Jun 16, 2008 7:19 pm US/Pacific
Woman Pleads Not Guilty In MySpace Suicide Case
LOS ANGELES
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Drew is accused of setting up an account on the social networking Web site MySpace.com, along with others, to pose as a 16-year-old boy, "Josh Evans," in 2006. MySpace is owned by Fox Interactive Media, Inc., which is headquartered in Beverly Hills.
CBS
A Missouri woman accused of orchestrating a deadly MySpace hoax that drove her daughter's 13-year-old classmate to suicide entered a plea of not guilty on Monday in a federal courtroom in downtown Los Angeles.
Lori Drew, 49, of O'Fallon, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis, entered her plea in response to a four-count indictment returned May 15 by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles. Her trial was set this morning for July 29.
Drew is accused of setting up an account on the social networking Web site MySpace.com, along with others, to pose as a 16-year-old boy, "Josh Evans," in 2006. MySpace is owned by Fox Interactive Media, Inc., which is headquartered in Beverly Hills.
Pretending to be Evans, Drew and others allegedly expressed a romantic
interest in the girl, Megan Meier, and then spurned her, saying, among other things, that the world would be better off without her.
Meier hanged herself in October 2006, shortly after receiving that message.
Drew, who lived four doors down from Meier, is charged with conspiracy and three counts of accessing protected computers without authorization to obtain information about the victim in violation of MySpace's terms of service.
The charges all carry five-year prison terms. Drew's indictment has raised eyebrows in the legal community, as the laws she has been charged with breaking are normally used to prosecute hackers and identity thieves.
In April, an 19-year-old employee of Drew's, Ashley Grills, told ABC's "Good Morning America" that she created the bogus MySpace profile, but said Drew wrote some of the messages.
She said it was Drew's idea to contact Meier over the Internet to find out what she was saying about Drew's daughter, a former friend.
Grills also told "GMA" she wrote the message about the world being a better place without Meier, but did so to end the fake online relationship because she thought the ruse had gone too far.
Meier's death was investigated by authorities in Missouri, but no
charges were ever filed.
(© 2008 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Wire services contributed to this report.)
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