> The lawyer had apologized for his client’s behavior and asked that we notify him if Danny ever attempted to contact me or anyone connected to me in the future.
So what happened?
Did the author's father verify this was indeed a real lawyer?
Did the author contact her own lawyer to help figure out what circumstances could result in a cyberstalker's lawyer saying this to her father?
I don't understand how an article on a first-person account of cyberstalking could possibly end with, "something extraordinary happened that I won't explain further and perhaps that will wrap things up."
> I don't understand how an article on a first-person account of cyberstalking could possibly end with, "something extraordinary happened
Because this is what happened so far.
> that I won't explain further
You can't explain things you don't understand. The article says:
I emailed the lawyer back, but due to attorney-client privilege he wouldn’t reveal the nature of his representation of Danny. I assumed, however, that he was being sued by another victim.
But you can follow up on them, especially in an article where the first-person account is part of a larger story about cyberstalking.
E.g., "We then contacted a lawyer who specializes in stalking, who told us that..."
E.g., "I emailed the professor mentioned earlier in the article to find out if criminal/civil settlements ever result in such an arrangement in cyberstalking cases."
Or, "While the lawyer couldn't reveal the nature of his relationship with Danny, I certainly was under no such obligation. We hired a private investigator to go through the records I had kept of the cyberstalking and harassment, to try to piece together who other potential victims may have been."
If this were a blog I wouldn't have commented at all. I can understand if the author took the call from the lawyer as a potential signal that the harassment was over and wishes to devote 0 more time going forward to dealing with this person. But it's not a blog-- it's a journalistic story about a person using every legal avenue available to stop the harmful behavior of an abuser that spanned decades, and how every single avenue fell short of stopping the abuse. That story is frustratingly incomplete because we don't know what it is that actually put a stop to the abuse, and it appears nobody took further steps to explain it.
I'm not interested at all in the drama of the incident.
I'm interested in what steps were necessary to force a lifetime harasser to find a lawyer and a) agree to provide that lawyer with at least a partial list of victims of his online attacks, and b) also agree to allow the lawyer to contact the family of those victims and request a response if the lifetime harasser ever tries to contact the victim again.
After all that I was expecting her to share her strategy for finally getting justice, you know, in order to help other victims reading the article. So basically this only serves to dissuade other victims from even trying to get help...
In some countries you just get a non-molestation order. Breaching that order is a criminal act.
That's much harder to do in the US because of 1st amendment and "prior restraint" - even if it's possible the stalked person faces expensive and lengthy court cases.
So what happened?
Did the author's father verify this was indeed a real lawyer?
Did the author contact her own lawyer to help figure out what circumstances could result in a cyberstalker's lawyer saying this to her father?
I don't understand how an article on a first-person account of cyberstalking could possibly end with, "something extraordinary happened that I won't explain further and perhaps that will wrap things up."