, I am free to publish the data. Over the 2+ decades of being online, I have encountered my share of kooks, bullies, crazies, etc. and as I look back, I’m comfortable with the avenues I and my legal team have used to address those situations and generally I’m happy with the outcomes. Next in the Online Bullying Series: Doxing

Merry Christmas

December 25, 2018December 7, 2017admin1 Comment

It’s Pinktober…Time To Schedule The Annual Boob Squish

October 2, 2018October 1, 2018admin25 Comments

October is “Pinktober”, i.e. breast cancer awareness month and like most breast cancer victims I know, we hate those pink ribbons. I prefer to use the month as a platform to promote mammograms and battle the most “popular” myths of breast cancer with the truth .

The following post below was published by me on October 9, 2017, a few weeks after finishing treatment for breast cancer. In the year since then, two acquaintances have been diagnosed with breast cancer. One was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic cancer, the other’s was caught extremely early, like mine was. One had a mastectomy, radiation and chemo, the other had a lumpectomy, no radiation and no chemo. Guess which one has annual mammograms and which did not.

GET THOSE BOOBS MAMMOGRAMMED YEARLY

*****Start October 9, 2017 post****

As regular readers know, I was diagnosed with breast cancer this past May and had taken a sabbatical from posting during surgery recovery. As this particular cancer journey has progressed, I have become increasingly aware of how much misinformation and stereotypes there are regarding breast cancer and the significant role social media and the media in general plays in hyping up fear. I see the fear flicker across women’s faces when I tell them of my diagnosis or hear the actual gasps and condolences they offer me. The words “breast cancer” strikes terror in the hearts of many. When I inform someone of my cancer diagnosis, I find myself needing to immediately qualify it by adding that it was caught very early and my prognosis is “exceptional”.

“Cancer has a language problem–not just in the way we speak about it, as a war that drafts soldiers who never signed up for it, who do battle and win, or do battle and lose. There’s also the problem of the word itself. A 57-year-old woman with low-grade DCIS that will almost certainly never become invasive hears the same word as the 34-year-old woman who has metastatic malignancies that will kill her. That’s confusing to patients conditioned to treat every cancer diagnosis as an emergency, in a world that still reacts to cancer as though it’s the beginning of the end and in a culture where we don’t talk about death until we have to.” Siobhan O’Connor, Time Magazine

One factor that has contributed to this “cancer language problem” is the media saturation of stories of women with stage 3 and stage 4 breast cancer such as actress Shannon Doherty which leaves the impression that the typical breast cancer patient is in dire straits. During Breast Cancer Awareness Month, also known as “Pinktober”, the media highlights cancer patient stories, mostly focusing on the worst case scenarios. While I am not famous on the scale of a celebrity actress, my attorney claims I am a semi-public figure, and therefore I wanted to put my story out there as an example of the many tens of thousands of women who are diagnosed with breast cancer, get treatment, recover and move on with their lives leaving cancer behind them. There are many thousands more of us than the celebrity cancer victims.

The other significant factor in promoting this cancer language problem is the abundance of memes presented as fact that are, at best, well-intentioned misinformation, and at worst, purposely using fear as the catalyst for fundraising. More on this later.

So, are the Shannon Dohertys really the only face of breast cancer? I don’t think so. This year, an estimated 252,710 women in the United States will be diagnosed with invasive breast cancer, and an additional 63,410 women will be diagnosed with in situ breast cancer. If the cancer is located only in the breast (an early stage of cancer), the 5-year relative survival rate of people with breast cancer is 99%. Sixty-one percent (61%) of cases are diagnosed at this stage. That’s nearly 190,000 women who will hear the terrifying news that they have breast cancer yet their prognosis is outstanding. The truly amazing news is that overall breast cancer death rates have decreased 36% from 1989 to 2012, after slowly increasing (0.4% per year) since 1975 and continues to decrease by about 1% every year.

Mammograms Matter

And what is powering the increase in survival rates? Mammography. A recent study by researchers from the University of Michigan explored the question of whether mammography makes a difference in survival rates. The researchers found that since mammography was introduced, there has been an overall 9% decrease in invasive breast cancer diagnoses . This decrease has been offset by an increase in diagnoses of DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ), which isn’t invasive. This means mammograms are finding more breast cancers early, when they may be less complicated to treat. This conclusion was supported by a study conducted by a team of researchers at the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands who studied every breast cancer case registered in the country from 1999-2012 —nearly 174,000 cases. Before 2006, the breast cancer survival rate was 91 percent. After 2006, it was 96 percent, they reported in the British Medical Journal. Women survived longer after 2006 because the tumors were smaller when they were removed and less likely to have spread, they reported. “Diagnosis of breast cancer at an early tumor stage remains vital,” they concluded. Mammography has helped reduce breast cancer mortality in the U.S. by nearly 40% since 1990.

My final staging was pT1Mic meaning I had what is called a “microinvasion” of invasive breast cancer measuring half a millimeter amid a larger segment of Ductal Carcinoma In Situ (DCIS) cancer. If I had had pure DCIS, I would have been staged at Stage 0 but that tiny speck of invasive cancer put me “barely out of Stage 0” as my surgeon said. The detection of so small a cancer is due to 3D digital mammography and the fact that I have had an annual mammogram for years which formed a baseline image that made detecting the tiny difference easier. Actress Christina Applegate champions the cause of women getting annual mammograms after her own diagnosis of breast cancer which was also discovered at a very early stage during a routine mammogram.

Delving into the online stories of women with metastatic breast cancer, I found too many instances of a lack of annual mammograms prior to their diagnosis of metastatic cancer. Shannon Doherty did not have any breast cancer screening tests for the four years prior to her diagnosis. Digging further, I found a few authors of popular breast cancer blogs whose cancer was metastatic who had also not availed themselves of annual mammograms. This may sound like victim blaming but, for me, I have nothing but sad pity for their plight. My cousin’s best friend died of metastatic breast cancer one month after diagnosis after spending years refusing to have a mammogram. Even for women 50+, skipping a mammogram every other year could miss up to 30% of cancers. The absence of breast cancer screenings due to it being an inconvenience, or that it hurts, or fear of finding cancer or a belief that mammograms are unnecessary are all personal life choices women have made but I wonder to what extent regret factors in when those choices backfire. It’s pointless, and indeed cruel, to cast blame on past decisions that cannot be changed in the here and now. There are women who still receive a diagnosis of advanced stage breast cancer despite doing everything right and having had an annual mammogram because breast cancer is a capricious disease. The reality is that an annual mammogram is a tool that is far more likely to detect cancer at an early stage and it’s sad when women decline the opportunity to use a tool that could prevent a lot of heart ache, fear and pain. GET A MAMMOGRAM, LADIES!

Dr. Google Is Probably Not Your Friend

The most difficult aspect of receiving an initial diagnosis of breast cancer is the waiting for all the pieces of the puzzle to fall into place so that you know exactly what kind of cancer you have, what the staging is and what treatment options are. For a data junkie like me, this waiting was excruciating. I wanted information NOW and sometimes looked to Dr. Google for answers. The problem with Dr. Google is that the stories of other victims are not *my* story and it was too tempting to borrow trouble, and in some cases, borrowing grief, from other people’s experiences. I think that is the danger of media stories of actresses fighting for their lives, i.e. the temptation is strong to think their story will be your cancer story. Julia-Louis Dreyfus’ recent press release announcing her diagnosis of breast cancer frustrates me because she declined to reveal the severity of the cancer and as expected, the media reported it with all the drama it could muster about her “battle against cancer” thus promoting fear. But Dreyfus’ cancer story may not be your cancer story.

Online forums populated by breast cancer victims could have the potential to be helpful but I found them to be unproductive in large part because of the self-selecting nature of those who frequently post. One long time poster in a popular breast cancer web site community forum made the observation several years ago that the people most likely to post to the forums are 1.) Newly diagnosed people who are rather hyped up and poorly informed; 2) People with emotional issues related to being diagnosed with cancer ; 3) Trolls who fake breast cancer and whose stories on the forum terrify women; and 4.) A few “angels”, i.e. people who are credible, post constructively. It took time to discern who the “angels” were amidst the chaos of emotions and factual inaccuracies people reported and I only found three people I could trust. And yes, there are evil trolls who thrill at spreading terror in a forum by fabricating the worst possible case. Googling “breast cancer scam” reveals that this is a not uncommon fraud women have done to financially exploit the compassionate.

In fact, no one I personally knew in real life with breast cancer had ever read an online forum nor ever posted to an online forum about their breast cancer. I searched but I could never find a blog dedicated to having a stage 0 or stage 1 cancer diagnosis. The reality is that many tens of thousands of women are diagnosed with an early stage of breast cancer, get treatment that is rather typical and uneventful, and come through it just fine to then move on with their lives not looking backward and having never told their tales online. Patients like me do not invest considerable time writing a dedicated blog week after week, for years, about their experiences with cancer.

Radiating Confidence

Forums are a self selecting population of patients who seek out this medium to express themselves, often presenting the worst cases that are not typical. There were several times I’d get frightened by something I read in a forum, ask one of my oncology team doctors about it only to be told, “In 20 years of practice I’ve never seen that/only saw it once. And stop reading those forums, Jeanne!”. One particular example was breast cancer radiation therapy threads on forums wherein posters described all kinds of problems they had from radiation. You’d think, reading the threads, that nearly all women undergoing radiation therapy have these heinous problems but the reality was much different. None of my acquaintances who had breast cancer reported those problems and my own experience was rather mundane and easy despite my anxiety that had been fueled by reading too many breast cancer forum posts. In a study published online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, most patients agreed that their initial negative impressions about radiation were unfounded. The study revealed that 93 percent of breast conservation patients and 81 percent of mastectomy patients agreed with the statement “If future patients knew the real truth about radiation therapy, they would be less scared about treatment.”

Because my breast cancer had not moved into the lymph nodes, I did not need chemotherapy but I did choose to undergo adjuvant radiation therapy that has been documented with numerous science-based research to reduce the risk of recurrence by 50%. Body position while going through breast cancer radiation treatment matters. Nearly all women undergo breast radiation therapy lying on their back. I was offered the opportunity to do radiation lying on my stomach in a prone position. Recent studies show that this new approach reduces the amount of lung and heart tissue affected by radiation therapy by 90 percent and I eagerly choose to do radiation in that prone position. I had the expected “sunburn”, parts of my skin peeled like a sunburn but I had no fatigue and no issues with lungs. Those horror stories of bad radiation were not my cancer story nor, it seems, for the majority of patients.

Are 30% Of All Breast Cancer Patients Destined To Die?

The most damaging piece of misinformation that I routinely saw bandied about on blogs, forums, news articles and even a few research articles was the alleged data fact that “30 -40% of women with breast cancer have a recurrence which typically leads to death”. Most metastatic breast cancer support groups use this statistic, often repeatedly stated in their videos, to lobby for increasing research funding into metastatic breast cancer.

The problem? There is no science-based evidence of this statistic being true.

Blogger Ann Silberman, who has Stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, spent 7 months researching the origin of the “30% metastatic recurrence rate” meme. Her conclusion was that there was no citation nor study which substantiated the statistic. You can read her detailed research HERE. Nick Mulcahy, in an August 2015 article titled “The Mystery of a Common Breast Cancer Statistic” for Medscape.com, concurred with Ann Silberman stating, “A commonly cited breast cancer statistic — that 30% of all early-stage breast cancers will progress, despite treatment, to deadly metastatic disease — appears to have no strong contemporary evidence to back it up.”

I don’t think it helps our cause as advocates for women with metastatic cancer to repeat misinformation. I also think that certain groups (K*ough*omen) deliberately misuse statistics for their own purposes, stats that were never meant to be used the way they are and which are now misunderstood by everybody. Ann Silberman

I can’t begin to tell you how much anxiety this statistic caused me when I first encountered it. My very sweet, compassionate and exceptionally experienced radiation oncologist shot that one down quickly and then proceeded to tell me a story. “I fell asleep the other night watching a PBS show about singing baboons (it was actually gibbons, Dr. J) in a jungle in Pakistan. I think you need to watch more singing monkeys than reading stuff online.” In other words, get on with your life, Jeanne, it’s going to be OK. And Dr. J was right, the rate of recurrence in 10 years is between 2 to 15 % depending on tumor size and what subtype (hormone receptor status and HER2) the cancer is, according to recent research. My cancer was triple positive, i.e. estrogen and progesterone receptor positive and HER2+, which the data shows having a 2.2% recurrence rate in 5 years which is the time interval during which most recurrences are most likely to happen. But also because my tumor was so tiny, my risk of it metastasizing was “vanishing miniscule” according to three of my oncology doctors. An extensive study of 10,000 women that was recently published in early 2017 indicated that women older than 50 years who are diagnosed with DCIS (stage 0) are more likely to be alive 10 years after their diagnosis than women in the general population. Another study of over 100,000 women diagnosed with DCIS had a low rate of breast cancer death (3.3%) at 20 years among women in the study.

There are cancer victims who do have a 30%+ rate of recurrence but they have an aggressive and rare type of cancer known as Inflammatory Breast Cancer or were diagnosed at Stage 3B. Remember, 61% of all women diagnosed each year with breast cancer are diagnosed with an early stage cancer and their prognosis will be “excellent”. Even more women are diagnosed with Stage 2 and early stage 3 and still their prognosis is good. The scary numbers of “30-40% recurrence leading to death” is not their cancer story.

Whether reading a forum, or a news article, or some social media thread, you should always ascertain what the cancer victim’s “story” is, i.e. what stage, tumor size, and type of cancer it is, and what treatments they had. It’s fairly easy to get scared reading these stories until you realize that their cancer is far more advanced/larger/spread to lymph nodes or organs than yours or that they opted to not treat their cancer with conventional medicine whereas you did.

Taking My Lumps And Leaving It

One thing I was completely unprepared for was the strong advocacy of some women for total mastectomy as opposed to a breast conserving lumpectomy which I believe is largely fueled by the news media presenting stories of celebrities opting for radical mastectomies as if this was the only option or the belief that removing the breast completely eliminates all potential for breast cancer. My oncology surgeon’s recommendation of a lumpectomy is based on 15 years of conclusive research data that the survival rates for total mastectomy versus lumpectomy with adjuvant radiation therapy were identical. There is no survival advantage to a radical mastectomy for my type of cancer. I did not expect to have to defend my decision to follow my surgeon’s experienced opinion for what was best for me but it appears I am not the only person to have experienced this peer pressure. One should presume that a woman has counseled with her surgeon as to the options and then made a well-informed choice of treatment for herself rather than presuming she’s ignorant and you need to be the one who enlightens her.

It’s Science-Based Medicine All The Way For the Win

This past May, just weeks before I would be diagnosed with breast cancer, I published a blog post entitled “Etiquette of Cancer: Keep Your Quack Cures To Yourself” in which I detailed the ridiculous and offensive pressure I had received during a prior experience with cancer to cure it with unproven, even dangerous remedies. Hoo, boy, breast cancer brought out the worst of these people. I was advised to eat nano colloidal silver to cure my cancer; to not trust my doctors at all; that my cancer was due to my body being acidic and therefore I needed to eat alkaline foods; and the worst were the people who believed my cancer was caused by a bad diet and therefore I could cure it with diet alone. The latter strongly emphasizes that “you caused your cancer, you can cure it”. There is an alarming and disheartening trend to convince breast cancer patients to NOT have surgery but to cure it with any number of utterly quack remedies. I got sent URLs to videos of women claiming to have cured their breast cancer with coffee enemas, rubbing urine on their breasts, drinking 6 veggie smoothies a day and consuming a mini mountain of supplements daily. Umm, no, thanks. Given that recent studies document that cancer patients who choose alternative medicine are 50% more likely to die from their cancer than those who chose conventional treatment, I consider the promotion of unproven treatments on people in a vulnerable state to be deceptive and evil. Mind your own business and don’t offer any opinions or suggestions about treatment unless we ask you for them.

One author of a blog dedicated to her battle against metastatic breast cancer died of the disease. That alone can cause the anxiety levels in me to shoot up…that is until I went searching for the details of her cancer and how she treated it. To do so requires looking at the “About” link or searching through very early blog posts. I found that this late author has chosen to treat her high grade, aggressive breast cancer with alternative medicine. Her cancer story is definitely not my cancer story at all.

So, the purpose of this post was to, hopefully, to change the “cancer language problem”, mitigate some of the misinformation and stereotypes about breast cancer and to give people hope that a diagnosis of breast cancer, especially caught early, is not an automatic death sentence. If you are one of the tens of thousands of women diagnosed with an early stage of breast cancer (as defined as being limited to your breast) each year, you are in the majority (at least 61%) of women diagnosed and your prognosis for a good, long life is very good. The celebrity cancer stories are not your cancer story.

Get an annual mammogram.
Hire the best doctors you can find (I love mine!)
Trust your oncology team of doctors if you do get cancer.
Be careful how much you read online and engage your critical thinking skills if something online scares you.
Wearing pink is optional (I don’t).

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Hurricane Florence …Let Disaster Show Your Kind Side

September 10, 2018admin19 Comments

Here in the Carolinas we are prepping for Hurricane Florence, just recently upgraded to a Category 4 storm. I remember when Hurricane Fran hit in 1996. No one had any idea a hurricane could come that far inland and do that much damage. Our home at the time lost 12 large trees, we had no power for 10 days and we lost the contents of a large freezer. The National Guard took over the local high school and that is where we went to shower. No electricity means no well water for a lot of people.

During Fran, tornadoes were spun off and one twisted the tops off of all the tall pines in my neighbor’s back yard, the tornado then jumped the road and took out the trees in our back yard and then jumped again to a street behind us and took out those trees. Roads were blocked for days due to downed power lines and trees lying in the road.

Some of neighbors in the subdivision got their power before us and I gave them two large frozen turkeys from the freezer before they defrosted. Cul-de-sacs became areas of neighbor potlucks with people combining food from freezers and using grills to cook. Neighbors helped each other with chainsawing and burning of debris….

Hurricane Fran was a Category 3 storm, Florence is the largest hurricane to ever hit the Carolina coast north of Charleston. So, everyone is prepping for disaster. The Husband traipsed off to find gas and propane, I filled the vehicle gas tanks and grocery shopped. Stocking water in every conceivable container we have. I’m glad I had hurricane straps attached to the barn roof so we’ll see how that holds up. The grocery store was busy but the atmosphere was one of kindness and civility. Men asking if I needed help reaching top shelf items, pleasant chatter with people in line.

Impending disaster does not have to devolve into chaos, selfishness and rudeness. Be kind to retail employees as they stock shelves as fast as they can or who are unable to make bread and bottled water appear when none exists. It’s a great time to reach out to neighbors BEFORE it gets bad and plan to share resources.