Anonymous Internet campaign brands man sex predator

8-24-2010 Connecticut:

MILFORD -- Michael Marcus calls the experience "Internet hell." Marcus, 65, has been accused in online blogs, petitions to public officials and letters to the Connecticut Post of serving prison time for sexually assaulting a child. He had sex with an underage girl and even with his own dog, the allegations said.

None of it is true, according to law enforcement officials. Marcus said Milford police and the FBI's computer crimes unit are now investigating the source of those allegations. He has had mixed success in getting the fake postings removed from websites.

The owner of Phone Geeks, a telecommunications equipment company here, Marcus said that he believes a distant relative is behind the Web-based attacks. A family dispute was the likely trigger, he said.

Since June 23 the tormentor has created a Facebook page, a blog titled "Michael N. Marcus: Tracking the Convicted Pedophile," and an online petition at Change.org seeking to have Marcus put on the state's sex offender registry. There have been comments posted on other websites and message boards, including Yahoo and SheWrites, a social networking site, urging people to contact Gov. M. Jodi Rell and urge her to have Marcus listed as a pedophile.

The postings accusing Marcus of sex abuse drew comments that ranged from concern and fear to anger. One poster suggested that Marcus be castrated. Another made anti-Semitic and other hateful remarks. When a few posters suggested that Marcus should be killed for his crime, his accuser opened an account at Photobucket, uploaded photos of Marcus' Milford home and a Google map showing how to find it.

The Facebook page, created using the name "Kevin Phillips," quickly added friends, though Marcus suspects most of them were other pseudonyms created by the same man. "You can get a lot of clip art photos to use as member photos, but I noticed that all of his `friends' made the same spelling errors and used my middle initial without the period.

"When I did see some profiles of real people who had responded, I contacted them and they all `defriended' this person," Marcus said.

"It's just so blatant, and the things that are being said are just incredible," Marcus said. "He claimed that I had put a photo of `half-naked children" on the home page of one of my websites. They were wearing rather modest bathing suits and their mother was 5 feet away. He said I violated my dog with a vibrating dildo."

No arrest record

The petition to the governor claimed that Marcus had served four years in a California prison for sexually assaulting a young boy, and that he bragged in a self-published book about having sex with a 15-year-old girl.

Rell forwarded the petition, which she received in late June, to the Department of Public Safety for follow-up, said Adam Liegeot, the governor's spokesman.

Lt. J. Paul Vance, the state police spokesman, said this week Marcus has done nothing that warrants registering as a sex offender. "He is not required to register in Connecticut, and he was not required to register in California," Vance said.

Marcus has no arrest record in Milford, said Officer Jeff Nielsen, the department spokesman. "We are investigating a complaint filed by this individual, but given that it is ongoing we'll have no comment," Nielsen said.

Marcus is not listed on the California registry, despite claims by the blogger that he is. Individual criminal histories are not releasable, according to an official in the California attorney general's office.

"We depend on the First Amendment, but sometimes it can also bite us in the ass," Marcus said. "I've had no luck at all in dealing with Google, which owns Blogspot and Blogger. They basically are telling me that it would take a court order to get them to remove it."

The photos of his home and the book's dust jacket were removed after Marcus complained that they violated copyright laws. A Google spokeswoman on Wednesday cited the U.S. Communications Decency Act in declining to remove the rest of the material. The law states that websites and search engines are "republishers" of material, and so are "not liable for any allegedly defamatory, offensive or harassing content published on the site."

Spokeswoman Victoria Katsarou said Google is following federal law. "We do not remove allegedly defamatory content from www.google.com or any other U.S. dot com domains," she said in an e-mail to the Post.

She told Marcus in a separate e-mail that: "The only exception to this rule is if the material has been found to be defamatory by a court, as evidenced by a court order. If you need us to take the blog down this is the procedure you'd need to follow."

Other sites have been more cooperative, Marcus said. "Photobucket, in a day, took the photos down. Yahoo also acted fast, and SheWrites, a social networking site, responded after I complained," he said. "They also cut off the membership of `Caroline Harris,' the name that was used to attack me there."

Facebook took five weeks to remove the pages, including the fake "friends" and their comments about Marcus. The site does allow families to take over a member's page but only after the member's identity is established. The provision is often used by the parents of teens killed in motor vehicle crashes. But establishing the identity of fake people wasn't easy to do, Marcus said ruefully.

`Protect America's Children'

The online attacks began on June 25. Marcus became aware of them when friends began calling. Some were concerned, he said, but others wondered if he had orchestrated the incident himself to drum up support for his new self-published memoir, "Stories I'd Tell My Children (but maybe not until they're adults)." The book has the photo of the children in his backyard pool and across the bottom a blue banner proclaims "Dirty Parts Are Easy to Find."

That tagline is also on the book's Amazon.com ordering page, but it refers to the parts of the book, not to a child's body. Marcus also writes about having sex with a 15-year-old girlfriend when he was a student at Hillhouse High School in New Haven decades ago. The books do contain references to "three-ways" and other sexual activities; Marcus claims that his exploits "are at least 80 percent true."

The online petition and the letter and e-mails to the Connecticut Post were signed by a Harold Bishop and Susan Fisher, and the group "Protect America's Children." There are no Harold Bishops or Susan Fishers living in Milford. A Susan Fisher residing in Orange said this week that she did not sign and is not aware of any petition about Marcus. The wife of Harold Bishop of Woodstock, Conn., said that her husband did not start the petition.

Several groups use the name "Protect America's Children," including a Miami-based political action committee that advocates for more stringent child welfare laws. Phone messages left at its listed number were not returned.

Marcus said he believed none of the groups using that name was involved in the campaign against him. "It appears that it is just another identity adopted by this person to attack me."

He has written and published more than 10 books, under the imprint of Silver Sands Press, his own company. They are memoirs, phone manuals, even books on how to navigate the self-publishing industry.

Now, Marcus said, he is writing another book, to be called "Internet Hell: How False Accusations Almost Destroyed Me and Could Destroy You." The book will be published next year, he said, or as soon as the legal matters surrounding it are resolved. ..Source.. by Frank Juliano, Staff Writer