> Don't get mad, get E-venge!
> By LAURA TOPHAM - More by this author » Last updated at 23:25pm on 6th May
> 2008
> Comments
>
> Natalie Lue would be the first to agree that hell hath no fury like a woman
> scorned.
>
> When she discovered that her fiancé Tom had been sleeping with other women
> behind her back - one of her friends caught him on a date with someone
> else - the rage she felt wouldn't go away.
>
> "I felt a terrible anger, which began eating away at me, bubbling away in my
> mind," is how she describes it.
>
> In the past, Natalie might have taken revenge by cutting up her faithless
> fiancé's clothes, or perhaps even trashing his beloved car.
>
> Scroll down for more...
>
> Thanks to the internet, though, a far more lethal form of vengeance is now
> at hand.
>
> Natalie, like a growing number of other betrayed and deceived women, decided
> to take her revenge online.
>
> "I woke up at 5am and felt an overwhelming urge to vent my anger," says the
> 30-year-old sales consultant from Surrey.
>
> "So I logged onto my computer and set up a blog."
>
> On it, she began to pour out the details of her troubled relationship.
>
> "It only took ten minutes - but it felt incredibly empowering," she says.
>
> When 25-year-old Poppy Harris discovered her boyfriend was looking for other
> women on an internet dating website, her tears didn't last for long.
>
> A few clicks of the mouse here and a spot of typing there and the
> advertising executive from Walton-on-Thames had transformed the man in
> question from a good-looking, affluent sports coach searching for a pretty
> young woman to date into an unemployed layabout seeking an older woman in
> her 50s or 60s.
>
> "It was the easiest thing in the world to hack into the website and change
> all his details," she says, laughing at the memory.
>
> "I would have loved to have seen his face when the e-mails started
> arriving."
>
> The devastating power of the internet as a tool of revenge was revealed in
> January by actress Jane Slavin who took 'e-venge' on her lover, world-famous
> composer Michael Nyman, after he spurned her with no explanation.
>
> Scroll down for more...
>
> Internet revenge: Actress Jane Slavin took 'e-venge' on her lover,
> world-famous composer Michael Nyman, after he spurned her with no
> explanation
>
> Posing as a beautiful woman called 'Lucia', she began a flirtatious online
> relationship with Nyman, who began bombarding 'Lucia' with explicit e-mails.
>
> The crowning moment of her revenge came when 'Lucia' agreed to meet Nyman in
> a café in North London. At the appointed time, it was Jane, of course, who
> walked in.
>
> To compound the humiliation of the man who wrote the haunting film score for
> The Piano, Slavin wrote an online diary drawing attention to Nyman's
> physical failings.
>
> A quick surf around the web makes it clear that such acts of vengeance are
> becoming increasingly common. Mugshots of hapless-looking men, stamped with
> captions such as 'Here's the beast!' or, more simply, 'Beware!', are flagged
> up online for all the world to see.
>
> In the U.S., there are countless websites and blogs dedicated to wronged
> women and the men who have hurt them - and the UK is fast following. Boiling
> bunnies is a thing of the past: revenge, it seems, is a dish best served up
> on a web page.
>
> For the women, online vengeance serves as both catharsis and punishment. It
> is also possibly the most public way of dragging down an ex-lover - the
> modern-day equivalent of putting him in the stocks and pelting him with
> rotten tomatoes.
>
> "It felt great to release the pent-up frustration," says Natalie Lue, who
> was engaged to Tom for five years, but discovered his infidelity only after
> ending their relationship.
>
> "It also felt great knowing so many people were being entertained by his
> terrible behaviour."
>
> "People started sending me e-mails saying they related to my frustrations.
>
> "This spurred me on and I started detailing everything that had happened
> with my ex. I felt I was settling scores, and it made me laugh that I was
> exposing personal details about him to thousands of people.
>
> "I told it exactly how it was. How he'd treated me like I was beneath him;
> how he'd been seeing another woman before we broke up; how he wasn't even
> nice the night he proposed.
>
> "And because we'd met through colleagues and shared mutual friends, lots of
> people knew exactly who I was writing about."
>
> But if the net has made it easier to give the nation's cheaters and liars
> their come-uppance, it's impossible not to question whether it is taking
> over all aspects of our love lives.
>
> Once, it was thought it was only teenagers who spent hours online playing
> out their stormy pubescent relationships.
>
> Now it is clear that millions of grown women also use the internet to find
> love via dating websites such as
match.com and social websites such as
> Facebook and MySpace.
>
> And when it all goes wrong, these same women are returning to their
> computers to bury their lovers.
>
> Take divorcée Laura Milnes, for example. The 44-year-old office worker found
> Chris - a former boyfriend from her 20s - through the website Friends
> Reunited.
>
> She discovered his infidelity by hacking into his e-mails - and took revenge
> by humiliating him online.
>
> "Instant therapy", she calls it.
>
> The irony is, of course, that it is the internet itself that has made
> infidelity easier.
>
> Laura, from Maltby in South Yorkshire, freely admits that she knew company
> executive Chris was married when she contacted him via Friends Reunited five
> years ago. The couple had dated for a year when she was 20.
>
> Twenty years later, divorced and with two teenage children, she turned to
> the internet for company.
>
> As Laura puts it: "I found myself curiously searching for Chris online.' And
> when she saw his profile, she e-mailed him.
>
> "He replied instantly and my stomach lurched. Even though 20 years had
> passed, I couldn't help but feel excited to hear what he was up to. Soon we
> were emailing each other all the time."
>
> Despite the fact that he was married, Laura insists: "It seemed innocent.
> When he phoned a few weeks later, we were like two old friends chatting
> away.
>
> "Not long after, he texted saying there was a surprise outside my house.
>
> "I was really shocked when Chris himself drove up. We just sat in his car
> talking. He looked exactly the same as I remembered, aside from a few extra
> lines on his face."
>
> One thing led to another and the pair embarked on an affair.
>
> "Even though I knew it was wrong, and really hurtful to his wife, I couldn't
> help it," she says. "I was bowled over."
>
> At first it was just occasional weekends when they saw each other. Then
> Chris would invite her to Austria, where he worked during the week, for
> short holidays.
>
> "We enjoyed eating out every night and listening to music," says Laura.
> "This all went on for about ten months.
>
> "All the while, Chris insisted that he and his wife no longer had sex and
> were more like friends, staying together for the sake of their kids.
>
> "Perhaps I was naive, but I chose to believe him.
>
> "Despite his marriage, we were like a normal couple. He said he loved me and
> that he had never been unfaithful before."
>
> But then Laura found she was pregnant.
>
> "Chris said he was about to tell his wife about our affair when I
> miscarried," she says.
>
> Not long after, Chris's visits began to tail off.
>
> "I called his wife, saying I wanted to speak to her about Chris," says
> Laura.
>
> "She didn't sound surprised. She asked me to go round to their house and
> tell her everything."
>
> After talking for several hours, the two women decided to look on his
> computer.
>
> "We found he was registered on internet dating sites and had been messaging
> women across the country," she says.
>
> "I realised then that I'd been fed a pack of lies. His wife even revealed
> they'd been having a normal sexual relationship. I felt sick and betrayed."
>
> Back home, she logged onto her lover's secret Hotmail account using the home
> computer password his wife had used. It worked.
>
> "I discovered even more slushy emails to other women," she says.
>
> "Each one I read made me more angry. There were lots between him and a lady
> in Scotland, and I learned he'd been on holiday with her. He'd told her he
> loved her, too."
>
> Laura copied the most intense, personal message he'd sent her and pasted it
> into an e-mail which she sent to everyone in his address book.
>
> "I wanted everyone to know what he'd been up to. I got a huge rush of
> adrenaline as I hit 'Send'."
>
> Soon, replies were flying in from all over the world, saying things like:
> "Good on you!"
>
> Before she knew it, Chris himself was on the phone.
>
> "He rang and said: 'What are you playing at? Are you trying to get me
> sacked?'
>
> "But the damage was already done. I'm so glad I sent that e-mail. It felt
> absolutely brilliant.
>
> "Women can't fight physically so need other means of attack. As long as it
> does not cause long-term damage, I think it's harmless.
>
> "Ultimately, Chris kept his wife and his job, while I released all my
> frustration and anger. E-venge is like instant therapy."
>
> But having humiliated a lover online, at what point should a woman call it a
> day? For how long must a badly-behaved lover be punished?
>
> One problem is that blogs posted in anger are hard to get rid of once they
> have whizzed off into cyberspace.
>
> As yet, there have been no legal challenges to such websites in the UK, but
> in New York a man sued his ex-wife over podcasts at her website on the
> grounds that they included statements that were "obnoxious, derogatory or
> offensive" and violated terms of their divorce settlement.
>
> The court found in favour of the woman's right to free speech.
>
> British blogger Natalie Lue insists: "I did write incredibly intimate
> details about my ex, but they're my experiences, so I'm entitled to.
>
> "Sometimes it feels strange that our relationship was read about by
> thousands of people, but there's never been any comeback."
>
> But once Natalie had finished pouring scorn on her ex-fiancÈ Tom, she found
> herself reluctant to give up her blog.
>
> "When I started having dates again, I'd write about any bad behaviour I
> encountered. None of my boyfriends knew I was writing about them on the
> internet, which I found very funny.
>
> "I have a new partner now, but I'd never write about him because we have a
> daughter together. He makes a point of not reading my blog - he'd prefer to
> find out things directly."
>
> Natalie, Laura and Poppy also argue that their cyber words have brought
> comfort to other women.
>
> "My outpourings seemed to connect with other women," says Natalie.
>
> "I realised it was helping them with their relationships, so I set up
> another site. Together, my blogs get 130,000 users every month.
>
> "It's empowering - both for me and for readers who learn through my
> relationships."
>
> But it's hard not to wonder where this cyber bitching will end.
>
> It could be argued, too, that these women would do better simply to get over
> their broken hearts and move on rather than washing their dirty linen in
> public.
>
> Poppy insists that she has finally done that.
>
> "I realised I had to let go and move on with my life," she says - though not
> before she had sent him an e-mail as 'Busty Belinda', suggesting a time and
> place to meet and insisting that he must be carrying a dozen red roses.
>
> "I hope he felt a right chump standing under the clock at Euston Station
> waiting for 'Busty Belinda'," she says, laughing.
>
> "It may be sad - but boy was it satisfying."
>
> Whoever said that romance is dead may well be right.
>
> One thing is clear - any man who deceives a computer-literate woman is
> treading on decidedly deadly ground.
>
> . Some names have been changed for legal reasons.
