The Developing Case

It's awe-inspiring to be on the lawful end of investigating unlawful conduct such as that of the Internet abuser, defamer, troll, and the like. The major miscalculation that the Internet abuser and defamer makes is that he can get away with his misconduct (1) because he's virtual, a puff of electrons; (2) that he's far out of the reach of his victims or presumably anonymous (never so! there are ways of finding anyone); (3) that his victims will run out of steam after exhausting their emotional response to the scandals and defamations launched by the abuser and defamer; (4) that no one will care to follow him and prosecute him.

Well, using our illustrative examples of Mr Richard Benham and Mr Scott Horne (as well as Joan Ross and her collaborators, including Mr Horne), we've shown and are continuing to prove all of those baseless presumptions to be deadly false.

If the reader peruses our previous postings it will become elegantly obvious that Mr Benham, Mr Horne and Ms Ross have painted themselves into a legal corner and have nowhere to go.

Benham says he is in Annemasse, France, just across the French-Swiss frontier and a short drive from Geneva, where Benham says he is engaged in post-graduate studies. Well, we have responses from the French and the Swiss authorities that they are looking into our request to locate Mr Benham and it's not to award him a post-graduate degree. That's for certain.

Benham has been found to have engaged in a veritable criminal's rap sheet of illicit and illegal misconduct ranging from forging his Yahoo! e-mail address to fraudulently obtaining personal information. He's been banned from ISPs and his webpages deleted. He has been investigated for copyright violation and has had to remove material as a result.

No matter what Benham has to say about anyone else, he has a pretty nasty mess of his own to clean up and he'd better get started by removing his scandalous blogs and web postings. NOW!

As for Mr Horne, he's an easier fish to fry and fry he will! Not only has he involved himself both civilly and criminally with Benahm and Ross, he has intentionally and voluntarily involved himself in a very sticky mess of defamation, conspiracy, collusion, harassment, just to name a few of the counts against him. But instead of taking steps to protect his interests, the poor fool just plods on and on and on getting more lost by the minute. Go figure!

Now what will Joan Ross do when Horne and Benham are deposed and implicate her in feeding them their local items used in their posts...or do they have another source? Stay tuned because we WILL find out ...

Mr Scott Waldmann's Times Union (Albany, New York) editor is not going to be all too pleased, either, when he's served with a summons and complaint in a libel lawsuit.

The best thing for both Benham and Horne to do is to wipe away every scrap of scandal and potential defamation from anywhere on the Internet and to ensure that all of the Google caches are purged of the material as well. And they'd better hope, albeit in vain, that their victims have not preserved the material for use in prosecution proceedings at law. Lawsuits get expensive and costs and sanctions are awarded only if it can be shown that the prosecution is frivolous; judging from Benham's and Horne's postings they will be hard put to convince any court that any prosecution is frivolous.