I need to post some more on this story, about the suicide of Megan Meier, because it’s so upsetting to me. I had missed it when it happened last year, but it’s resurfaced again, and I just need to process this now.

Two young girls who used to be best friends have a falling out.

Instead of letting the girls work it out or offer to mediate or just accept the end of a relationship, the mother of one girl, Lori Drew, decides to pose as a boy on-line and communicate with the other girl, Megan.

She claims she did this only to get information as to what Megan might be saying about her daughter.

A Chicago Tribune article reads:

The Meier suicide occurred in October 2006, but it did not become widely known until last Sunday when the Suburban Journals newspapers, which cover the St. Louis suburbs, published a lengthy article detailing the hoax involving a fictitious 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans, who contacted Megan on MySpace.com.

Their communication lasted six weeks, according to the Journal article, and ended with a string of disturbing messages from Josh and postings that read Megan was “fat” and “a slut.”

The story reported Ron Meier, Megan’s father, saying the final posting on the MySpace account read “The world would be a better place without you.”

Ms. Drew knew the emotional fragility of this girl. She created the “perfect guy”, someone who would build up this girl’s esteem, and her parents said she did seem to be “lighter”. And then she created him to turn on her.

When I awoke this morning and tried to wrap my brain around how a grown up could do something like that, I got the image of angry fathers running out into the field or the parking lot after a game and beating up the coach who made a call that pissed them off. At least one coach, I’ve read of, died as a result.

Unlike the fathers who had no boundaries with their children, this woman, who evidently, couldn’t tell where she ended and her daughter began, didn’t choose overt aggression. She chose covert aggression – relational aggression.

Not only did she instigate the hoax but, as is characteristic of relational aggression, got other people involved, other kids. The above article states that the “parents“, as in plural, of Megan’s friend had tried to encourage others to join in the hoax. I guess that means the father was involved, in some way, too, unless I’m misreading something.

But the main focus is on the mother who, opened the MySpace account for the purpose of communicating with Megan Meier as a ruse, a woman who, apparently, never grew out of relational aggression or up from adolescence.

I just want to say here that in looking at the great cruelty involved in this hoax, I hope people don’t become so fixed on the adults that they overlook just how harmful this type of behavior is, period – regardless who is perpetrating it.

Relational aggression hurts. Bullying of any kind hurts. Unfortunately, Megan will not have been the first to harm or kill herself because of bullying.

We need to remember that we are the ones who know that the person behind “Josh Evans” was a grown up. Megan did not know that. She only knew that she was suddenly the recipient of cruel and hateful messages from someone she thought had been her friend or romantic interest, and from other kids who were participating.

And I really don’t care if someone else has dealt with bullying and came out a super hero for it. It’s not a challenge that should be issued to any child. I was sexually abused as a child, and have developed strength and integrity from that experience and use what I have learned to help others, but that doesn’t mean what happened to me wasn’t wrong…or that we shouldn’t help prevent that from happening to others.

Bullying is wrong.

So what if this made-up boy hadn’t turned on her? Would it have been less cruel?

How would Megan have felt to discover someone she thought she was falling for was a hoax, and that she had been the laughing stock for other people? Would this story have had a different ending for someone who was emotionally unstable at this time of her life?

And what if she had been emotionally stable? Would it have been a walk in the park for Megan, even then?

No, the woman’s agenda went way beyond just needing to see what Megan Meier was saying about her daughter on-line. She meant to hurt her with a vengeance in the cruelest way.

She succeeded.

Read the article from Megan Meier’s hometown: St Louis Post Dispatch