Yale students unable to identify anonymous forum bashers
By Nate Anderson
January 27, 2008 - 10:39PM CT

Two female Yale law students who were the target of vicious (and anonymous) online attacks are having a tough time figuring out who was behind the postings. The women filed suit last June as "Does I and II" in an attempt to unmask "Cheese Eating Surrender Monkey," "DRACULA," "Sleazy Z," "hitlerhitlerhitler," and "The Ayatollah of Rock-n-Rollah" (among others), but in a legal filing this week the women's lawyers admitted that they had so far dug up nothing.

The lawyers have even resorted to asking the anonymous defendants to turn themselves in, a tactic that has worked about as well as might be expected. The anonymous posts went up on AutoAdmit.com, a popular laws school site and discussion forum. When the women entered Yale Law a few years back, a series of vindictive threads attacked them with a bizarre range of fabricated charges.

These aren't your standard Internet trolls, either; messages advocated punching the women in the gut while pregnant, raping them, and sodomizing them. The women were each accused of having STDs, having done sexual favors to Yale Law faculty or deans, and being lesbians, among other lurid accusations. AutoAdmit doesn't log IP address, so finding out who was behind the messages has been difficult.

After filing suit, the women's lawyers explored a host of different avenues; in a court document filed this week, those strategies were laid out in detail (and were also noticed by a Slashdot poster). The legal team contacted Microsoft, Highbeam Research, the University of North Carolina, ServInt Internet Services, PenTeleData, GoDaddy, and others.

Ars Technica
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