Stranger than Fiction

By Dr. Brian Russell– Just when we were all set to hear the sentence for the Monstrous MySpace Mom — the woman who impersonated a teenage boy on MySpace and taunted one of her daughter’s classmates into committing suicide — the judge says that the case will be DISMISSED! That’s right, dismissed. Even though a jury considered the evidence, weighed it, and concluded that the MMM violated the law, the judge apparently has concluded that the law she was charged with violating — a federal law that makes it a crime to access an interstate computer network fraudulently — was misapplied (intended to apply to identity thieves and applied to the MMM basically because there wasn’t anything applicable with which to charge her at the federal level). So, it appears that the MMM will get off with zero punishment…and a young girl is dead. I think it’s a travesty.

In Thursday’s Jackson news, it appears that the federal D.E.A. is getting involved in the case, raising suspicion that what I’ve called “Hollywood health care” — celebrities like Anna Nicole Smith, Heath Ledger, Chris Benoit, and probably Jackson getting prescriptions for just about anything they want from sycophantic doctors who’ll compromise their medical ethics to be part of a celebrity’s “inner circle” — is in play here. Good, I’m glad the D.E.A.’s getting involved. As I’ve said, the only way to curtail the practice of Hollywood health care is for doctors who might consider administering it to see doctors who have in fact administered it spending less time in L.A. nightclubs with the stars and more time in prison with other felons. Also on Thursday, Debbie Rowe, the “mother” of Jackson’s oldest two children, reportedly expressed a desire to be involved in the determination of their permanent guardianship, suggesting that maybe she wants custody. While a biological mother, assuming that’s what she is, normally would be ahead of a grandmother in the custody line, Rowe’s claim, as I’ve said, is tainted by her lack of involvement in the children’s lives until this point, when their guardian may also get some control over the minors’ likely-substantial future assets. As a child custody expert, it’s tough to imagine a court determining that the best interests of the children would be best served by placing them in Rowe’s care, especially when that would mean splitting them up from the youngest Jackson child, but this case does illustrate something fairly typical of custody cases — no candidate for custody is ideal (e.g. a nearly-80-year-old woman who’s married to a man with a reported history of child abuse vs. a virtual stranger who apparently was willing to abandon the children in exchange for money until it seemed like maybe there was more money involved in parenting them). Stay tuned.

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