MySpace suicide leads to ‘travesty’ trial

Megan Meier and Lori Drew's daughter were best of friends. Then, as teenage girls do, they had a row and drifted apart - and 13-year-old Megan (pictured above with Lori Drew), it's claimed, started spreading malicious rumours about Drew's daughter around the Missouri town they lived in. The Drews decided to get their own back, online. The 'cyberbullying' that then took place led, it's alleged, to Megan's suicide, and to a federal prosecution in Los Angeles that's the first of its kind. Certainly, the case is seen as a landmark in internet law - and one that's led to outrage in some legal circles.

Forty-nine-year-old Lori Drew allegedly cobbled together a spurious MySpace profile and masqueraded online as 16-year-old 'Josh Evans', a new kid in town who became the online suitor of Megan. After 'Josh Evans' told Megan that the world would be a better place without her in it, the distraught teen hanged herself later the same day in her bedroom cupboard.

Megan, however, is not the alleged victim of the crimes of which Drew was indicted in May. And Los Angeles, where jury selection in Drew's trial began yesterday, is 1,800 miles from Dardenne Prairie, the St Louis suburb where she lives. But MySpace is based in Beverly Hills, and federal prosecutors say the social networking website was the victim of her violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a law normally used to prosecute computer hackers which has never been applied before to cyber-bullying. "This adult woman allegedly used the internet to target a teenage girl with horrendous ramifications," Thomas O'Brien, the US attorney in Los Angeles, said when the indictment was announced.

Drew's lawyers and others have attacked the case as egregious prosecutorial excess. "The government, in its zeal to charge Lori Drew with something, anything, has tried to criminalize everyday, ordinary conduct," the defence said in one brief. But the trial