I think the only options remaining are to start reporting him to the police. It's easy to dismiss complaints received online from strangers and believe her precious son isn't capable of making death threats and threats of sexual violence but if she starts getting visits from the police and/or FBI it might wake her up from her own naiveté. I can understand her being upset about receiving an email about her son from someone she doesn't know but if she really believes that Grawp is someone else who is just poking fun at her son then she's got her head in the sand and won't be convinced by any evidence we can present her with no matter how compelling. So I think it's at the stage where we decide we're going to just accept it or we take it to the next level and involve law enforcement.
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 10:04 PM, Fran Rogers fran@nutmeg.ws wrote:
You all may remember [[User:JarlaxleArtemis]], who has been "editing" the English Wikipedia since 2004, at age 15. Originally he was an apparently good-faith editor, but was sanctioned by ArbCom in early 2005 for somewhat immature outbursts, copyright violations, and erratic behavior; eventually he pulled such stunts as putting his teacher's e-mail address on his userpage encouraging people to harass the "fucking bitch," e-mail bombing people who deleted his copyvios, and finally impersonating users and vandalizing with what would come to be hundreds of sockpuppets, all while claiming to be the victim. He was banned:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/JarlaxleArte mis_2http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/JarlaxleArtemis_2
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Linuxbeak/Admin_stuff/Jarlaxl eArtemis < http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Linuxbeak/Admin_stuff/Jarlax leArtemis&action=edit&oldid=117471376http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Linuxbeak/Admin_stuff/JarlaxleArtemis&action=edit&oldid=117471376> &action=edit&oldid=117471376
He sockpuppeted and vandalized for a while after that, but apparently disappeared in 2006. One would have hoped maybe he grew out of his teenage phase and decided to get on with doing something productive instead.
But sadly, the story doesn't end there. In mid-2007, he reappeared with a new "persona"... the move-vandal "Grawp." Unlike his ostensible predecessor Willy on Wheels, who at least had a harmless light-hearted flair to him, as "Grawp" Jarlaxle relished in specifically targeting users and sticking their personal information (usually gleaned from Daniel Brandt's website) in his page-move titles along with death threats and rape threats. Eventually we discovered that Grawp was in fact JarlaxleArtemis, and he only got more persistent and venomous (probably because as Jarlaxle, he was very open about his real-life identity and location himself.)
About a week ago, having been one of Jarlaxle's recent targets, I decided to take matters into my own hand, and found his mother's contact information and wrote to her to inform her of the awful misdeeds her son's been up to. (While Jarlaxle is 19, he lives with his mother, and performs most of his vandalism from her Internet connection.) Instead of replying to me, however, she complained to OTRS that I was falsely accusing her son, who she insisted was JarlaxleArtemis but not Grawp. Jarlaxle then proceeded to prove her wrong... by vandalizing multiple wikis as "Grawp" later that night from the same IP address his mother sent her e-mail from. The ticket was handed to ArbCom, who replied to her with this evidence and the assurance that her son was in fact the one responsible... but received a response that she didn't believe them, didn't care, and was blocking all further e-mail from Wikimedia. (Though it's been suggested that Jarlaxle himself may have written that mail.) And he's continued to vandalize as recently as tonight.
Personally, I'm utterly bamboozled. This kid is nineteen years old and in college; he's an adult, and he has his entire life ahead of him. Yet he still continues to anonymously threaten and harass people on the Internet, even though he's clearly stepped into illegal territory, his identity is known along with reams of evidence of his misdeeds connecting them to him, and his parent upon whom he's still dependent has been alerted. And he still soldiers on, using Mom's broadband to move pages on Wikipedia to titles "I will rape and murder (insert admin here)." What could possibly be running through his mind? And how can he be stopped?
-Fran
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