UPDATE: A court found Lori Drew guilty of three misdemeanor counts in the MySpace suicide case.
But I hope that in focusing on the legal issues, we don’t lose sight of the blood-curdling ethical aspects. Consider this account about the trial on Wired.com:
Ashley Grills [a former employee of Lori Drew, who was given immunity to testify against Drew] was in the kitchen with Drew and Sarah, Lori Drew’s then-13-year-old daughter, when she proposed creating a fake MySpace account to get information on Megan. [Lori] Drew applauded the plan, and thought it was funny, but did not herself conceive it, Grills said….
When Lori [Drew] and Sarah Drew returned [and saw the profile created by Grills], “Lori commented that the kid was pretty good-looking, and that I basically did a good job,” said Grills. The Drews then urged Grills to send Megan a friend request as Josh.
Over the course of about a month, “Josh” struck up a flirtatious relationship with Meier, primarily under the control of Grills and Drew’s daughter, with [Lori] Drew present for about 50% of the communications the first week. Both Sarah Drew and Grills began to get cold feet — “we thought we would get in trouble because it’s illegal to make up fake MySpace [accounts]” — but Drew told them not to worry. “It was fine, and people do it all the time,” Grills recalled Drew saying.
Asked by prosecutor Mark Krause how Megan responded to “Josh,” Grills answered: “She flirted with him … She was happy.”
At first, the plan was to use the account to see what Megan was saying about her friends, and then to print out the messages and confront Tina Meier, Megan’s mother, with evidence that the girl was being mean. Halfway through, the plan changed, when Drew proposed inducing Megan to meet up with the fake boy at a local mall. “To, I guess, humiliate Megan,” said Grills….
Over the course of the 28 days the Josh Evans account was active, Lori Drew helped craft messages sent to Meier, Grills said, and assumed the Evans identity directly for at least one short exchange…
Grills’ final message to Megan Meier came after Sarah gave Jessica Mulford, another girl in the neighborhood, the password for the Evans account, and Mulford sent a message as Josh saying he didn’t want to be friends any more, Grills testified. In search of an exit strategy, Drew, Grill and Sarah Drew then decided to turn Megan against the fake boy. “We decided to be mean to her so she would leave him alone … and we could get rid of the page,” she said.
Grills and Sarah Drew worked on the final exchanges of messages together, in the presence of Lori Drew and her husband, Curt. “We were reading things out loud … and everyone would formulate the best thing to say,” she said. It was Grills’ fingers that typed out the last message to Megan: “The world would be a better place without you….”
When an ambulance arrived at the Meier house not long after,[Lori] Drew sent Grills and Sarah down the street to find out what happened. When they returned with news of what Meier had done, Grills said Lori’s husband, Curt Drew, started yelling at them to get rid of the MySpace account. Lori Drew, who was consoling her daughter, then also started yelling at them to delete the Josh Evans profile, and told them not to say anything to anyone, Grills said.
Grills said Drew worried that their scheme may have “pushed [Megan] overboard because she was suicidal and depressed.”
So, from this testimony we learn:
At least two adults were instrumental in setting up the scam.
When they became worried about their behavior it was fear that they’d violated a rule, not that they’d done something cruel.
When they decided to extract themselves from this scam, they decided the best way would not to come clean and apologize but be extra cruel in order to drive Meier away.
They admitted that part of the plan was the humiliation of Meier.
At least one of the adults involved in the scheme apparently knew Meier had a history of depression.
When they realized that Meier killed herself, the first reaction of some of the adults was to delete the evidence.