StarWars Kid settles in Cyber-Bully lawsuit...

[indy007]

the link

TROIS-RIVIÈRES, QUE. — As Ghyslain Raza recalled, whenever he walked by his high school's common areas, other students would jump on tables and chant, "Star Wars Kid! Star Wars Kid!"

There would be a commotion as they shouted and poked at him, trying to get a reaction. "It was simply unbearable," he said.

An otherwise ordinary teen in this Quebec small town, Mr. Raza had become a worldwide object of ridicule when schoolmates put on the Internet a video of him clumsily pretending to be a Star Wars character.

Three years later, Mr. Raza and his parents this week reached an out-of-court settlement with the families of three former schoolmates they had sued for $351,000 in damages.

The settlement annuls a civil trial set to begin on Monday that would have scrutinized one of the world's first and most-publicized cases of cyber-bullying.

However, documents filed in the case at the Trois-Rivières courthouse give new details about how a mean-spirited high-school prank turned into a global Internet cause célèbre.

Specifics of the settlement remain confidential.

Lawyers for the three schoolmates had suffered a setback after they were not allowed to introduce as evidence a transcript of a phone conversation Mr. Raza had with a blogger, Jishnu Mukerji.

The blogger had posted a transcript of the exchange on the Internet.

Conducted a month after the video and parodies of it began circulating, the conversation has Mr. Raza calling the spoofs "interesting" but not expressing much distress.

However, a judge rejected a bid to table a transcript of the chat and Mr. Mukerji was not available to testify.

The documents include transcripts of examinations under oath of Mr. Raza and of three students accused of circulating the video, Michaël Caron, Jérôme Laflamme and Jean-Michel Rheault.

(Proceedings against a fourth, François Labarre, were dropped after Mr. Raza acknowledged that the allegations against that student were based on hearsay.)

In the transcripts, Mr. Raza said the experience left him unable to attend school.

"It was simply unbearable, totally. It was impossible to attend class," Mr. Raza said.

He said the situation left him feeling drained of energy, and that he let himself go and no longer lifted weights to keep fit.

He said he was diagnosed with depression by a pedopsychiatrist at Montreal's Sainte-Justine Hospital and his lawyers, in their fillings, said they wanted to have a psychiatrist and a psychologist testify, along with producing his medical file.

Under questioning, Mr. Laflamme and Mr. Rheault conceded their role in spreading a video that Mr. Raza, then 15, had made of himself and left on a shelf in the school TV studio.

Mr. Laflamme said he discovered the tape in April of 2003, when he took school equipment to film a varsity football game.

He showed the tape to Mr. Rheault, who made a copy of it.

"I thought it'd be an interesting prank . . . I wanted Ghyslain to know what I knew of him, what I had seen," Mr. Laflamme said.

"All I did was take the cassette, digitize it on the studio computer to pull a joke on Ghyslain. After that, I had nothing to do with it," Mr. Rheault said he later told the school principal after the controversy erupted.

He said that when a school counsellor confronted him about Mr. Raza's misfortunes, he replied, "It's no fun what happened here, but that's the problem with the Internet. Things travel fast."

Mr. Caron, who says he didn't even know the two other pranksters, said in examination that as the tape was being e-mailed among students, he created a website and posted the video on it.

According to court filings, the video first appeared on the Internet on the evening of April 14, 2003.

About a month later, one U.S. Web blog that had posted the video said it had been downloaded 1.1 million times already.

Mr. Raza's lawyer said in a court filing that the video was so widely circulated that one Internet site solely dedicated to the two-minute clip recorded 76 million visits by October, 2004.

Mr. Raza conceded in his examination that he didn't express much anguish when he spoke to Mr. Mukerji in May of 2003 about his sudden fame.

He said he was cautious because "everything I said was textually reported on the Internet. I signalled in more or less subtle fashion my unhappiness."

Mr. Raza -- who appears on the video as a chubby, ungainly young man -- recalled how other students got on tables and chanted taunts at him. "There was about 100 people in those halls. It was total chaos . . . Any opportunity was good enough to shout 'Star Wars!' "

He said in one class, where a document was shown through a projector, other students scrolled the text, mimicking the opening of the movie, as they sang the Star Wars theme.

And whenever he was in a public place, he said, strangers would call to him.

"Hey! It's Ghyslain Raza! Star Wars Kid, hey!"

He left the school and eventually, got a private tutor.

No one would comment yesterday about the settlement, including whether it included monetary compensation.

However, previous proceedings in the case had included discussions about whether the families of the three defendants had liability insurance.

The families of the three defendants have varying financial situations, court documents suggest. Mr. Caron's court filings include a letter from an insurer refusing to provide liability insurance coverage, whereas Mr. Laflamme says in his examination that his father had savings of $500,000 from an inheritance.

[Mustaine]

good for him, now i can start my lawsuit on all of you.

[Scatcat]

great now he'll get a book deal too.  Seems to me a good @!$ kicking of the perps was in order.

[CMC Airboss]

Who should play him in the made-for-TV movie??

[Meatwad]

superdud

[Debonair]

i dont think the guy that played luke works much..or luke skywalker from 2live crew

[Seagoon]

"An otherwise ordinary teen in this Quebec small town"???

Anyone else whose seen the video also have problems with the above statement? Are all of the other teens in this small Quebec town nerdy, overweight, and prone to go into a sound-effect accompanied frenzy if you hand them a broomstick? Imagine what the Junior Prom must look like...

[LePaul]

"...He said the situation left him feeling drained of energy, and that he let himself go and no longer lifted weights to keep fit. ..."  

When was he fit?

[nirvana]

Originally posted by LePaul
"...He said the situation left him feeling drained of energy, and that he let himself go and no longer lifted weights to keep fit. ..."  

When was he fit?

That's what I was wondering, figure he could still pick up that cheeseburger and cram it into his mouth.  If he was so drained he shouldn't have been able to eat, right?

[lasersailor184]

This kid was a nerd and a geek to begin with.  This situation is just an excuse for him to stay that way.

[SuperDud]

Originally posted by Meatwad
superdud

[eskimo2]

Originally posted by Seagoon
"An otherwise ordinary teen in this Quebec small town"???

Anyone else whose seen the video also have problems with the above statement? Are all of the other teens in this small Quebec town nerdy, overweight, and prone to go into a sound-effect accompanied frenzy if you hand them a broomstick? Imagine what the Junior Prom must look like...

LOL,

Typical Canadian prom I bet.

[StSanta]

Originally posted by Seagoon
"An otherwise ordinary teen in this Quebec small town"???

Anyone else whose seen the video also have problems with the above statement? Are all of the other teens in this small Quebec town nerdy, overweight, and prone to go into a sound-effect accompanied frenzy if you hand them a broomstick? Imagine what the Junior Prom must look like...

Pretty normal if you ask me. This kind of comment is pretty rich, coming on a forum dedicated to playing WWII fighter pilots on the internet.

If you look at all the anal retentive posts about his plane or that or this armament or that you'll see that it's more than 'just a game' to quite a few people.

A kid, at least, can be expected to want to be a hero. A fat unpopular kid seeking escape through pretending to be Luke Skywalker is really nothing unusual. This kind got caught, that's all. It sure beats shooting your classmates to vent your anger/anguish what have you.

Maybe it's un-Christian behaviour or something but it matters not to me. You have enough intelligence to see and understand the underlying general principles behind this Seagoon.

This dude, no matter how comical the video (and the fact that to many he represents a funny anti-hero) was bullied, probably for years. Popular and mediocre kids (social wise) have very little understanding of what this does to the mind. Not fitting in as a teenager can cause a lot of interesting behaviour later in life.

[deSelys]

Originally posted by Seagoon
"An otherwise ordinary teen in this Quebec small town"???

Anyone else whose seen the video also have problems with the above statement? Are all of the other teens in this small Quebec town nerdy, overweight, and prone to go into a sound-effect accompanied frenzy if you hand them a broomstick? Imagine what the Junior Prom must look like...

Where's your compassion, St. Seagoon? What did he do wrong, exactly?

[BTW]

Originally posted by Seagoon
"An otherwise ordinary teen in this Quebec small town"???

Anyone else whose seen the video also have problems with the above statement? Are all of the other teens in this small Quebec town nerdy, overweight, and prone to go into a sound-effect accompanied frenzy if you hand them a broomstick? Imagine what the Junior Prom must look like...

No less normal than the geeks standing on top of tables taunting him. I have this image from  "Lord of the Flies" come to mind - "kill the pig! kill the pig!"

Who is raising these heartless animals? They are nothing to be proud of, that's for sure.