billpalmer.net

There's a depraved lunatic slandering me, and it's time for it to come to an end

The last thing anyone wants to read when they come to this website is the airing out of dirty laundry, so I promise I'll try and keep this short and sweet. But there's an issue here, and I'm afraid things have reached the point where I feel I need to say something publicly and set the record straight, so everyone who comes into contact with this issue knows exactly what they're dealing with here. I'm only going to address this issue this once, after which I will have nothing else to say about the matter going forward:

About twelve months ago, an individual named Philip Smith contacted me because he wanted to work for my company, LoadPod. Or, as he put it in an email he sent me on June 30th of 2004, "I have an interest in doing the loadpod service and offering it my store." Because LoadPod already had sufficient coverage in Mr. Smith's area code, I politely turned him down.

But he persisted, and his actions over the next few days were, well, a bit odd. First, on July 12th of 2004, he signed up on the LoadPod website pretending to be a customer, even though he wasn't. Then, on July 13th of 2004, he claimed that he knew two people who wanted to be customers, even though he didn't. He couldn't accept the fact that we simply didn't need any additional personnel in his area, and instead of having the patience to wait until we did, he decided to play games with us. At that point I'd seen enough out of Mr. Smith that I was quite relieved that I hadn't hired him. I mean, hey, what a goofball.

And that was the last I heard of him -- or so I thought. About three months ago, some character named "Adzoox" began surfacing on various parts of the web as what might best be described as some kind of stalker. First, he began posting lengthy rants about me on his own personal blog, and when that apparently didn't bring him enough attention, he began a habit of going to any website that posted any kind of a link to anything that I'd written for any of my websites, and proceeded to post a link in the comments section, begging people to come and read what he had to say about me. This rather odd practice of his was brought to my attention by various friends, and even readers, who were concerned that I appeared to have picked up a cyber-stalker.

So just what did this "Adzoox" character have to say about me? Well, a lot of rather creative name-calling, for one thing ("retarded delusional" was my favorite), and that's all well and good. Thank goodness we live in a country where you have the right to call someone a retarded delusional if you really want to. But I'm afraid that was merely this guy's warm-up act.

You see, in an alternate universe that apparently exists only within this guy's head, it turns out my life is quite a bit different that I thought it was. In Mr. Smith's imaginary universe, it turns out that none of the advertisers on any of my websites really exist, I have no income, and perhaps most interestingly, my company LoadPod has no customers and doesn't really exist. Furthermore, all those times I've read articles about LoadPod in the New York Times, or BusinessWeek, or watched news stories about LoadPod on television, none of that really happened. And the quotes about LoadPod from those news sources that are displayed on the LoadPod website? In Mr. Smith's imaginary world, it turns out I made them all up.

Needless to say, this was all a bit of a shock to me, but I actually found the whole idea rather humorous. I mean, here's this clown who has nothing better to do all day than to sit back and create this alternate life for me, in which none of the fortunate things that have happened to me over the past two years have really happened after all. I really got a laugh out of it. Just some harmless lunatic, right? Almost what you'd call a groupie. The price of an increased profile, I suppose. The best part of it all, I think, is how he would post stuff in the comments section of his own site, pretending to be me -- and then he (no longer pretending to be me) would criticize me for posting the comments! It takes a special kind of crazy to come up with stuff like that. Who was this guy, and what did I ever do to him? I didn't know.

But then he slipped up one day, and in one of his rants about me, he let slip the fact that he had once applied for a position at LoadPod. I checked my records and, sure enough, this "Adzoox" is none other than Philip Smith, the same Mr. Smith who had unsuccessfully attempted to become an employee of mine a year earlier. So at least now I understood his motivation. The only thing worse than a disgrunted former employee, is a disgruntled former employee who never managed to get a job with you in the first place. But still, he was just a harmless lunatic, right?

Even when Mr. Smith began sending harassing emails in my direction last month, I still knew better than to take the bait. He was hoping beyond hope that he'd get some kind of response out of me, and was probably lying awake at night wondering just what he had to do to get me to finally respond and give him the kind of attention that he's apparently so desperate for. But he was, simply put, a cockroach not worth getting my shoe dirty over.

This week, however, I got word from one of my advertisers, letting me know that Mr. Smith had contacted him and told him the same bizarre lies about me that he's been posting on his personal blog all this time. He also attempted to get my advertiser to stop advertising on my website, and even threatened to launch a smear campaign against my advertiser's company if he kept advertising on my site.

Kind of changes the whole equation, now doesn't it? No more just a harmless lunatic sitting in his little corner of the web and making stuff up about me, Mr. Smith has now decided to launch an all-out invasion on my entire existence, it would seem. What next? Will he call my mother and tell her about the time I turned in my term paper late back in the eleventh grade? Sorry pal, she already knows about it.

Right now I'm contemplating my next step, and I'm not entirely sure whether that's going to be hiring a lawyer and getting an injunction against Mr. Smith, or just calling his local police department and filing criminal charges. Frankly, I've never had to deal with an individual quite so depraved as this guy, so this is something of a new stretch of territory for me. What I can tell you is that after today, I never intend to speak publicly of this matter again, because I simply won't allow my audience (on any of my websites) to become bored to death with this kind of nonsense. But because this lunatic has so thoroughly crossed the line, and appears to have no limitations whatsoever as far as his plans to keep coming after me with increasingly bizarre and disturbing behavior, I did want to get this all out in the open so that, going forward, everyone knows exactly what they're dealing with here. I will only say the following once:

Every single word that has ever been written about me by Philip Smith is an out-and-out lie. Every word Philip Smith will ever write about me in the future will also likely be an out-and-out lie. He's nothing more than a disgruntled and very disturbed individual who is attempting to extract some measure of revenge on me for the fact that I didn't hire him when he applied for a job with my company last year.

And that's all I will ever have to say on the matter.

Hunting season on me is over.

Now, let's get back to business, shall we?