Mike Marlowe fully admits that he sometimes gave George Gillespie a hard time in that AOL chatroom. But never in his wildest imagination did he expect to be sued in court for what he characterized as "razzing."
"We gave him crap," said Marlowe, a 33-year-old welder in Fayette, Ala. "I'm not going to deny it. I teased him and he teased me back. He gave it back better than he ever got it."
A generation ago, such petty personal beefs might have been settled with fists outside the corner bar, but now it's the Internet age — and Ohio resident George Gillespie instead filed a $25,000 lawsuit against two erstwhile cyber chums he met in the sprawling 900-room, mostly anonymous society that makes up AOL's chat universe.
Gillespie, 53, claims that Marlowe and Bob Charpentier, a 52-year-old Oregon resident, insulted him and harassed him in the AOL chatroom called "Romance — Older Men" to the point where it inflicted "severe emotional distress and physical injury that is of a nature no reasonable man could be expected to endure it."
The complaint, expected in court on Jan. 31 for a pretrial conference, also names AOL as a defendant for allowing the alleged harassment to take place.
Details here from CourtTV.com.