Nevermind, I don't want to be famous.

August 14, 2009 5:10 AM

I'm an artist who has had the incredible luck to have some work released to a large worldwide audience, and have been excited and pleased to get a large influx of new fans adding me on myspace, and emailing me. It's been great until I came home tonight and logged in -- I'm extremely freaked out by a fan's behavior on myspace. I do not know what to do, or even who to ask about this. I feel like this must sound ridiculous.

While the work that has gotten the exposure was a collaboration and released by a large entertainment company, it was a work for hire, and I do not have any professional representation or management. I'm doing my own self-promotion and management on my own. I got this lucky break and have suddenly got a some great exposure for my art, and have been getting an unexpected amount of strangers contacting me. I don't know what's "normal" or what to expect here. I'm getting probably 15-20 contacts a day across myspace, facebook and twitter. I imagine this is nothing special in the scheme of "fame" and I imagine it will die down soon. I should also add that I have separate pages on facebook and myspace for my art persona. I do not accept friend requests on personal pages unless I know the person in real life.

Most of the folks contacting me are teenagers. I've tried to respond to everybody that contacts me, just once. Relatively impersonal, but grateful for the kind words, and I do try to find something personal to say to everybody that emails me.

While this has been a little overwhelming, of course it's very exciting and encouraging and I've just decided to enjoy it for as long as it lasts -- I understand this sort of thing is fleeting, to say the least.

A few days ago, I got a message from someone in Mexico (I'm in the US). The mail was very sweet, nothing particularly out of the ordinary of other messages I get, and I sent something back thanking the person and encouraging them to continue pursuing their dreams, as they had one profile picture which hinted toward their own artistic endeavors. I think they responded again, I did not reply. As I'm playing it by ear here, I have had a "reply once and thank them, and leave it at that" rule. I don't keep close track of the messages I receive. I just try to follow a first in/first out rule and then forget about it.

I came home tonight to discover this person in Mexico left a comment on my page with pictures they'd uploaded of my name carved into someone's skin. I suspect it is theirs. It is my first name. It's possible they just found this on google as my name is not terribly unique (not wildly common, either). This is terribly shocking and upsetting. I was actually physically sick and very frightened when I saw it. The accompanying text message was benign, the pictures are terrifying. They uploaded the pictures directly to their profile and linked them in the comments. This person, who I believe is a teenager, has one other friend besides me on their myspace, and mentions my name several times on their profile.

I do not know what to do. I'm afraid to even delete the comment for fear of provoking this clearly disturbed person further. If they lived in the US, I would feel more comfortable contacting authorities, or trying to track down the parents. As it stands, I have no idea what to do as this person is in Mexico, or so says the profile.

I contacted myspace via their customer service form, but beyond that, what can I do? What if they do not respond? My first instinct was to respond to this person, but I stopped myself, as I think that this person just wants attention and I don't want to stoke the fire. My next thought was, delete the comment, unfriend, block, and move on, but frankly, I'm afraid to do that without a gameplan should this escalate.

I am completely freaked out by this. Am I overreacting? To be honest, right now I am so freaked out that I want to delete any self-promotion I have on the entire internet, shut it down completely, stop performing and hide forever. I definitely need some advice.

posted by anonymous to human relations (11 comments total)

This person's behaviour is entirely their own choice and their own responsibility. Unless you are actively encouraging people to harm themselves, you did not cause this person to do this.

Responding to what is an obvious demand for attention (self harming alone is not a demand for attention - posting pictures of it on the internet is) will only escalate the problem. When you ignored their email the first time, they self harmed by scribing your name into their skin. What are they going to do next?

Remove what you can, and block/ignore the rest. Have nothing more to do with this person. If they are old enough to pick up a knife, they are old enough to know the consequences of picking that knife up. Whatever this person does is beyond the scope of your ability to help them. You are not their therapist, parent or emergency care physician. This person probably does need some kind of medical care, but you are not the person to provide that for them. That responsibility falls to their loved ones. If you make a good faith effort to find those loved ones, that is as much as you can reasonably, realistically and practically do.
posted by Solomon at 5:32 AM on August 14 [4 favorites has favorites]

You aren't responsible for what other people do to themselves. You know that of course, and you have no reason to stop promoting yourself online. You need to make a living and this is one of the ways you've chosen to go about it. To discourage this persons kind of behavior, I'd do a blog post on your myspace page that talks about how much you support folks that cut themselves (that you don't think it's healthy, etc) , and link to some organizations that promote healthy body images. I wouldn't respond directly to the person, and I'd remove that post that has the pic. Good luck, and don't let this get you down - you've done nothing wrong.
posted by bigmusic at 5:32 AM on August 14

I echo what is said above, but also keep in mind that you don't know exactly what someone did or did not do. As you speculated, "It's possible they just found this on google as my name is not terribly unique". Try looking at the filename, the google for it. Or, google for yourname cut arm. Also, it could be faked.
posted by mikepop at 5:48 AM on August 14 [1 favorite has favorites]

Is the nature of your art at all violent or dark? If so, this fan may not actually be dangerously disturbed, but rather just a kid with a casual attitude about body carving. I saw a video featuring a fan that carved "Slayer" (referring to the band) into his arm, then set it on fire briefly. (An act that has been repeated since.)

The fan didn't seem at all upset or violent. He was cheerful and didn't seem to be a danger to himself or to Slayer. This wasn't depression- or self-loathing-driven depression. He was just an enthusiastic fan that wanted do something over the top, which seemed appropriate to him because Slayer had also pushed boundaries.

Now, it is certainly not a smart idea to carve messages into your skin for any reason. But your fan may not be harming himself all that much to do it and might not have any idea that it's something that would scare you.

I think you should let him know that you'd rather he not show his appreciation that way and thank him for being a fan. He probably wants you to like him, so he'll probably back off.

I understand, however, if you're too freaked out to contact him directly, so maybe you should go with bigmusic's idea.
posted by ignignokt at 5:55 AM on August 14

Now that you are in the public eye, even disregarding this particular incident, you should review your overall exposure online and on the public record. Is your physical address easily searchable? Your phone numbers? What have you revealed about yourself or your world online?

The number one rule of dealing with wackos is *do not take the bait.* Report this fully to MySpace, including supporting documentation of the pictures, etc. If you receive an explicit threat, report it to your local police (nothing will happen, but you need to start a record with law enforcement if things get more serious). DO NOT respond directly or indirectly to this person. I would recommend deleting the comment, or possibly just disabling commenting entirely. Invite fan mail via email, and respond from a separate email account for that purpose to the ones that seem to deserve a response.

Does your leveraging this opportunity really depend on cultivating a fan base on MySpace? Is there not a more targeted online setting? Not to stereotype or anything, but promoting yourself as an artist/musician/model/whatever on MySpace is a fine way to reach the lowest common denominator market -- throw mud at the wall and see what sticks.
posted by fourcheesemac at 6:01 AM on August 14

You might as well go and buy The Gift of Fear right now. It is really, really good.
posted by kathrineg at 6:38 AM on August 14 [1 favorite has favorites]

You're over-reacting. Delete the comment, unfriend, block, and move on. On the off-chance that he decides to come here for some reason, if and only if he makes it here from Mexico, then you can just call the cops. If he is too clever for that, then there is nothing you can do anyway.

There are a lot of psychos in the world, and if they want to hurt you, there is not much you can do about it (except stop enjoying life). Roll the dice and go on living. Otherwise lock yourself in an airtight cage with a personal life-support system, forever.
posted by Matt Arnold at 7:40 AM on August 14

If you've reported it at this point, I don't think there's much more you can do (I would delete the comment if you haven't already -- does MySpace let people moderate comments before they appear?). I understand you're rightfully freaked out but you're not responsible for this person's actions. (I think mostly, you're doing everything right -- your "reply once" idea is great.)

I know you don't have professional representation, but is there a friend that could help you manage your online presence? Not so much that you wouldn't be in charge of it, but just someone else to help wade through the friend requests and e-mails. You said you were a little overwhelmed before this, so having another set of eyes for all of this would definitely help you step back a little.
posted by darksong at 7:49 AM on August 14

I completely empathize with you, I've written articles in the past that had unintended consequences that I wasn't comfortable with. I wrote a story once about my experiences buying drugs in a part of North Philly that was the hub for black market pharm narcotics, and got contacted by a narcotic squad officer (over Myspace, no less) the following week. He told me he loved the story; he read it after taking the paper it was published in off a kid he busted who was out in the neighborhood looking to score drugs. Then, he said they picked up a bunch more kids over the following week, all walking around literally carrying copies of the paper looking to buy OxyContin for the first time.

Also, I later did a story that was sort of a hard probe into homicides using the Myspace pages of kids from the corner crews involved in the killings. I started getting deluged with Myspace messages from the kids in these crews, all talking about how they were looking out for me and if they saw me around the way they were going to get me. It was very unnerving and I did eventually decide to wind the series down because the non-stop flood of death threats was just too much.

What I did in both these situations was I got with other writers and reporters to sort of process the information, ask for guidance and for them to share similar experiences. I would recommend this; if you know any other artists who do what you do and have experienced a similar surge in visibility you should be talking to them to find out how they handled it and share stories about things like this. It will be therapeutic.

Btw, I keep a Myspace profile because I really like it when kids from the neighborhoods I write about contact me to talk about their lives. That's their preferred social networking site, their search skills are not necessarily well honed and I don't want to shut down that avenue of direct access to me for them. If you enjoy contact from average teenagers who might not be college bound, it's a great way to keep a channel open. But, it's obviously a mixed bag. If you don't want this type of contact, you should really consider giving the password to someone else you trust to manage it, like has been suggested.
posted by The Straightener at 11:06 AM on August 14 [1 favorite has favorites]

One thing you can do is check the photo with tineye, a reverse image search engine, in case it is indeed a "borrowed" photo.
posted by taz at 4:01 AM on August 15

I'm glad I inspire you but Stan
why are you so mad? Try to understand, that I do want you as a fan
I just don't want you to do some crazy shit

The Gift of Fear rule is that you should stop responding. Now. You don't want the person to get into a situation where they figure out "oh, it takes X to get anonymous to respond" -- where X can be five e-mails, ten phone calls, or cutting your name in their skin. That is your gameplan. Escalation is probably a sure bet in the short term, but your gameplan remains the same.

I am so freaked out that I want to delete any self-promotion I have on the entire internet, shut it down completely, stop performing and hide forever.

There are only a few people this screwed up. You may have acquired your quota for a while.
posted by dhartung at 12:02 PM on August 15