A Long History of Harassment

Middleboro selectman, family target of Web attacks

ENTERPRISE CORRESPONDENT

Posted Aug 22, 2007 @ 03:51 AM

A grim-faced selectman demanded that some casino foes stop taking shots at his family, including his 2-year-old daughter, and purge their site of blogs that sexualize children.

Reading to his board from a prepared statement Monday night, Selectman Adam M. Bond detailed comments posted on CasinoFacts.org that targeted him, his wife and daughter.

Bond said someone using the screen name Monkberrymoon suggested, “Middleboro's little girls generally, and my daughter specifically, be enrolled in a dance class to become strippers.”

“If people really want to aimlessly bash or condone the bashing of public officials and at the same time run for the place of those same public officials in the recall election, so be it. It takes all kinds. But the line gets drawn where those people attack innocents, where they attack my daughter, who has done nothing to them,” Bond said.

Bond said one posting suggested, “A soothing thought would be Adam Bond being attacked and eaten by wild dogs! No, by cannibals! Killer bees? Yeah, killer bees.” With his wife, Victoria, pacing the hall, Bond said he would shoulder the personal attacks, but was visibly angry as he looked up from his statement and slowly said, “Leave my daughter alone.”

Bond further qualified his remarks, saying the entire site isn't denigrating, but, “these things keep cropping up.”

He suggested the directors get their Web site “under wraps” because “anonymity breeds irresponsibility.”

He called on the board of directors to end the mudslinging and named them, Annemarie P. Jacobson, Gregory Stevens, James D. Reynolds, Paul Weston, Richard Young, Robert M. Desrosiers and Stephen D. Morris.

After the meeting, CasinoFacts Director James Reynolds, who was reached by telephone, said the blogs leveled at Bond's daughter were uncalled for.

“That's got to go,” Reynolds said. “It's far beyond anything acceptable or imaginable.”

Reynolds agreed the anonymous nature of blogs can lead to irresponsibility.

“I took my own blog site down, it was getting unruly,” he said.

Director Annemarie Jacobson plans to address the issue with her board members and said it was disturbing.

“If I had seen it, I would have asked to take it off,” she said.

Jacobson sympathized with Bond and said children should not be involved in casino politics. When pictures of her own children showed up on the CasinoFriends' Web site, “It disturbed me as well.

Cyber Bullies Continue to Harass Voters Who Oppose Their Views

LIMO OWNER HARASSED FOR CASINO SUPPORT

By Charles Winokoor, Staff Writer

GateHouse News Service

Posted May 04, 2008 @ 10:25 PM

RAYNHAM —

It can be a dirty business this thing called blogging.
Click on an Internet website, go to a blog that’s linked to it, and post anonymously to your heart’s desire — saying just about anything you want about anyone you choose without fear of legal ramifications.
Michael Quish, the owner of MSM Executive Luxury Vehicle Service, a limousine company with an office on Route 44 in Raynham, claims that he’s become a victim of cyber-bullying.
A small group of people, he said, have been using blogs as a means to damage his personal and professional reputation.
He said he’s been labeled a domestic batterer and that it’s been implied that he’s a pedophile. Someone else, he said, recently posted a message suggesting that his company was about to file bankruptcy.
All of those accusations, he said, are flat-out false.
Quish said his troubles with bloggers during the past half year or so can be attributed to his vocal and visible support of bringing casino gambling to Middleboro.
Quish last summer even went so far as to stand near the Middleboro rotary and hold up a sign urging others to join his cause.
And at a subsequent, federal hearing with representatives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs he described how some people driving by had directed racist comments at him.
“Is this payback for that?” he asked.
Quish said the pedophile reference developed from an online chat session on Middleborocasino.com — one of approximately 25 website domains he owns — when he was jousting with an anti-casino opponent.
At one point he became frustrated with an adversary who, he said, had been taking cheap shots at him under cover of anonymity.
He now admits the comment he typed in that led to the trouble could have been written more artfully. It read: “Nice welcome! Now knock the crap off with the multiple browsers and give me what I crave!”
Very quickly someone posting as “middleboro mom” suggested that Quish, who goes by the online moniker Mr. Limo, was “telling kids ... to come out and play.”
Then someone with the online handle King of Hearts claimed to be an 11-year-old who wanted to post comments. Quish said he recognized that a proxy server — a means of hiding or masking a user’s address — was in play, and so he immediately “booted him off.”
Within an hour of the initial posting, he said, his remark had been copied and pasted onto Middlebororeview.blogspot.com, a blog that Quish says is owned by a woman named Jesse Powell — an avid opponent of an Indian casino resort being built in Middleboro, and someone who had recently lost a bid for a Selectmen’s seat.
He also has a record of the same “middleboro mom” later in the day having written that “[T]his guy allowed my 11-year-old and a bunch of friends to post on his site” and that he “sent videos of children to someone” and should be “investigated by the authorities.”
Quish, himself a father of two young children, said that “someone grabbed a little statement [I made] and ran with it.”
He said when a blogger gets hold of a comment and misconstrues it, especially within the context of young children, it can quickly escalate “to a real dangerous point.”
Quish said he can’t prove it in a court of law but is convinced Ms. Powell was behind the postings and that she has been intent on damaging his reputation.
A call on Friday to a phone number listed as belonging to a J. Powell in Middleboro was not immediately returned.
Another blogger who goes by the name Gladys Kravitz, and is described on her site as “Middleboro’s Nosy Neighbor” (a reference to a gossipy character in the TV show “Bewitched”), less than three weeks ago, according to Quish, stated that he was going bankrupt.
That, he said, is potentially harmful considering that he’s heading into prom season and could lose limo jobs as a result.
Adding a bizarre twist of irony is that Richard Young, president of CasinoFacts — a Middleboro-based group of volunteers who oppose a casino coming into their town — accuses Quish of having called him a pedophile on Quish’s Middleboro Casino website.
Young said that when he asked Quish to remove the comment he did so. The moral of the story, he said, is that “if we have an issue we need to deal with it like adults.”
Quish, however, said he never posted anything of the sort and was completely taken out of context. He said his message on his website to Young was to stop already with all this talk of pedophilia.
Quish said he’s reported the cyber attacks — which he is quick to point out are the handiwork of a small minority of people who oppose his stance on casinos — to Raynham Police Chief Lou Pacheco.
He also said that he and a small group of concerned citizens recently held a meeting to discuss the potential for devising a bill, one that would hold people liable for making slanderous comments on Internet message boards and blogs.
And Quish said he’s voluntarily taken down all the message boards on his premier website, the one he hopes will one day benefit his business if and when a casino resort comes to Middleboro.
Now, he said, he would appreciate it if those in the other camp would do the same, to once and for all put an end to all of the electronic squabbling and mean-spirited name-calling.
“It’s just wrong and has to come to an end,” he said.
cwinokoor@tauntongazette.com