Re: 12/22/00 - Lesbian Nation: Lesbian Couple Sues to Discover Name of Tormentors; 12/14/00 - The Pinnacle: The lawsuit revisited
Lesbian Couple Sues to Discover Name of Tormentors
By Carol Ness
Tracie Cone and Anna Marie dos Remedios feared that they might run into trouble when they took over a local paper a year ago. They're a couple, openly so, in rural San Benito County. But they've earned almost universal respect for transforming the weekly Pinnacle from an ad-driven shopper into a real newspaper. They raise horses, ride Harleys and have established themselves as solid citizens during their five years in this tight-knit community. To people here, they are simply, fondly, "the girls."
When trouble hit, it came viciously and anonymously: A series of Web sites linked Cone and the Pinnacle to lesbian porn sites, falsely accused their columnist-provocateur Bob Valenzuela of being a child molester, and obscenely mocked city politicians -- all for taking a strong slow-growth stance in this fast-developing rural valley, the Silicon Valley explosion's southern tip.
This collision of small-town growth politics, Internet free speech and a touch of lunacy or homophobia -- depending on who is talking -- has prompted a federal defamation lawsuit meant to unmask the tormentor and earn a public apology. The situation has left "the girls" in fear, the community uneasy that one of its own is probably responsible, and lawyers trading theories in an emerging area of Internet law.
"It's a cool community, an isolated, small ranching community. It's one for all and all for one. It's not a mean-spirited place," said Cone, the Pinnacle's publisher. "That's why these Web sites were such a shock to us and to so many people. The attack against us is so completely mean-spirited."
Added dos Remedios, executive editor: "The worst thing is not knowing who it is and what the risks are."
Since the first of four anti-Pinnacle Web sites went up in October, the women's horses have been let out, and the newspaper's main computer died mysteriously. Both incidents could have been coincidences, but dos Remedios and Cone are not taking any chances. They unplug the computers at night, and no longer let anyone work alone in the Pinnacle's shopping mall office.
Hollister police and the San Benito County sheriff say the Web sites, however offensive, are not criminal. "That threshold has not been crossed yet," said Sheriff Curtis Hill. "But I'm watching things. If I even have a sense there's a potential hate crime, I'll have my staff get all over that."
Cone and dos Remedios agree that they were not attacked because they are lesbians -- but the Web sites and a front-page story the Pinnacle ran about its lawsuit exposed their orientation to many readers and advertisers. "We were attacked by someone who didn't like our politics, our success at making (growth) an issue. They didn't know how else to strike out," Cone said.
"But the whole underlying theme of the site is anti-gay," dos Remedios said. "The Web site says we are trying to turn this place into Sodom and Gomorrah."
Valenzuela takes pride in a lifetime spent tweaking officialdom of all kinds, including, in the past, then-San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein -- when Valenzuela ran a bookstore in the Tenderloin -- and now in his Pinnacle column, "Thoughts While Not Shaving." He's used to death threats and crank calls. But the Web sites, he said, are the worst. Characteristic of the sites' juvenile humor, they reproduced his column photo, showing Valenzuela flashing his trademark peace sign, and digitally eliminated one finger. The false accusation, though, is why he joined the suit.
"I pride myself on being a good father. To me the No. 1 thing in this world is children. To be called a child molester -- I cannot think of anything that someone would call me that would upset me more," he said.
The Web sites went up at a time of high tension around growth issues in Hollister, where the pro-development tide of the 1990s has taken a sudden U-turn. In the past decade, the town's population almost doubled, to 30,000. Among the results: Traffic jams, an overwhelmed sewer system and the takeover of orchards and ridgetops by tract homes. The town's character was changing, becoming the bedroom for an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 people commuting from the county to Silicon Valley jobs.
When Cone and dos Remedios left their jobs at the San Jose Mercury News and bought the Pinnacle, they envisioned serving as a watchdog over community values. Cone had been a writer at various newspapers since 1979, and dos Remedios a news photographer for more than seven years. They began aggressive coverage of growth and other issues and instituted a first for the county -- an editorial page that stated their slow-growth views and held politicians to answer for their acts.
Lee Collins, former San Benito County chief administrative officer now in San Luis Obispo, said he thinks that the Pinnacle's coverage has reflected, not shaped, Hollister's growth debate -- but that those thwarted might not see it that way.
"I think the folks frustrated at what has been a tidal shift in that community against the kind of rampant growth they've experienced look to demonize someone," Collins said. "They know they've had it easy, plowing under orchards, throwing up tracts."
In October, there was furious debate over the 677-home West Fairview development proposed for the burgeoning southeast side. Two high-voltage City Council votes backed the big project, but the council might have lost the war. The three pro-growth council members whose terms expired this fall did not even run for re-election. The council seated last week is a slow-growth majority, and West Fairview is being challenged by referendum.
It's no secret that people think the Web sites were the work of one or more of the players in the drama, although no one wants to say who. Among about a dozen city officials interviewed, all but one said that while they might or might not agree with the Pinnacle's editorial stance, they found its coverage fair and the Web site attack cruel.
Even Mayor Peggy Corrales, a council pro-growth advocate who has come under Pinnacle fire, said she likes the paper and is all for free speech, but "when you start hurting people's feelings, when it's talking about things that aren't true . . . somewhere along the line, you have to draw a line."
The exception was eight-year City Councilman Joseph Felice, one of the three who left office last week, who said he believes that the sites were designed to implicate him. He expressed nothing but contempt for the Pinnacle and "their articles and their little opinion pages and their little whatever you want to call them, articles that are one-sided and not objective." He said the newspaper and Valenzuela have "been slamming me week after week, and it's not just me." He accused the paper of running phony letters to the editor that criticize him and back slow growth.
"I looked them up in the phone book and on the tax rolls" and didn't find their names, he said. "They make them up."
Felice said the growth problem boils down to newcomers, including dos Remedios and Cone, who move in and try to slam the door behind them. Just a few preboom years ago, he said, the town was desperate for jobs and the public supported pro-business views. Felice, a fifth-generation Hollister resident, suggested that the Web site creator is probably one of his supporters and then pointed his own finger at another local man, also ridiculed on the Web sites, who has spoken out against development. Whoever it is might never be known.
Cone, dos Remedios and Valenzuela have turned to the courts to try to find out, but results are far from guaranteed. By tomorrow, Yahoo, which provided free space for the first Web sites, must respond to a subpoena seeking their creator's identity. The subpoena springs from the Pinnacle's lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose on Nov. 6. It names Cone, dos Remedios and Valenzuela as plaintiffs and asks more than $5 million in damages from unnamed John Does for being publicly shown in a false light, libel, copyright infringement (for using Valenzuela's Pinnacle photo) and civil rights violations.
Yahoo is not being sued. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Internet service providers cannot be sued for defamatory material posted in their systems. Yahoo took the Web site down promptly when asked, said Pinnacle attorneys Gary Clifford and Peter Spurzem, both of Hollister. Whether an Internet service provider must provide information about users who post defamatory material is being hashed out in the courts. A Florida court ruled in October that they must do so in a case involving anonymous chat room comments about a company CEO.
The American Civil Liberties Union has fought exposure of anonymous posters, citing the threat to free speech. Yahoo's policy is to provide the information after giving the user a chance to fight the subpoena, said company spokeswoman Shannon Stuba. But it might not know who put up the sites. Anyone can create Web pages there under any name. Electronic tracking is possible but costly, according to Clifford. After Yahoo took the Web site down, it popped up in increasingly offensive forms on two other free Web page sites, which have not yet been subpoenaed.
Cone and dos Remedios said the situation has cost them $7,000 in legal bills so far. "It's not fair that there's this one realm of the publishing world where you can say whatever you want about anything, and it doesn't have to be true and you're not accountable for it," Cone said. "We are accountable for every word we print."
Felice doesn't agree, saying Valenzuela, especially, has been able to say whatever he wants as simply his opinion. That is all the Web site author did, he said. "It's freedom of speech. It's no different than what's printed in the Pinnacle each week," Felice said.
However the case shakes out, it all comes back to one thing, said Carole Appling, head of the San Benito County Chamber of Commerce. "You know that book 'Who Moved My Cheese?'" she said. "Cheese is a metaphor for something that's always been the same and now it changes. "The girls are great. Do I embrace their political viewpoint? No, I don't, but I read their paper. "Anytime you have professionals out there doing what they are doing in the business they are doing it in, you are going to get someone who doesn't like their cheese moved."
To send your thoughts and well-wishes to Cone and dos Remedios email:tcone@pinnaclenews.com
(C) 2000 The San Francisco Chronicle. via Bell&Howell Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
lesbianation.com
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Week of 12-14-00
The lawsuit revisited
Because so many readers have expressed a sincere interest, I want to update you on The Pinnacle’s efforts to unmask the creator of the defamatory Web site attacking the credibility of this newspaper, columnist Bob Valenzuela and our calls for slow-growth while local governments deal with sewer and traffic problems and overall planning issues.
We are now, I believe, just a tedious legal maneuver away from learning the anonymous culprit’s identity. The lawsuit and the resulting subpoena against Yahoo have been costly and time consuming. Yahoo had 30 days to turn over the information we requested and took 20 of them.
What we got Monday from Yahoo was not a name, but an ISP number. I have learned a lot about the inner workings of the Internet during this process. ISP means "Internet Service Provider." Every time you log on to a network, that transaction is assigned a code number. Using information returned as a result of the subpoena, we know exactly what day and time the perpetrator signed on to post the defamatory sites and what provider he or she used. Those numbers should be linked to an on-line account.
Just knowing that isn’t enough. We are sailing into uncharted legal waters. The U.S. Supreme Court has said that Internet providers aren’t responsible for information posted on their sites, and Congress has declined to deter commerce by placing restrictions, so Yahoo has not offered information voluntarily. There are no appellate court rulings – yet – forcing an Internet Service Provider such as Yahoo to reveal the names of culprits like the one we are dealing with. But a court in Virginia did rule late last week that a doctor defamed anonymously was entitled to $675,000 in damages from the person posting information about him – after he sued to have the writer’s identity revealed.
We are now in the process of filing a subpoena against Internet access provider PacBell. We learned from the subpoenaed material that the author used a PacBell account, which means his or her address is something like JohnDoe@pacbell.net. When PacBell responds, we should know for sure who the culprit is, and our lawsuit will have a real name attached instead of "John Doe."
Meanwhile, just as I warned, media attention to our predicament has become overwhelming. A story in Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle was disseminated nationwide. I heard from friends in Texas, Washington and Florida that I haven’t seen in years.
The Associated Press picked up the story, and it ran Monday in many newspapers in California and across the nation. I heard from readers offering moral (and technical) support in San Jose, Ontario, San Diego, Camarillo, Fresno and Monterey. We were on local radio and television, and on a Chicago radio talk show. It’s been interesting sitting as the interviewee rather than the interviewer.
The story has all of the elements. A small town impacted by Silicon Valley. The powerful Internet, where laws are just now beginning to emerge. The First Amendment and, of course, the fact that the site was blatantly anti-gay. Content of the sites indicated the author was someone with at least an emotional stake in continued rapid growth in Hollister, so when the culprit is revealed more intense coverage conceivably could follow.
As I promised when we first wrote about the lawsuit, I have told reporters that this is a great community and that this hateful Web site, in my experience, is not indicative of how people treat each other here. Well, not only reporters. I also was quizzed this week by a person thinking about bringing a business to Hollister, but was hesitating because the articles made it seem this is a blatantly anti-gay town, which his company – and many progressive high-tech corporations, by the way – would not abide. I told the businessman that I believe the Web site author is a mean-spirited aberration.
The sites showed that the person is unable to articulate his or her opposition to Pinnacle editorial stands through a simple letter to the editor (we print all that are original to us, signed, non-libelous and with a phone number we can call for verification), or even a rant on the phone, as so many others of you have managed. He or she instead resulted to the equivalent of a childish name-calling. The forum, however, was worldwide and the intent was to damage this newspaper, both in terms of credibility and, as a result, financially.
When we do find an answer, we will post the story immediately on our Web site at www.pinnaclenews.com. Of course the story will appear in the next edition of The Pinnacle.
We relish none of this. It has been a tremendous distraction to our mission, which is publishing San Benito County’s best newspaper. I apologize this week if you’ve tried to call our office and got a busy signal. The phones have not stopped ringing.
During the weeks that we have endured the attacks and the wait, we have worked hard to focus on this newspaper and our coverage of the community while not bending to the psychological pressures being exerted on us.
We have taken tremendous comfort in your kind words and letters. Thank you all. Pinnacle readers are The Best.
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