I want to tell you a story from my own life so you understand why I know that Lori Drew is a sociopath who will step all over others to protect herself. Even though she is protecting her daughter right now, rest assured that her daughter would be treated the same way she’s treated Megan Meier if Lori were threatened by her daughter’s actions.
When I was a junior in high school and my brother was still in elementary school, my father began a public affair with a woman with many ties back to our family. Her husband worked in the same office as my mother in a management capacity and she was the president of the PTA at my brother’s school. Her daughter was a year older than me, her son was a year younger than my brother, and they lived about two miles away. Even though we lived in a decent-sized suburb of LA, it was a place with a small-town mentality in the 70’s. Everyone knew everybody else, and my father’s affair wasn’t much of a secret; in fact, it was no secret at all.
This woman decided she wanted my father. He’d had affairs before but was perfectly happy having affairs and staying married. My mother wasn’t thrilled with it but it wasn’t yet the time where women felt empowered (and she was a career woman, too) to end their marriages and strike out on their own, particularly when they had a couple of kids to worry about. So she suffered. Until The Witch. The Witch would stop at nothing to make our family so miserable that my mother would want to divorce my dad.
The Woman was not afraid of the telephone, and she used it quite often to call and make threats, ordering us to leave so my father would be free, yelling that the world would have been better if we’d never been born, if my mother would just off herself, or if she wouldn’t, maybe The Witch would hurry it along. Death threats from hysterical women were not taken seriously by law enforcement back then, but she didn’t stop with that. The next trick was to call on my parents’ 16th wedding anniversary in absolute hysterics with maximum drama, claiming that if my mother didn’t leave my father THAT NIGHT, she’d commit suicide. My mom was left at home after that call while my father rushed off to prevent her from offing herself.
My father had a job where he would work for a 72-hour straight shift and then be home for 4 days. During those times that he was working, The Witch would call at all hours of the night, hysterical and drunk, escalating the threats toward me, my brother and my mother. She started rumors at my school that I was a two-dollar hooker (I was such a goody-goody in high school that it was silly. That rumor HURT.) She got pregnant and had a kid by my father while still married to her husband and he still married to my mom. The people in the PTA gave her a baby shower. The office folks at my high school gave her baby gifts, which she made sure to receive and flaunt right in front of me, telling everyone that Karoli had a bastard brother. It felt like a slap at me even though it should have been a slap at her, don’t you think?
It wasn’t, because she was the darling of the town. She was the cool mom, the one who let her daughter have parties, who name-dropped and knew everyone who was anyone. She talked pretty out of one side of her mouth while talking shit out of the other and spewing it in the direction of anyone she hated. She was the one who everyone thought was awesome because she was ‘best friends’ with her daughter and her daughter’s friends. Yeah, that kind.
My father wouldn’t believe any of it. He kept saying we were lying, exaggerating, trying to make him feel guilty. In desperation, I finally started documenting her behavior, especially the phone calls, which I taped on a handheld cassette recorder from a muted extension. Armed with the proof, I asked him to hear me out with her in the room and really listen to what I was saying. He agreed, provided that I would come up to her house and confront her at the same time I showed him everything.
Stupid me, I agreed. And it was a setup. If I had it to do again, we would have met in a neutral spot. But I trusted him and trusted that he’d listen to me, because usually he would. Only by this time he was so smitten with her that there was no one who could get through, and she was only concerned with her interests and distorting the facts to paint herself as a victim while victimizing everyone around her. So I walked up to her front door, rang the doorbell, and as I did, two uniformed policemen stepped out from behind the entryway and escorted me off the property while my father and The Witch watched from the window. After they handcuffed me and made me stand in front of the house for 15 or so minutes “to teach me a lesson”, they removed the handcuffs and “let me go this time”, provided that if I set foot on her property again, I would be charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace. They condescendingly explained that the only reason they weren’t arresting me then was because The Witch had asked them to ‘go easy on me’ this time, but they were aware of all of the trouble I had made for her. In one fell swoop, she sent a powerful message — she had control and I damn well better not step out of line again. I didn’t. It took me a very long time to forgive her for her sick games and she is never, ever to be trusted again.
In my seventeen-year-old hurt and confused mind, I understood that The Witch would stop at nothing to: a) separate him from his family; and b) protect her own reputation and self-interest no matter what it cost anyone else, because no one else mattered. Only her. Only what she wanted.
She knew I hadn’t done anything to her. She knew what she was doing to us. She had the friends in the right places (she’d been a private investigator once) to make sure that she turned everything around on me. Humiliation was her stock in trade and she used it like a whip to hold me in line.
They are still together. They deserve each other. She got what she wanted, because I also understood that my own survival depended upon me severing all ties with him as long as he was with her. They are both sick, but my victory is that I’m not, and my family is protected from her nasty, ugly, sick, perverted lying, manipulative ways.
Now you understand my bias, and keep it in mind as I talk about Lori Drew and why I believe the post on the “MeganHadItComing” blog is legitimately hers, and why I believe it reveals the depth of her need to paint herself as the victim by taking her indefensible acts and turning them back on the real victims.
Tactic #1: Make yourself the victim of the same scheme you used to victimize, or…repay evil with evil.
The first inkling that Lori Drew is in full-tilt self-justification mode comes when she talks about the events leading up to Megan’s first banning from MySpace by her parents. Megan was not conducting herself in an above-board fashion the first time around — she was pulling middle school stuff, and she made a fake profile to use against another classmate on MySpace. After her parents discovered it and took her access to MySpace away, Lori claims that Megan orchestrated a MySpace attack on her daughter through friends, since Megan no longer had her own access.
All of this may be true. It would support the fact that Megan had lost access and only recently had it returned at the time of the Josh incident. It could also support the issues that led the Meiers to have her switch to a different school. I said before and I’ll say again, that drama abounds among 13-year old girls, and meanness is part of that equation. It happens face-to-face and it happens in cyberspace. It’s an age old thing. More evidence of that? The success of the Can I Sit With You? project, created for adults to share their own stories of middle school angst and how they coped in the hopes of helping kids in the middle of it get some perspective on their own situations. Being 13 can suck, especially if you have social, weight, and depression issues. So I believe it’s entirely possible that Megan Meier did everything Lori Drew describes, up to this point.
It’s the progression that bothers me. As Drew goes on to tell the story, more of the true feelings start to bubble up in the language she uses. She begins by paying lip service to Megan’s ‘condition’, but then look at the words she uses to describe her:
Now I had nothing but sympathy for Megan’s condition. But my sympathy has limits. When you come after my daughter and try to hurt her like that, my patience wears out. This troubled child was no longer able to poison my baby in person, so she decided to reach out on the Internet to do it instead. Like any parent, when you see the ill-behaved child next door causing trouble for your family, you want to wring the neck of the parents who let it happen. But, as Megan’s parents made it clear earlier, they were not about to come down on their precious Megan. I had no recourse with them. And, forbidding the children from seeing each other was not effective because Megan could simply harass my daughter online.
Then, my daughter heard that Megan was lobbying her parents to get her MySpace back. I was instantly terrified. That little monster was a tremendous poison for my daughter as-is.
Permit me to paraphrase in real language: That bitch attacked my precious, and I want to beat the shit out of her in person. Or her parents. But since that wasn’t an option, I came up with a plan…
The Plan, as she outlines it is interesting. She says this:
We didn’t totally know what we were doing with the Josh Evans persona, or where it would lead, so I kept it quiet. We did our best to shmooze Megan into opening up. I complimented her pictures and said how great she was. I very gently asked her about her school life and her friends hoping that if she was planning any attack on my daughter that we would be one step ahead of her and could take this evidence to her parents, show them what their daughter is up to so they would finally take action.
Okay. So then it gets hotter and heavier. Lori claims that talk of being ‘in love’ and having ‘makeout sessions’ was purely Megan’s invention. I’m at a loss to imagine conversations where it was all Megan with absolutely no Josh encouragement…if you can, please show me. But really, that’s a red herring. The next genuine red flag is here:
I had “Josh” friend other people that Megan knew all the while so that if anyone else knew of anything that was going to happen, we’d have that much more chance of staying ahead of the game. One of the girls we friended even figured out that the profile was fake. We let her in on it, and asked what she wanted. Turns out, she wasn’t friendly with Megan, either, so she wanted to help. I gave her access to the account.
This is the first real indicator of motives that are really about ‘payback’ rather than ‘monitoring’, because why on earth would you give the login information to someone who is admittedly no friend of Megan Meier and what on earth was she ‘helping’ with under those circumstances?
That’s when I decided I would have to teach Megan a lesson and give her a taste of her own medicine.
Oops, she just forgot that she’s the adult. Lori Drew just turned 13 again and was going to pay back the mean girls. Here’s where it gets disturbing. Again, just quoting the key phrases here:
Megan’s feelings be damned, and to hell with her consequence!
Megan was screaming at Josh for answers on who he had been talking to: she wanted to know who ratted her out so she could take out revenge on them, too. I shared Megan’s messages with everyone involved and encouraged everyone to stand up against her and not take her crap anymore.
I expected a certain amount of bullying, and I was OK with it. I wanted Megan to get a taste of what she had been dishing out this whole time.
And here is where The Witch hides. In the 13-year old Lori Drew, who is so outraged, so incensed, so INVOLVED in her daughter’s life that she is not allowing her 13-year old to fight her own battles (or turning off her access to MySpace), but has now transmogrified into a 13-year old herself who is hell-bent on revenge and payback. She’s gonna show that little bitch what happens when you mess with Lori Drew or Lori’s daughter.
Megan had been punished enough, and I was satisfied that she would think twice before bullying or manipulating anyone again. I don’t know who wrote that “better off without you” message.
I don’t believe her.
Then comes the self-justification:
Their lives were destroyed. What good would it do to inform them that their daughter’s MySpace boyfriend was a fake?
They wouldn’t believe that their daughter was a MySpace bully and a real life manipulator when she was alive, so why add to their grief now?
(or put another way, they don’t see that it’s all their fault that this happened anyway, so why should I admit to anything?)
The final blow: I’m okay; you’re not
Instantly I knew we were dealing with unbalanced people. Aggravated by their child’s death and their own culture of anxiety, I very much feared for my family.
Um…WHO has the culture of anxiety? Go back to the start and read the “poison” comments one more time, Lori.
The icing: I’m right, you’re not, you’re all picking on me…
The final word from authorities has come down that there will be no charges, so I don’t have to remain silent. There’s no point in hiding anymore. The internet has made it clear that mob revenge must prevail, even if there’s no justice in it. So be it.
And there you have it. Not one single line of regret in the entire post for the role Fake Josh played in Megan’s suicide. Not one single line of regret for stepping out of the adult role and behaving like a child. Not one single admission of the manipulative, ugly, backhanded treatment of the Meier family. Only justification and more piled on until finally, the victim becomes the victimizer and the victimizer becomes the victim, making the circle complete.
Danah Boyd writes:
Deceiving children is problematic to begin with, but doing so by tapping into their emotional weaknesses is outright deadly. At a gut level, Lori knew that she could capture Megan’s attention by creating a male character that showed interest. In other words, Lori knew how to manipulate Megan’s attention and emotions. She capitalized on that knowledge, self-justifying it as responsible parenting.
Read her whole post — she’s got a great take on it.
Sick. Ugly. Dangerous. Behavior.
If Lori Drew were interested in protecting her daughter from any attacks, she would have shut down her MySpace account, just as Shelley suggests the Meiers should have done. After all, the girls went to different schools and without online contact, they would move on. If Lori Drew really understood that she crossed a line — a very big line — when she decided that the ‘consequence be damned’, she would have posted the story and at the end, owned her contribution to this tragic end. Instead she cries “unfair! Foul!” and turns it all back on a dead 13-year old girl.
I worry for her daughter. Truly. It’s just a matter of time before she crosses that line again, and she just might take her own daughter down in the process, or teach her to be as manipulative and self-deceptive as she is.
Her parting shot: Here I am, internet. Come get me.
You did a good job of that all by yourself, Lori Drew. I have no desire to ‘teach you a lesson’. You wouldn’t learn it anyway. You can’t. So you join my “Witches Hall of Fame”, next to The Witch herself. You have a great life.
Note: I have no evidence beyond my gut that the person behind the “meganhaditcoming” blog is Lori Drew, beyond my gut and accepting the “confession post” at face value. It’s possible that it’s an invention. However, the dialogue and conversation (ignoring the real trolls) is worth reading, if for no other reason than to understand and identify toxic parents if you should run across one like this.
Technorati Tags: Megan Meier, Lori Drew, suicide, MySpace, cyberbullying, bullying, middle school, parenting, toxic parenting
