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Cyber Bitching

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Don't get mad, get E-venge!
By LAURA TOPHAM - More by this author » Last updated at 23:25pm on 6th May
2008
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Natalie Lue would be the first to agree that hell hath no fury like a woman
scorned.

When she discovered that her fiancé Tom had been sleeping with other women
behind her back - one of her friends caught him on a date with someone
else - the rage she felt wouldn't go away.

"I felt a terrible anger, which began eating away at me, bubbling away in my
mind," is how she describes it.

In the past, Natalie might have taken revenge by cutting up her faithless
fiancé's clothes, or perhaps even trashing his beloved car.

Scroll down for more...

Thanks to the internet, though, a far more lethal form of vengeance is now
at hand.

Natalie, like a growing number of other betrayed and deceived women, decided
to take her revenge online.

"I woke up at 5am and felt an overwhelming urge to vent my anger," says the
30-year-old sales consultant from Surrey.

"So I logged onto my computer and set up a blog."

On it, she began to pour out the details of her troubled relationship.

"It only took ten minutes - but it felt incredibly empowering," she says.

When 25-year-old Poppy Harris discovered her boyfriend was looking for other
women on an internet dating website, her tears didn't last for long.

A few clicks of the mouse here and a spot of typing there and the
advertising executive from Walton-on-Thames had transformed the man in
question from a good-looking, affluent sports coach searching for a pretty
young woman to date into an unemployed layabout seeking an older woman in
her 50s or 60s.

"It was the easiest thing in the world to hack into the website and change
all his details," she says, laughing at the memory.

"I would have loved to have seen his face when the e-mails started
arriving."

The devastating power of the internet as a tool of revenge was revealed in
January by actress Jane Slavin who took 'e-venge' on her lover, world-famous
composer Michael Nyman, after he spurned her with no explanation.

Scroll down for more...


Internet revenge: Actress Jane Slavin took 'e-venge' on her lover,
world-famous composer Michael Nyman, after he spurned her with no
explanation

Posing as a beautiful woman called 'Lucia', she began a flirtatious online
relationship with Nyman, who began bombarding 'Lucia' with explicit e-mails.

The crowning moment of her revenge came when 'Lucia' agreed to meet Nyman in
a café in North London. At the appointed time, it was Jane, of course, who
walked in.

To compound the humiliation of the man who wrote the haunting film score for
The Piano, Slavin wrote an online diary drawing attention to Nyman's
physical failings.

A quick surf around the web makes it clear that such acts of vengeance are
becoming increasingly common. Mugshots of hapless-looking men, stamped with
captions such as 'Here's the beast!' or, more simply, 'Beware!', are flagged
up online for all the world to see.

In the U.S., there are countless websites and blogs dedicated to wronged
women and the men who have hurt them - and the UK is fast following. Boiling
bunnies is a thing of the past: revenge, it seems, is a dish best served up
on a web page.

For the women, online vengeance serves as both catharsis and punishment. It
is also possibly the most public way of dragging down an ex-lover - the
modern-day equivalent of putting him in the stocks and pelting him with
rotten tomatoes.

"It felt great to release the pent-up frustration," says Natalie Lue, who
was engaged to Tom for five years, but discovered his infidelity only after
ending their relationship.

"It also felt great knowing so many people were being entertained by his
terrible behaviour."

"People started sending me e-mails saying they related to my frustrations.

"This spurred me on and I started detailing everything that had happened
with my ex. I felt I was settling scores, and it made me laugh that I was
exposing personal details about him to thousands of people.

"I told it exactly how it was. How he'd treated me like I was beneath him;
how he'd been seeing another woman before we broke up; how he wasn't even
nice the night he proposed.

"And because we'd met through colleagues and shared mutual friends, lots of
people knew exactly who I was writing about."

But if the net has made it easier to give the nation's cheaters and liars
their come-uppance, it's impossible not to question whether it is taking
over all aspects of our love lives.

Once, it was thought it was only teenagers who spent hours online playing
out their stormy pubescent relationships.

Now it is clear that millions of grown women also use the internet to find
love via dating websites such as match.com and social websites such as
Facebook and MySpace.

And when it all goes wrong, these same women are returning to their
computers to bury their lovers.

Take divorcée Laura Milnes, for example. The 44-year-old office worker found
Chris - a former boyfriend from her 20s - through the website Friends
Reunited.

She discovered his infidelity by hacking into his e-mails - and took revenge
by humiliating him online.

"Instant therapy", she calls it.

The irony is, of course, that it is the internet itself that has made
infidelity easier.

Laura, from Maltby in South Yorkshire, freely admits that she knew company
executive Chris was married when she contacted him via Friends Reunited five
years ago. The couple had dated for a year when she was 20.

Twenty years later, divorced and with two teenage children, she turned to
the internet for company.

As Laura puts it: "I found myself curiously searching for Chris online.' And
when she saw his profile, she e-mailed him.

"He replied instantly and my stomach lurched. Even though 20 years had
passed, I couldn't help but feel excited to hear what he was up to. Soon we
were emailing each other all the time."

Despite the fact that he was married, Laura insists: "It seemed innocent.
When he phoned a few weeks later, we were like two old friends chatting
away.

"Not long after, he texted saying there was a surprise outside my house.

"I was really shocked when Chris himself drove up. We just sat in his car
talking. He looked exactly the same as I remembered, aside from a few extra
lines on his face."

One thing led to another and the pair embarked on an affair.

"Even though I knew it was wrong, and really hurtful to his wife, I couldn't
help it," she says. "I was bowled over."

At first it was just occasional weekends when they saw each other. Then
Chris would invite her to Austria, where he worked during the week, for
short holidays.

"We enjoyed eating out every night and listening to music," says Laura.
"This all went on for about ten months.

"All the while, Chris insisted that he and his wife no longer had sex and
were more like friends, staying together for the sake of their kids.

"Perhaps I was naive, but I chose to believe him.

"Despite his marriage, we were like a normal couple. He said he loved me and
that he had never been unfaithful before."

But then Laura found she was pregnant.

"Chris said he was about to tell his wife about our affair when I
miscarried," she says.

Not long after, Chris's visits began to tail off.

"I called his wife, saying I wanted to speak to her about Chris," says
Laura.

"She didn't sound surprised. She asked me to go round to their house and
tell her everything."

After talking for several hours, the two women decided to look on his
computer.

"We found he was registered on internet dating sites and had been messaging
women across the country," she says.

"I realised then that I'd been fed a pack of lies. His wife even revealed
they'd been having a normal sexual relationship. I felt sick and betrayed."

Back home, she logged onto her lover's secret Hotmail account using the home
computer password his wife had used. It worked.

"I discovered even more slushy emails to other women," she says.

"Each one I read made me more angry. There were lots between him and a lady
in Scotland, and I learned he'd been on holiday with her. He'd told her he
loved her, too."

Laura copied the most intense, personal message he'd sent her and pasted it
into an e-mail which she sent to everyone in his address book.

"I wanted everyone to know what he'd been up to. I got a huge rush of
adrenaline as I hit 'Send'."

Soon, replies were flying in from all over the world, saying things like:
"Good on you!"

Before she knew it, Chris himself was on the phone.

"He rang and said: 'What are you playing at? Are you trying to get me
sacked?'

"But the damage was already done. I'm so glad I sent that e-mail. It felt
absolutely brilliant.

"Women can't fight physically so need other means of attack. As long as it
does not cause long-term damage, I think it's harmless.

"Ultimately, Chris kept his wife and his job, while I released all my
frustration and anger. E-venge is like instant therapy."

But having humiliated a lover online, at what point should a woman call it a
day? For how long must a badly-behaved lover be punished?

One problem is that blogs posted in anger are hard to get rid of once they
have whizzed off into cyberspace.

As yet, there have been no legal challenges to such websites in the UK, but
in New York a man sued his ex-wife over podcasts at her website on the
grounds that they included statements that were "obnoxious, derogatory or
offensive" and violated terms of their divorce settlement.

The court found in favour of the woman's right to free speech.

British blogger Natalie Lue insists: "I did write incredibly intimate
details about my ex, but they're my experiences, so I'm entitled to.

"Sometimes it feels strange that our relationship was read about by
thousands of people, but there's never been any comeback."

But once Natalie had finished pouring scorn on her ex-fiancÈ Tom, she found
herself reluctant to give up her blog.

"When I started having dates again, I'd write about any bad behaviour I
encountered. None of my boyfriends knew I was writing about them on the
internet, which I found very funny.

"I have a new partner now, but I'd never write about him because we have a
daughter together. He makes a point of not reading my blog - he'd prefer to
find out things directly."

Natalie, Laura and Poppy also argue that their cyber words have brought
comfort to other women.

"My outpourings seemed to connect with other women," says Natalie.

"I realised it was helping them with their relationships, so I set up
another site. Together, my blogs get 130,000 users every month.

"It's empowering - both for me and for readers who learn through my
relationships."

But it's hard not to wonder where this cyber bitching will end.

It could be argued, too, that these women would do better simply to get over
their broken hearts and move on rather than washing their dirty linen in
public.

Poppy insists that she has finally done that.

"I realised I had to let go and move on with my life," she says - though not
before she had sent him an e-mail as 'Busty Belinda', suggesting a time and
place to meet and insisting that he must be carrying a dozen red roses.

"I hope he felt a right chump standing under the clock at Euston Station
waiting for 'Busty Belinda'," she says, laughing.

"It may be sad - but boy was it satisfying."

Whoever said that romance is dead may well be right.

One thing is clear - any man who deceives a computer-literate woman is
treading on decidedly deadly ground.

. Some names have been changed for legal reasons.

. Additional reporting Diana Appleyard.

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