Web Posting Attacks HLS Students

When law student Stephanie Zarro Avanessian logged onto a popular online message board about law school, she encountered shocking postings that ridiculed her and several other classmates about their appearance and sexual identity.

An anonymous user had posted the derogatory comments to the Web site AutoAdmit—an online message board that claims to be “the most prestigious law school admissions discussion board in the world” on its site.

After eliciting a number of responses from other anonymous users, the thread turned into a graphic and offensive description of her body.

“I think it’s totally sexual harassment,” said Avanessian, a student at Harvard Law School. “They are doing this to gay men, to women, and it’s just awful.”

The postings, which attacked several other students in addition to Avanessian, prompted Law School Dean Elena Kagan to e-mail the student body yesterday exhorting students not to join the discussions.

“I hope all of you will act with professionalism, and of course with simple decency, in turning your backs on this new and highly efficient mechanism for malicious gossip,” Kagan wrote.

The site is host to numerous posts that identify fellow classmates by name and make offensive remarks about physical appearance, race, and sexual identity.

In multiple threads, the posters describe their classmates as “fat,” remark on the size of their breasts, or use ethnic slurs. Two targets of other posts did not respond to repeated requests for comment yesterday.

The president of gay rights group HLS Lambda, Adam R. Sorkin, said he was disturbed by the homophobic tone of many of the threads after doing a search for the word “faggot.”

“I was shocked by the number of posts that used that term in referring to people in a derogatory sense,” he said.

Since employers can follow students through Google and other Web sites, Kagan added in her e-mail that the derogatory posts could cause “repeated damage to their lives and careers.”

Aside from Kagan’s note, the Law School could do little to curb the use of the message board and was not in a position to determine the identities of the anonymous posters, Dean of Students Ellen M. Cosgrove said.

“There’s really nothing else that Harvard Law School can do,” she said. “The individuals have standing if they want to pursue some kind of recourse.”

While students could track down the IP address of the poster on their own, the process typically involves a lot of time and work.

Despite the Law School’s position, students expressed hope that the administration would take action to prevent others from being hurt.

“I thought it was disgusting and reflects really poorly on the Law School and Harvard in general. In some cases there could be some legal actions taken,” said David S. Mitchell, a student representative for Avanessian’s first-year section.

At one point, Avanessian said, the online attacks made her consider withdrawing from her activities at the Law School.

“I had a vision of being at Harvard Law School and being in a community that I could participate in, but now I just think of it as school,” she said.

—Staff writer Kevin Zhou can be reached at kzhou@fas.harvard.edu.