www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,261916,00.html
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. 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."
Hillary Clinton, D-NY 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.
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.
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 LA television writer and longtime friend of Seipp's, wrote in an e-mail. 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. There was perhaps one silver lining, Seipp's friends said. 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?"
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. "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?" "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?" 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 LA 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. Stein had just started as a journalism professor at a private school in Los Angeles called the Ribet Academy, where Maia was in 10th grade. Maia, he said, was undeniably bright and an excellent writer, and he made her editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. But things quickly went sour, and Stein ended up leaving the school in October after a dispute with Maia and her mother. According to him, he quit because of a tangential issue -- the administration wanted to suspend Stein for a single day for responding to Maia on her blog before the school had formulated its official statement. Any parent should know what happened next: Cathy Seipp fought back. And as a blogger, she naturally did it online with her trademark acid tongue, writing columns that detailed her daughter's travails and mocked Stein as a "fat sweaty loser ... who used to have ambitions of being some kind of Internet personality." But Stein said some of Seipp's comments disparaged his fitness to be a teacher and implied that his fixation on her daughter was less than wholesome. "If I had a woman implying I should not be near children, you think that doesn't deserve some sort of response?" com hadn't been bought, so he purchased it himself under an obviously assumed name and began to fill it with anti-Seipp parodies -- amateurish montages that stuck her head on the Beatles' "Abbey Road" album cover or floating alongside other Republicans in a cartoon hell, for example.
means, if I remember well, paying several hundred dollars upfront to start the procedure and have a panel of experts review the claim and rule," journalist Emmanuelle Richard, a close friend of Seipp's, wrote in an e-mail. She felt powerless and felt that she had to dedicate her energy and resources to her daughter and her health first."
com and turned it into a parody site with more examples of the Stein sense of humor -- Masters done up as Dr. Wanting to avoid a potential long-term legal battle and bad publicity, Masters, now 79, decided to ignore Stein's site. "I'm not surprised at what he did this time," Masters said. "It's a hate addiction -- once he starts he never stops. That's how long he holds onto a grudge that doesn't exist." For his part, 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. 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 Inte...
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