Nowhere to Hide

The harassment started on Dec. 20. Jayne Hitchcock and husband Chris were hosting a holiday dinner for friends when they began receiving mysterious phone calls. Some were hang-ups, but others were odd--”Loverboy” calling collect from somewhere or a student from Germany wanting, he said in halting English, to discuss his sexual fantasies.

“It became terrifying,” recalls Jayne Hitchcock, an author of six nonfiction and kids’ books who lives in Crofton, Md. “We had no idea what was going on.”

Another phone call provided a clue: “Do you know your name is being ‘spammed’ on sex ads all over the usenet?”

The occasional sensational story notwithstanding, the Internet is usually benign, with generally accepted codes of conduct. In its usenet area, you can find thousands of discussion “newsgroups” on every imaginable subject, from quilting to body piercing, in which people read and answer messages from others with similar interests. Among the Net’s minor annoyances is the practice of “spamming,” or flooding users with unwanted communications. Otherwise, maliciousness is mostly confined to “flame wars”--stinging exchanges of sarcasm or insults.

What was happening to Hitchcock, however, was different--a kind of cyberstalking that led her to file a civil suit last month against a literary agency she believes is responsible.

Based on that lawsuit and e-mail exchanges among the participants, this is the story of how a group of online friends banded together to end that harassment. The people they accuse of being behind it declined numerous requests from The Times for comment.

Immediately after receiving the warning call, Hitchcock revved up her computer to see what her caller was talking about. It didn’t take long before she found hundreds of ads under her name, with her home address and phone number attached: “Female International Author, no limits to imagination and fantasies, prefers group macho / sadistic interaction, including lovebites and indiscriminate scratches. Stop by my house. Will take your calls day or night. . . .”

“It was hell,” she says. “The phone rang constantly. Meanwhile, we worried that these sex maniacs might drop by.”

The harassment didn’t stop there. According to Hitchcock’s lawsuit, a series of inflammatory posts to newsgroups, ostensibly from Hitchcock, attracted hundreds of blistering e-mails. Department heads at the University of Maryland, where Hitchcock works as a teaching assistant, received insults and resignation notices forged with her name. Hitchcock’s e-mail address was “mail bombed” with hundreds of nonsensical messages designed to short-circuit her account. Her husband’s account was also bombed, as was that of her book agent, whose name was then also attached to inflammatory messages.

*

Who could have done all this, and why? Hitchcock suspected she already knew: the Woodside Literary Agency.

Hitchcock’s troubles actually began months earlier in a usenet group called misc.writing, where writers (including this reporter) banter, discuss editors and font sizes, and add to the never-ending chronicles of misc.writingville, a metaphorical town with spots like Kate’s Bar and Grill “located in the Writer’s Block at the intersection of Hope and Despair.”

The Woodside Literary Agency first appeared there in January 1996, when it posted a message to hundreds of newsgroups, including rec.pet.cats.alt.business, sci.med.diseases.lyme and even alt.binaries.pictures.lesbians:

“The Woodside Literary Agency of New York City is now accepting new authors for publication, re: fiction and nonfiction (all kinds). Advances from publishers as high as $50,000. . . . We also handle magazine articles. Publishers paying as high as $1,000. We have offices from New York City to Florida. Poems and screenplays are also in demand. . . .”

Misc.writing denizens, who knew something about publishing, started asking questions: Why advertise when most agencies have more applicants than they can handle? What kind of agent is looking for poems at a time when the poetry market is so lousy that most poets can’t even give their poems away? And hadn’t agents stopped handling magazine articles about the time of the Great Depression?

As the writers posted these and other questions, they sent copies to Woodside by e-mail. No answers were forthcoming.

But their questions started shaking loose reports from people who had answered the ads. In posts to the group, they described Woodside as a “love your work, send me money” shop. One misc.writing poster wrote ruefully, “They asked for a reading fee of $75. I took the gamble even realizing it was a possible come-on. I got a letter saying ‘welcome aboard’ and asking for $250 expenses, and another $250 if they haven’t found a publisher in a year”--a highly irregular request in the publishing world, where agents are usually paid for succeeding, not for failing.

Hitchcock had just moved back to the United States from a stint in Japan with her Marine husband. Needing an agent, she sent writing samples as a result of the first ad. Woodside accepted her--and then infuriated her by asking for money to represent her.

“I remember what it’s like to be a hopeful writer. If I hadn’t known better, I might’ve paid the money too,” she said in an interview. “Legitimate agents don’t ask for upfront fees, they make a percentage when they sell your writing. A phony agent is worse than no agent, because they don’t just steal your money, but your dreams as well.”

Several writers who suspected a scam began issuing warnings and complaining to Woodside’s Internet service provider (ISP). “We thought of it as a misc.writingville community service project,” Hitchcock jokes. It was hard work--more than 8,100 notices advertising the agency were posted last year under a legion of bland names (John Lawrence, Dr. Susan Day, Alex Baker, Ted Denver). Each ad had to be hunted down, a response posted and a copy sent to the originating ISP. As its accounts were canceled, Woodside hopped to new Internet companies.

Trying to lighten the load of the campaign, some writers competed to produce something so bad that even Woodside would reject it. They all did their worst, but Wendy Chatley Green of Texas was the only contestant who “won,” getting a hand-scrawled rejection from “Dr. Susan Day” for her samples of unbearably god-awful cyberpoetry. Everyone else--even “Kiki Rothschild,” who proposed a neo-Nazi novel called “Even Hitler Got the Blues”--received an acceptance letter from Woodside with a request for a $150 “reading fee.”

*

Although Hitchcock was just one of many writers challenging its ads, the Woodside agency inexplicably fixated on her, according to the suit. She alleges it posted responses to her that were cryptic (“FART!” read one in its entirety), oddly baroque (“How bitter are sour grapes. Be it known that all who attack literary agents have 99% of the time been rejected, so they bite their own tail, and cry, cry, cry”) or downright scary (“HITCHCOCK, PLEASE STOP DON’T CALL THE AGENCY COLLECT ANYMORE. THEY KNOW ABOUT YOU. IT’S AN OBSESSION. I’M REALLY NOT INTERESTED IN YOU . . . “ repeated over and over).

The agency publicly threatened to sue her; it also posted claims in group after group that Hitchcock was a pornographer, bitter because Woodside had rejected her, she alleges. Because of both the lawsuit threat and what she considered a clear-cut case of libel, Hitchcock consulted an attorney. He began preparing a case and forwarding copies of relevant Woodside-related posts to the New York attorney general’s office with a suggestion that investigators might want to look into the practices of the agency. Woodside’s threat of a lawsuit has never materialized.

(A woman who answered a reporter’s call to Woodside refused to comment or to reveal the names of Woodside’s principals or even her own. She hung up during subsequent calls. The Baltimore City Paper reported that a call from its reporter was answered by a woman who declined to identify herself or her attorney but read this statement: “On the advice of counsel, the Woodside Literary Agency is not responding at this time to the allegations of Jayne Hitchcock, except to say that they are false and that it is Hitchcock who has harassed and libeled the agency for several months.”)

Because of the continuing harassment and the fear of bodily harm, Hitchcock called the FBI, which assigned an agent to look into her case. Still, that didn’t solve the calls and angry e-mails. She changed her e-mail address and appealed to usenet friends all over North America and Europe, most of whom she has never met, to help her out. A small group began back-channel mailing lists to communicate by e-mail and coordinate their efforts.

The first priority was to quickly answer and then cancel the Hitchcock posts to stop any further damage. Members of misc.writing fanned out across usenet, hunting down posts and putting up answers. They recruited Chris Lewis, a highly regarded computer security expert from Ottawa who, in his free time, acts as an anti-spammer. He has written wide-ranging software that “cancels” spam posts before they can do much damage. Lewis informed the group that software of his own and anti-spam colleagues was already searching out and destroying the forged Hitchcock posts, as well as a whole new round of Woodside ads.

*

One mystery remained: Who or what really is the Woodside Literary Agency?

Unfortunately, while the Internet can be used to invade privacy, it can also be used to protect it. The ads for Woodside were issued under a legion of bland names, yet they all seemed to share the same idiosyncrasies of grammar, spelling and punctuation. Amateur sleuths in the group checked phone records and found that two of the three addresses listed on Woodside stationery have phones in the name of one “Ursula Sprachman.”

Stan Kid, a misc.writingville regular who happens to be a police sergeant in New York City, visited Woodside’s main headquarters.

Kid issued an e-mail report: “I found the ‘main office’ at 33-29 58th St., Woodside, NY. It is a private attached two-family house in a crappy industrial neighborhood. An aluminum awning stretched from the house to the sidewalk. On the front of the awning was a sign, ‘The Woodside Literary Agency.’ . . . If the FBI or any other law enforcement agency gets involved, it shouldn’t take too much detective work to find J. Leonard or Susan Day. Maybe even Jimmy Hoffa.”

Next, some of the group played cyberdetective to see if they could find out for sure who was responsible for Hitchcock’s woes.

Sally Towse, an amateur Internet technosleuth from Saratoga, Calif., went laboriously through the phony Hitchcock postings and extracted certain esoteric information attached to all posts. She ran them through a search engine and found a clue: They were sent using the same rarely used, outdated x-mailer software used for the Woodside posts, and both came through the same local Internet supplier. She reported to the e-mail group: “Of the zillions (it seems . . . but really not that many) of posts I checked, no one, except Woodside and the forging spammer, had that x-mailer type AND used IDT New York for posts.”

The sleuths were closing in. A spam-canceling colleague of Lewis’, Stan Kalisch III, ran across a curious anomaly in posts in three groups--alt.culture.usenet, alt.society.anarchy and talk.origins--which were perhaps the smoking guns everyone was looking for. The posts were the standard Woodside advertisement, posted from the same software, but with Hitchcock’s name and e-mail address attached to the top.

When added to everything else, it was enough for Hitchcock’s attorney, John A. Young of New York City, to sue Woodside. He began drawing up the documents to sue Sprachman and any other “John Does and Richard Roes of the Woodside Literary Agency” in U.S. District Court for actual and punitive damages totaling $10 million. As of Friday there had been no response to the suit.

*

Finally, after a few weeks, just as the scary phone calls had dwindled to just one or two a day, strange mail started to arrive. On Jan. 22, an unordered Forbes subscription and two unordered packages from CD clubs were delivered. And there was a plain brown package with a Long Island postmark and a return address that didn’t match.

Jittery, Hitchcock called police, who told her to leave the house immediately. On close inspection, police found the parcel contained . . . incense.

“When is it going to end?” she sighs.