00:00:00
Phoebe Judge: This episode contains
language that may not be suitable for everyone. Please use discretion.
I'm going to be very... I don't even
00:00:11
know how to say this to someone like you
[Melissa laughs], to admit that I have
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never read a Harry Potter book.
Melissa Anelli: Oh, that's OK. [Upbeat pop-style instrumentals.]
Phoebe Judge: So will you
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start by just telling me what your life
was like in 2008 before this all started?
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Melissa Anelli: Sure. In 2008, we were just
a year past the publication of the last book,
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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and
that was a huge moment for everyone. And I
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was running the website. We had a really large
team and it was a really heavy time still,
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even a year after the last Harry Potter
book, it was still kind of crazy. Phoebe Judge: This is Melissa Anelli. Since
2001, she's run a Harry Potter fan site
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called The Leaky Cauldron, which provides
news on the books and Harry Potter movies,
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and where hundreds of thousands of fans share
theories and predictions about what will happen to
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the characters and what they hope will come next.
Melissa also has a podcast. It was one of the
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earliest podcasts out there, called PotterCast.
[Montage.] Speaker 1: Welcome, welcome to another...
Speaker 2:
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The official podcast of The Leaky Cauldron.
Speaker 3: The Leaky Cauldron. Speaker 4: The Leaky Cauldron.
Melissa Anelli: It is PotterCast 204.
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Once again, I'm Melissa. I'm here with John,
Frak, and Sue. We've got another week of
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Potter fantastic... [Fades out.]
Phoebe Judge: And because the fans, there were so many fans, I
mean, from what I understand,
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this is a gigantic fan site. It must've
felt, though, that this was really good,
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that you could take something that people
really enjoyed and liked and this world
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that had been created, and you could create
this place where there could be conversation
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and information and expand on something.
Melissa Anelli: And that it could actually
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be a job. It was glorious. There was nothing
better than watching the fans just enjoying
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a book and creating fan art and valuable
discussions and friendships and creating
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communities and fan conventions. Now it's a
commonplace thing, but back then we were the
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first people doing it. It was really exciting.
Phoebe Judge: Melissa was able to visit the sets
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of the Harry Potter movies. She had sit-down
interviews with J.K. Rowling and in 2008,
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Melissa published a book, Harry, A History:
The True Story of a Boy Wizard, His Fans,
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and Life Inside the Harry Potter Phenomenon. J.K.
Rowling wrote the foreword and the book debuted at
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number 18 on the New York Times bestseller list.
Melissa Anelli: I would speak a lot about Harry
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Potter. I would be interviewed a lot about Harry
Potter. I'd interviewed J.K. Rowling a bunch of
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times. She had been on our podcast. The podcasts
themselves made us a little bit of celebrity,
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you know? And, yeah, I got a lot of attention.
Phoebe Judge: And then one day Melissa's
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colleagues told her they were having
trouble with one of The Leaky Cauldron commenters. This person wanted Melissa
to read a piece of fiction they'd written
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and was growing increasingly angry
when no one was paying attention. Finally, Melissa herself intervened. She says she
sent a polite email saying, "Please cooperate with
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the rules and respect the moderators." That seemed
to work out. Melissa received an apology email
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almost immediately. This was July 17th, 2008.
Melissa Anelli: And I went to bed,
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and then the 18th, I woke up and I got an
email the next day that said, "I'm going to
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hunt you down wherever you live and slit you
ear to ear like the stupid, fat sow you are."
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That's literally what the next email was. And it was so alarming.
Phoebe Judge:
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I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
[Driving electronic music.] Melissa sent the email to her colleagues at The
Leaky Cauldron, and they banned the user from the
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site. They hoped that would be the end of it. Yes,
it was a horribly graphic threat, but the truth
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is a lot of women who've made their careers
online are constantly bombarded by cruel and
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often sexual messages. Melissa and her colleagues
started gathering more information about the user.
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And they were able to determine that the person
harassing her was 25 years old and lived in New
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Zealand. Her name was Jessica Parker.
Melissa Anelli: I really thought it'd be a one-off. I was like, "Well,
this person is a little bit off."
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She was angry that I threatened to ban her.
OK. She can take her business elsewhere.
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Phoebe Judge: And then they realized that
the piece of fiction Jessica Parker wanted
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read so badly was about Melissa —
an odd, violent, sexual story. Is it surprising to you that she's a woman?
Melissa Anelli: It was at the beginning.
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I think I got a lot of that, "Oh my God, it's a
woman?" But none of this can be like... You can't
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be like, "Oh, well she was so attracted to you or
whatever." It's not that. And I think people are
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surprised by that the most. Stalkers it's usually
like, "I can't have her." And this is not quite,
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I don't know — I don't know what this
is. There's just no logic to it. Phoebe Judge: A 2014 Pew research study
found that 40% of Americans have been
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harassed online. And that harassment
is disproportionately aimed at women. But it's less common for a woman to stalk another
woman. The Centers for Disease Control report
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that 88% of female stalking victims are stalked by
men, while only 7% are stalked by another woman.
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Melissa Anelli: She would send vicious, very,
very graphic death threats, and also rape threats.
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Phoebe Judge: With her threatening to rape you?
Melissa Anelli: Yes. Yes. Very... She seemed to
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have a plan. Those were the most...
difficult ones because they were so, so graphic and it just became commonplace.
Every other day. Every time I would ban a
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Twitter account, another one would come up.
Every time I would make a blog post someplace,
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a comment would come up. I would ban IPs, she
would get around them. It was, God, hundreds of
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email addresses and accounts to get at me.
Phoebe Judge: Did you go to the police?
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Melissa Anelli: We did. We went to
the police, and the police were like, "She's in New Zealand." And that doesn't make
it less scary because the world is small these
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days. And if somebody is that unhinged, you
don't know what they're going to do. It did
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make me feel better that she wasn't in New York.
But the cops basically said to me, "You can go
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get a restraining order, but it's a piece of paper
that only works if she's actually in New York."
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Phoebe Judge: It's hard enough to prosecute
cyberstalking in this country. The requirements
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vary from state to state and are phrased in
vague and subjective ways, with an attempt to
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make a distinction between fear as in "emotional
distress" versus fear of serious bodily harm.
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I don't know how one evaluates fear,
so it's already incredibly confusing. But it becomes nearly impossible to prosecute
when you're dealing with someone overseas.
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Melissa felt like she couldn't get anyone to help
her. The threats kept coming. Threats to leave her
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lying in a pool of blood. Bomb threats. Her face
was photoshopped onto a pornographic image and
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posted publicly to Twitter with Melissa's
friends tagged to make sure they saw it.
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Then there were the tattoos. Jessica Parker
posted photographs of several tattoos
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she'd gotten, inspired by Melissa's life.
Melissa Anelli: There's a cartoon illustration of
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our fellow podcasters, and she got that tattooed
on her back. And she copied a tattoo that I got.
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She got a tattoo of a woman in a geisha outfit
that supposedly represents me on a trip to Japan,
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which is something that I mentioned once
on a podcast. She got another tattoo that's
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supposed to have been partly inspired by
my cat — like, it's really something else.
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But honestly the thing — that was all, it was
all so common. And so coming in thick and fast
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at that point, and the heady era of all this,
that was like when most of that was happening.
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And the thing that really shook me was when she
called my mother. Because she called my mother,
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and when my mother answered the phone she said,
"I got it. I got it. I got it." And she started
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laughing in a high pitched voice. And my mother,
with no expectation that this was happening,
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realized it was her and just stayed very silent
on the line until she hung up. I don't know why
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she didn't hang up herself, but my mother just
realized what was going on. And that's crazy
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because my mother's phone has been unlisted
since we moved to Staten Island in 1981.
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Phoebe Judge: Jessica Parker posted a YouTube
video describing the day she'd made the call
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to Melissa's mom. At the end of the video,
she says, "I don't even like doing this,
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but sometimes you make it necessary."
Melissa Anelli: She also got all our addresses
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off real estate searches. So the fact that I
bought an apartment meant she had my home address,
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which was great. [Laughs.] So she started
sending postcards. She would send a copy,
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four copies. My sister's house, my father's
office, my mother's home, and me. And it would
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all be handwritten — they wouldn't be copied — but
it would be the same text, and we'd all get them.
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So I would get a text from my mother in the
morning with a picture. And I knew that
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there was a postcard waiting for me. And
this would happen three times a week. She sent a Kewpie doll to my sister with a card,
for my nephew, for my just-then-born nephew,
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that said, "Enjoy your parents while you can." I
mean, I love my nephews more than anything. And
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the idea that she even deigned to speak
to them, never mind send them something,
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never mind send them something threatening,
I really did not do well that day. And thank
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God for my family.
Phoebe Judge: After a year of this abuse with no help from local
police, the family finally went to the FBI.
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Melissa Anelli: My sister's a lawyer,
and she was a number one on the case, she had a case file. [Laughs.] She was really
great. And we were asking everybody who we should
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call. We were calling the border agency, we were
calling... God, we didn't know where to go. And
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then somebody said to us, "You should call the
FBI." I don't even remember who said that to us.
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But we called the FBI. My sister left a message.
And we got a call back from an agent named Cari,
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who was a giant Harry Potter fan. And she
had taken it a little bit on herself to head
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the stalking area. She felt strongly about it,
that the online world was the Wild West and that
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it needed regulation. And she was the first person
to say to me, "This shouldn't be happening to you,
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and we can help." And that was a full year in.
Phoebe Judge: The FBI launched a stalking
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investigation with the assistance of the New
Zealand police. But they warned Melissa that
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cases like this can take years and years to
resolve, if a resolution is even possible.
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It's strange to think that at the same
time, hundreds of thousands of Harry Potter fans were flocking to Melissa's site,
celebrating the supportive online community,
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a way to find your people. And no one had
any idea what Melissa was dealing with.
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You were continuing, of course you were
continuing your work on your site and the
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podcast. Was it hard to try to be the same
presence for these fans that you were when
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you were constantly looking over your shoulder and
pretty sure that this person who was stalking you
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was listening, too, and hanging on every word.
Melissa Anelli: Very much. It was really difficult
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that every time I did anything publicly, there she
is. There she is. And I always — I started to know
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without having to be told, without her
having to make a threat, I started to know exactly when it was her typing. It's like
a preternatural — I always know when it's her.
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Phoebe Judge: At this point, Melissa was
losing hope that law enforcement here or
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in New Zealand would ever be able
to do much. But then the day before Christmas Eve in 2011, she got some good news.
Melissa Anelli: I was at my mom's house. It was
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the day before Christmas Eve. And I got an
email from Cari Robins, from the FBI, that said,
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"Merry Christmas." And it was a forward of... That she was arrested for criminal
harassment, finally. And my mother and I
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celebrated. We were, like — we said, "Oh my...
Oh my God, this has happened. Maybe this will
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come to an end now. Maybe she'll get the help." I
was warned really early on, "Don't start feeling
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sympathy for your stalker. Don't start. Other
people can give her sympathy. Don't do it." But
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I can't help but feel somebody is failing this
girl, that she's not getting the help she needs.
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So part of it I was like, "Well maybe — God, maybe
she'll get help. And this can all stop. And we can
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all go onto better days."
Phoebe Judge: What's behind the warning not to feel sympathy?
Melissa Anelli: A psychologist friend told
00:13:18
me that. Because you have to stop yourself from
empathizing with them so that they can manipulate
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you. And that you have to, even if it's not
fair, you have to close yourself down to feeling
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sympathy, even though you want to be a
good human, and leave that job to other people just to protect yourself.
Phoebe Judge: She was given a mental
00:13:43
health assessment. The New Zealand police
assured Melissa that Jessica Parker would be
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under the care of a mental health team and
receive ongoing counseling and treatment.
00:13:53
But the criminal charges against her ended
up getting dropped as part of a New Zealand
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legal practice known as 'diversion.' Basically
if Jessica Parker agreed to certain conditions,
00:14:03
like counseling and not contacting
Melissa, her charges would be withdrawn. But Jessica Parker did not stop contacting
Melissa. Melissa kept meticulous records of each
00:14:16
contact, and emailed every piece of documentation
to both the FBI and to the New Zealand police. She
00:14:23
shared much of this documentation with us, years
of it. And what's clear is that Jessica Parker was
00:14:30
not getting the mental health care she needs.
Melissa Anelli: So it makes these stopgaps of time
00:14:37
where it's quiet. But is it quiet, or will I open
my Tumblr box tomorrow and get another message?
00:14:43
Phoebe Judge: Jessica Parker was arrested for a
second time in 2012. And that same year, the FBI
00:14:51
secured an international warrant, which meant she
would be arrested if she ever tried to come to the
00:14:56
U.S. This time, the New Zealand prosecutors asked
Melissa to write a victim's impact statement,
00:15:02
describing the toll this had taken on her.
Melissa Anelli: And it was so many times in her
00:15:08
emails and her whatever she had said, "I wish you
would just tell me how you feel about all this,
00:15:12
and I'll go away. Just tell me how I've made your
life hell. Just tell me what I've done to you."
00:15:16
And I was like, "No. No, there's no way." So when
they wanted a victim impact statement, I was like,
00:15:20
"Well, I'm giving her what she wants." And the
police from New Zealand, who I now speak with
00:15:27
regularly, said to me, "It would really help if
you filled one of those out because she got off
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really leniently last time because the judge
hadn't heard from you and they couldn't tell."
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So I wrote a big victim's impact statement for
the second time around. And it seemed to work.
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The judge said she wasn't allowed to contact me
and all these things, or anyone associated with
00:15:50
me. She wasn't allowed to use the internet. She
wasn't allowed to use the mail. It was a really
00:15:54
good ruling, but she started again. So now
it's happening again. And it's horrifying how
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normal this is now. You know?
[Melancholy string music.] Phoebe Judge: A couple of years ago, she
made the decision to speak publicly about
00:16:12
the experience and identify her stalker by name.
Melissa Anelli: And in the very beginning, I was
00:16:17
told by everybody, the FBI, the police, everybody,
"You're not supposed to give them the validation
00:16:23
that they're looking for, because that is never
how it stops." And I was in a special situation,
00:16:28
because two years goes by, three years goes by,
now we're at five years. And the FBI is — while
00:16:35
they were wonderful to me — is still spinning
the wheels, getting something to actually happen
00:16:40
with this criminal harassment thing.
And stalking victims are, by default, silenced. It's a crime that you can't
participate in the solving of, you're
00:16:54
not allowed. You're not allowed to participate.
You're not allowed to stand up and say, "I'm a
00:16:57
victim." You're not allowed. And there are very
good reasons for that, but it's still incredibly
00:17:02
frustrating. And I remember myself getting so
angry — and so angry, frankly, that everybody
00:17:08
around me didn't really get it. And I just
did, I wrote a post, my friend Maureen Johnson,
00:17:16
who's a popular author, wrote a post.
And suddenly it was everywhere. Suddenly,
00:17:24
I mean, my God, the emails that started
coming in. And suddenly I heard from the
00:17:28
New Zealand police directly.
Phoebe Judge: In July of 2013, an affidavit was filed in a New York court, again
charging Jessica Parker with criminal harassment.
00:17:38
It's an ongoing investigation. And Melissa says
she may have to testify in a New Zealand court.
00:17:45
We reached out to the New Zealand police
for an update, but they declined to comment.
00:17:50
And in the meantime, Melissa is just trying
to deal with it. It's been eight years.
00:17:55
Melissa Anelli: It's so weird. I'm so used
to this. It's like, "Oh, another one from
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my stalker." And I don't want to make that... I
don't want to indicate that that means I'm not
00:18:04
being affected. That's dangerous, right? If you
get so used to it. Actually, somebody from the
00:18:08
FBI did say to me at one point, "Well, can't you
just get... This is just going to happen." And I
00:18:15
refuse, I refuse to accept that the only way not
to get death threats and rape threats is to just
00:18:22
become desensitized to it.
Phoebe Judge: How has this changed how you operate online?
Melissa Anelli: Oh, so much. My whole
00:18:30
personal, social experience is so different from
everybody who's never had to worry about this.
00:18:39
I think most people now are a little
bit more cautious with social media, but they're happy to say things about
their personal life in a carefree way like,
00:18:47
"I'm going on a trip next week. Can't wait to go
there." I turn off all my... You'll never see...
00:18:51
If you ever see, "From New York, New York,"
on one of my tweets, that's because I made
00:18:55
a mistake and didn't turn off the location
data. I never, ever have the location data on.
00:19:01
It really makes you look over your shoulder.
Phoebe Judge: It's so sad though, because online
00:19:05
is kind of how you built your career and
your name for yourself, your success. Melissa Anelli: Yes. Ironic, isn't it? I got
into a community where it was all about being
00:19:14
passionate and being able to share in a safe
space, and somebody perverted that passion into
00:19:20
an extreme and then perverted the safe space, too.
And struggling to continue it, keep all that stuff
00:19:27
going in the midst of that has been difficult. A
lot of people ask me, "Did you ever just consider
00:19:34
closing Leaky? Closing Leaky Cauldron, just
calling it a day..." I was like, "No, absolutely
00:19:39
not. She will not win that way." You know?
Phoebe Judge: Why do you think she became fixated on you?
Melissa Anelli: I wish I
00:19:46
knew. I get this question so often, "Why you?
You're known on the internet a little, why you?"
00:19:53
And every time I try to come up with an answer,
I just have to remind myself that there's no
00:19:58
logic. It's not logical. I drew the bad apple.
Every known person on the internet gets their
00:20:05
share of lots of this. But this particular
thing, even the FBI eventually told me,
00:20:12
this particular thing is rare. Usually one or two
years, they give up. Eight years is unheard of. So
00:20:19
if I could put anything on it, I would say that
I started to represent Potter to her. I think it
00:20:24
was because I was somebody who was doing things
she wanted to do, or liked or whatever admiration
00:20:30
or like or whatever it was, that she had for
me sublimated into a desire to contact me,
00:20:37
because she could contact me because I was
available. And when I refused that contact,
00:20:42
the fixation I guess, held.
[Disorienting electronic music.] Phoebe Judge: She says she's still getting
messages she believes are from Jessica Parker all
00:20:51
the time. One came in the day before we spoke.
[Electronic music.] Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohrer
and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers.
00:21:09
Special thanks to Alice Wilder and Russ
Henry. Julienne Alexander makes original
00:21:14
illustrations for each episode of Criminal.
You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.
00:21:20
Criminal is recorded in the studios of North
Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. We're a proud
00:21:26
member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the
best podcasts around. Shows like Fugitive Waves
00:21:33
by the Kitchen Sisters. They have a new series
focusing on food and cooking and how communities
00:21:39
come together around the table. The Kitchen
Sisters have been long-time radio heroes of ours.
00:21:45
Fugitive Waves — go listen.
We're going on a tour this fall with all new stories told live. We'll
be in New York, Minneapolis, Boston,
00:21:55
San Francisco... Lots of other places.
You can find out more on our website, thisiscriminal.com. We'd love to see you.
Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the
00:22:07
Knight Foundation and MailChimp,
celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. And thanks to Adzerk for providing
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00:22:18
I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.
Jingle: Radiotopia. From PRX.