Teen Has No Regrets on Insult Web Site

A San Fernando Valley high school senior who ran a now-defunct Web site that gave Southern California middle and high school students a forum for mean-spirited gossip and rumors said Friday that he did not regret the emotional pain it caused but was upset only that free speech had lost out to the “rule of the mob.”

Skyler Tennen, 18, who called himself a “dweeb -- actually I prefer ‘geek,’ ” said he made the decision this week (to shut down schoolscandals.com only after his family was bombarded by angry e-mails and phone calls, and after public outcry triggered by a local radio talk show threatened his parents’ careers.

His mother is a Los Angeles schools administrator and his father a lawyer who said that he represented the site.

Tennen said it was never his intention to promote what he called a “ragboard” when he started the advertising-free Internet site three years ago from his home.

Instead he said he wanted a place where students could expose scandals in public education, as well as express themselves freely.

But the Cleveland High student made no apologies for the nasty postings, even though some parents said their children needed counseling or transferred schools after being targeted for public ridicule.

Comments on the Web site gave a true picture of life inside school walls, even if people’s feelings were hurt, Tennen said during an interview Friday at a Japanese restaurant in the Valley. He said he never wrote any of the virtual bathroom-stall graffiti -- in which teens called others “whores,” sluts,” “retards” and worse.

“It’s like reality TV shows, and those are horrible,” said Tennen, who has long brown curls and wears braces. “The people that are seeking therapy now as a result of schoolscandals should have been seeking therapy earlier. It was going to happen regardless, and I am glad to say that I got the child who needed therapy, therapy. I am proud of it.”

Tennen said he is a registered Republican and was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq. He said he pretended to be a protester at a recent antiwar rally in San Francisco, but only so he could “laugh at the crazy people.”

He plans to study communications next year at Cal State Northridge.

Cleveland High Principal Allan J. Weiner said Friday that he was “horrified” to discover that one of his students had created the site.

“If I had my way, I would hold him back from participation in graduation,” Weiner said. “But it’s not an activity that happened on our school grounds.”

He also expressed concern about the angry reaction on campus toward Tennen, who he described as a quiet student active in drama and debate clubs.

“For all intents and purposes, he’s a nice young man,” said Weiner. “You get surprised by the kids that get involved in these things.”

The principal added: “I think times are probably going to get harder for him, now that that’s out. I don’t know if the school can do an adequate job of protecting him.”

Tennen responded: “They hadn’t done much to protect anyone, ever.”

His mother, Diane Tennen, is business manager for a regional unit of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Robert J. Collins, superintendent for District C, said Friday that her job was not in jeopardy.

“Mrs. Tennen has been an excellent employee,” Collins said. The site, he said, was “not done on school time, and to be candid with you, I don’t know of her direct involvement in it.”

Collins added: “I need to emphasize that as a district we do not condone those types of Web sites, and we believe that they are harmful.”

Skyler’s father, Ken Tennen, a tax attorney in West Hills, previously told The Times that he represented the site’s Nevada-based owners, Western Applications, but he declined to identify them further.

Interviewed Friday at his two-story Canoga Park house, where two American flags were flying, he said he helped his son get the site off the ground by finding investors he had known professionally.

They gave $4,000 in start-up funds for software and Web hosting in hopes that the project would grow from having bulletin boards for about 100 California schools to a national moneymaking operation, he said.

But Ken Tennen said that “this very quickly turned into a monster.”

“We learned open forum can become very ugly and nasty very fast,” he added.

However, he said he thinks the whole episode was useful for both his son and society.

“Not only do I believe in free speech, but I believe he’s a big boy and he can make his own mistakes.... It’s a legitimate debate about open forum, kids and the Internet, Web master responsibility and parental control.”

Ken Tennen has served as chairman of the board of the private Happy Valley School in Ojai, which he attended.

He resigned this week from the board of Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic of Los Angeles, and that agency released a statement that his association with the Web site “may have adversely affected our donors and the students that we serve.”

Soon after an article appeared in The Times earlier this month about the controversial Web site, radio hosts of the “John and Ken Show” on KFI-AM (640) launched a campaign to shut down schoolscandals .com.

Skyler Tennen went on the show and identified himself as the Web site’s administrator (and Ken Tennen’s son).

The radio duo identified him as a student at Cleveland High. Later, they posted his parents’ work phone numbers and e-mail addresses on the radio show’s Web site. For several days running, they also encouraged listeners to “communicate their feelings about the Web site.”

Radio co-host Ken Chiampou said that Skyler and Ken Tennen “were cavalier, even dismissive” when they spoke on the show and that they angered listeners.

His partner, John Kobylt, said he was delighted that the site was out of service. “We definitely wanted to shut them down, and it was done peacefully; it was done through public pressure,” he said Friday.

Asked about whether that campaign forced him off the Internet, Skyler Tennen said: “I don’t want them to think that the site was taken down blatantly because of threats, but in the short answer, I guess, yeah, it was.”

His father described the radio duo’s show as “the news equivalent of professional wrestling.”

“They have no regard for the truth or for people’s personal lives,” he added.

During his interview Friday, Skyler Tennen insisted that the Web address was not intended to invite gossip. “It’s not student scandals, it’s school scandals,” he said. “It was designed about teachers’ classes, unfair decisions within the school.”

He said that he had struggled to find a way to keep out the most controversial content, even though it was protected as free speech and did not expose the owners or operators of the Web site to legal risk.

“I understood the problems with the site and I wanted to come up with an alternative solution,” he said, but added that as a nonprofit enterprise he had difficulty finding moderators.

Some students said they believed that Tennen had good intentions, despite the Web site’s problems.

“He did get unfairly targeted,” said Cleveland High senior Marissa Greenberg, who is associate editor of the campus newspaper.

“That is something bad that happened that he shouldn’t be faulted for,” she said. “But he didn’t write those things. He sponsored a forum for them. People posted rumors on the site, and I didn’t agree with the site, but it was legal.”

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Times staff writer Megan Garvey contributed to this report.