I am single-minded enough to find you...and slit your throat from ear to ear.
It arrived out of nowhere. Everything else in Melissa Anelli's e-mail inbox was perfectly innocent: a thank-you note from her sister, updates from colleagues at The Leaky Cauldron, the Harry Potter fan site she moderated. Everything else about July 21, 2008, had been totally unremarkable. Until Jessica Parker appeared on Melissa's screen.
You'll hear from me again soon, wrote Jessica. And Melissa did—thousands of times, over what would become a waking nightmare. Melissa recognized Jessica as an offensive commenter she'd banned from The Leaky Cauldron. "I thought if I just blocked her e-mail address and refused to respond, it would all go away," says Melissa, now 35. But Jessica invented countless new aliases and flooded Melissa's e-mail, message boards, and social media accounts with death threats, love letters, rape threats, and pleas for attention. I beg you, give me the time of day... I'll throttle your neck... Don't leave me hanging... You are a dead woman walking...
Melissa knew cyber harassment existed; as a site moderator and self-employed writer, she practically lived online. But she'd never realized just how vulnerable she was: very. Forty percent of Internet users experience online harassment, a recent Pew Research Center study revealed. (A new survey of Women's Health readers puts that number closer to 55 percent.) Worse, as ever more people use the Internet to work, chat, shop, and play, and as the lines between online and off further blur, the virtual abuse is spilling over into real life. And no one—not lawyers, not cops, not even the government—is prepared to stop it.
Melissa, as she soon found out, was on her own.
Cunt. Bitch. Slut. Whore. Nearly two-thirds of women have been slapped with one of these or similar insults online. Most often in retaliation for...nothing. The old "she was asking for it" explainer? Total BS, per a startling study from the University of Maryland. Researchers created a bunch of fake chat room accounts and, without posting a single thing, watched what happened. Feminine usernames racked up an average of 100 sexual or threatening messages a day; masculine usernames, on the other hand, got fewer than four each day.
It's a modern catch-22: Our often-useful, share-driven online accounts are open targets for harassers looking to insult, frighten, or harm without repercussion, says Jac SM Kee, creator of Take Back the Tech, a global campaign against gender-based violence. And it's easier to fling vitriol when there's no face-to-face contact. To wit, most women—nearly 70 percent in our WH survey—already know their harassers.
The abuse can take myriad forms—everything from name-calling to illicit messaging to revenge porn to death threats. All chilling in the moment, but even more so in the long-term. Studies show that female victims suffer deep emotional turmoil, including paralyzing stress, anxiety, and depression. Many lose their jobs or fail to find new ones, since about 80 percent of employers use the Internet to screen potential hires and might stumble upon reputation-trashing content.
These attacks are "designed to make women unemployable and undateable," says lawyer Danielle Citron, author of Hate Crimes in Cyberspace. "Harassers feel more powerful when women are silenced."
Perhaps most troubling of all: Online harassment can morph into physical aggression, says Michael Kaiser, executive director of the National Cyber Security Alliance. In one horrifying case, a woman's ex-boyfriend impersonated her on Craigslist, inventing violent fantasies and posting her address—prompting a man to come to her house and rape her.
Melissa is not alone. In a recent Women's Health survey, 55 percent of readers said they had experienced online harassment. For more staggering statistics, watch the video below.
Melissa could feel her sanity unraveling. Jessica was everywhere. In her inbox; all over her Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr accounts; in The Leaky Cauldron community posts; on her cell phone's missed-calls log; and, eventually, in her and her family's nonvirtual mailboxes. That fall, shortly after buying a Brooklyn apartment, Melissa opened her laptop to find an e-mail from Jessica. Attached was a satellite image of Melissa's neighborhood, her building circled in ink.
One night soon after, Melissa heard strange noises outside her front door. She panicked and called the cops. They found nothing, but Melissa filed a police report with the NYPD, listing Jessica's full name (unlike many online harassers, Jessica didn't bother concealing her identity). She asked the officers for help with getting a restraining order. But they told her that since Jessica's IP address showed she most likely lived in New Zealand, way out of their jurisdiction, there was little they could do. Their best advice? Just stay off-line.
"If I didn't go online, I wouldn't be able to work," says Melissa. "They didn't seem to get that." It's a familiar frustration: Many police don't recognize just how integral online communication has become to people's careers, and victims are often told to come back when a "real" crime has been committed, says digital forensics expert A.J. Fardella. "Cops have no idea what to do when someone is being harassed online. They need training in how to respond to cyber crimes."
Problem is, they have scant tools at their disposal. While all 50 states have enacted laws against online harassment, enforcing them can be a befuddling, Herculean task. The line between abusive comments and free speech remains malleable, and proving that something is illegal is so difficult that many women begrudgingly suck it up, telling themselves it just comes with the territory of being online.
Those who choose to fight are in for a long, slow battle. "These incidents take lots and lots of time to investigate, especially when a suspect is anonymous or in another county, state, or country," says Chris MacNeil, a North Carolina-based detective who has worked on numerous cyber-stalking cases. Prosecution is even more complex and time-consuming and requires a staggering amount of documentation.
None of which helped Melissa. Jessica plagued her relentlessly, promising rape, murder, and dismemberment. One day, Jessica posted a photo of a new tattoo on one of her Twitter accounts; it was identical to one of Melissa's. Consumed by concern for her own and her family's safety, Melissa started to dread going online or appearing at work events. She quit producing her podcasts and videos and started seeing a therapist. Her life as she'd known it was over.
Considering the legal quagmire—which, by the way, exists for online and off-line stalking—it's not surprising that fewer than 40 people are charged under federal laws each year. Victims and activists are fed up and pressuring legislators to act, stat. "Online abuse prevents women from being full digital citizens, from living their lives," says Citron. "It's a major discrimination we have to address."
Progress has been glacial but hopeful: In 2013, Congress added cyber stalking to existing laws in the Violence Against Women Act. That same year, Charlotte Laws, a member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, helped California become the first state to ban revenge porn after anonymous hackers posted topless photos of her daughter online. And in December, the Supreme Court heard arguments in U.S. v. Elonis; its decision could determine the legal future of online harassment. (Anthony Elonis was arrested after he posted on Facebook that he would murder his ex. His attorneys argue he's protected by free speech laws. Obviously, the prosecution disagrees.)
For now, harassment watchers say women's best defense needs to stem from social media itself. "When users report abuse to companies like Twitter, it's only the first step in holding the perpetrator accountable," says Carla Franklin, a cyber-stalking survivor turned digital activist. Under sharp criticism for lax responses, Twitter and Facebook have recently revised their harassment policies. Facebook has a zero-tolerance rule (harassers' accounts are eventually deactivated). And Twitter has banned revenge porn and started preventing blocked users from seeing a person's profile; it also now allows bystanders to report any abuse they come across, increasing the likelihood that harassers will be kicked off.
In the summer of 2009, Melissa's sister—now herself a victim of Jessica's harassment—called the FBI. Miraculously, an agent immediately agreed to take their case. "She was the first person I talked to who said this should not be happening, and that she would help us do something about it," says Melissa.
The triumph was sweet but short-lived. As Melissa's team gathered evidence, Jessica kept up her online bombardment for the next four years. She was briefly arrested in New Zealand in 2011 for harassing Melissa and others, but after a three-month "no Internet" sentence, she resumed stalking Melissa. By that time, however, Melissa was packing a new determination—and some muscle.
If Jessica sent Melissa a specific time-and-place death threat, the FBI sent Melissa backup. Other times, Melissa hired her own bodyguards to trail her at domestic and international Harry Potter conventions. "There were some seriously famous people at these conferences," she says, "and there was little old me, with this big, burly ex-marine guarding my door."
In 2013, the FBI finally had enough evidence to issue a warrant for Jessica's arrest. She would be taken into custody the second she ever stepped on American soil. Melissa felt safer at home, but Jessica still infected every corner of her online life (and, more and more often, her family's snail mail). As a last resort, Melissa reached out to a newspaper and a detective in New Zealand; the former published her story, while the latter started building a local case. In June 2014, almost six years after that first e-mail, Jessica was rearrested for stalking Melissa.
These days, Melissa's life—cyber and physical—is blissfully Jessica-free. Her harasser was sentenced to undergo extensive counseling and cannot have contact of any kind with Melissa. Perhaps most crucially, she's not allowed to own any device that connects to the Internet for one year.
Still, says Melissa, "I now get terrified when a new online acquaintance tries to get too close, too fast." She has friends prescreen her e-mails and rarely posts updates on Facebook. Mostly she just asks herself, again and again, why she was targeted by Jessica. "I honestly don't know," she says. "This is a crime that can happen to anyone."
For more information about cyber harassment, including what to do when you feel threatened, pick up the May 2015 issue of Women's Health, on newsstands now.
* Excerpts are from actual harassment sent from Jessica to Melissa
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