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Internet attacks bring man charges, suit, suspension Former company sues for statements uttered on the Net Sunday, November 08, 1998 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
As soon as Peter Krum joined an Internet give-and-take on corporate finance, it should have been clear he hadn't come bearing dry, button-down analyses of price-earnings ratios.
His screen name was "I Am Dirk Diggler," a reference to a porn star character in the 1997 mainstream movie "Boogie Nights."
His real name, he wrote in a user profile, was "Buck Naked."
And between July and last month, the State College-area man posted messages suggesting that the health-care giant he once worked for was starting to collapse, that its managers lacked ethics, that its chairman was bilking Medicare and that he was having sex with the chairman's wife.
Krum's messages got a reply.
The company, HealthSouth Corp., an Alabama-based business with hospitals and physical therapy centers across Western Pennsylvania, brought suit last week in Centre County Common Pleas Court, charging Krum fashioned lies into Internet messages that libeled the company, its chairman and the chairman's wife.
Penn State University, which employed Krum as food and beverage manager at its two hotels, has put him on unpaid leave while it investigates whether he was posting the messages from a university computer on university time.
Penn State police are planning to charge Krum with harassment, said Ron Schreffler, a detective with University Police Services.
Krum has filed no reply to the lawsuit, and could not be located for comment.
He and his wife recently moved from their State College-area townhouse to somewhere around nearby Centre Hall, and have an unlisted phone number.
"These cases are pretty rare," Duquesne University Law School professor Kenneth Hirsch said. "But there's nothing about the Internet that would shield users from liability."
"When it comes to libel, whether you're in an Internet news group or an Internet bulletin board or in a chat room, you're going to find it's the same as a public park or a newspaper or a soapbox," said Jerry Berman, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit organization trying to jibe civil liberties with cyberspace. "The Internet makes everyone a publisher."
Eleven months ago, Krum officially bade HealthSouth goodbye, quitting as food services supervisor at the company's Nittany Valley Rehabilitation Hospital near State College to work at Penn State, HealthSouth attorney Donn Dutton said.
But by late summer, the employee and the company renewed acquaintances.
The Internet service Yahoo! Inc. maintains cyberspace bulletin boards where users post messages on a variety of topics. And I Am Dirk Diggler became a regular, posting messages about HealthSouth, $13 million-a-year Chairman Richard Scrushy and his wife, Leslie Scrushy.
The lawsuit says that in a message Aug. 11, Krum accused Richard Scrushy of "bilking taxpayers by sapping Medicare reimbursement."
Eight days before that, he cheered a drop in HealthSouth stock by writing, suggesting "Dick's wife will dump him and begin to be able to give me her full attention."
In other messages, he invented more suggestions of a relationship with Leslie Scrushy, called HealthSouth managers "egotistical yahoos" and said senior management was "inept," the lawsuit says.
In a message not cited in the lawsuit, I Am Dirk Diggler wrote that he had just found out his wife was expecting, scored a win in the stock market, felt blessed and would "be toning down my messages."
But a week later, on Oct. 6, he was back on the topic of HealthSouth, writing: "I warned each and every one of you this house of cards was starting to collapse," according to the lawsuit
"I don't know what his motive was," said Dutton, a member of the Miami law firm Sherman & Fischman.
HealthSouth is the largest chain of rehabilitation and outpatient surgery clinics in the nation. It has 1,800 centers in the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, and took in $3 billion last year.
But it wasn't too big to ignore Krum as a minor irritant.
First, HealthSouth went to Yahoo! with a subpoena to find out who I Am Dirk Diggler was.
Then, with Krum's identity in hand, the company brought suit, charging that Krum tried to undermine public faith in the company and "blacken reputations."
When Internet users step outside the relative privacy of e-mail and launch attacks in public forums, "They've turned a corner," said Ari Schwartz, a policy analyst with the Center for Democracy and Technology.
"If you accuse people of crimes, you better be right," Hirsch said. "If you falsely accuse, and it's not portrayed as a matter of opinion but as a matter of fact, you're going to get hurt."
HealthSouth attorney Bruce Fischman charged that Krum's allegations were laced with falsehood, that he posted lies and had no ties to the Scrushys.
But Krum mixed in enough fact and pretended to know enough about the Scrushys "that a reasonable person who read the statements could have believed that they were true, in whole or in part," the court papers charge.
"When you're saying you're sleeping with the chairman's spouse or the chairman is a crook, the company is sensitive to that," Fischman said.
The messages were coming from a Penn State e-mail account assigned to Krum, and were posted on company time, university spokeswoman Christy Rambeau said.
So, the university suspended Krum without pay from his job as food and beverage controller at the university's Nittany Lion Inn and Penn Stater Hotel, Rambeau said.
"We want to see if there was wrongdoing," she said.
HealthSouth did not sue Yahoo!, which has federal protections as the messenger and warns users they are responsible for the messages they post.
"But we've asked them to remove those messages from the bulletin board," Fischman said. "... All we can do is ask."
Yahoo! has not complied.
As for Krum, even if HealthSouth wins its case, "They'll probably have spent more than they'll get back," Hirsch said.
But this probably isn't about money, the law professor said.
"It's to terrorize other people who might be inclined to do the same," he said.
HealthSouth probably also is hunting a payoff that a full-court public relations press couldn't deliver, Hirsch said.
"There is a special vindication from a court making judgment," he said.
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