Police Arrest MySpace Girl For Party Disaster
14 04 2007Or, It Da Innanet Innit, What Made Me Do It! Wasn’t me, Mam!
I have to say when I read Police Arrest MySpace girl for party disaster, at first I thought – Just another MySpace story. Then I read on and couldn’t believe what I was reading. The gist of it is that Rachel Bell, who is 17, hosted a “let’s trash my house” party, inviting people to her parent’s house through her MySpace site. The resulting damage is hovering around £20,000. It also resulted in the police, coming to the house, trying to contain the disturbance. And criminal damage. Rachel’s lame attempt at trying to blame hackers for doctoring her site is almost amusing. Almost.
Actually, she blames her school friends for taking over her site to tempt those interested in a night of sex and drink at “Rachel’s place”.
Yeah. Right. She’ll have to do better than that. Rachel was apparently too scared to face her parents, who, on having their very nice home on a private estate wrecked, have been forced to rent temporary accommodation. They had been on a caravan holiday with Rachel’s sister and two brothers. Rachel “apologized” to her mother by phone after being in hiding.
They had forbidden her to have guests in while they were away. She has admitted asking round 60 friends - and a couple of DJs. But she blames the hackers.
“It was just supposed to be a party with a few friends and it turned into a complete nightmare. I’m sorry, mam,” she said. “It was so surreal - it still seems surreal. You just can’t imagine anything like it happening. I’m really, really sorry, I absolutely regret everything. I still haven’t properly slept, I just keep waking up and thinking about what happened.”
The party led to pandemonium in Woodstone village, near Houghton-le-Spring, as seven police cars, including a dog unit, sealed off the street and tried to cope with drunken teenagers - and allegedly some children as young as 11 - until after 4am. Enraged neighbours with golf clubs chased partygoers, who had arrived from as far away as London, blocking the cul-de-sac with minibuses and cars.
Mrs Bell said yesterday that the £230,000 house felt “as though it had been raped”, with vomit, graffiti and urine on floors, clothes and beds. Her other children’s things had been trashed in an apparent copycat version of an incident on Channel 4’s teen soap Skins.”
Apparently “reviews” of the party are appearing on the Internet. Rachel says she is sorry, but the MySpace Messages kind of make that somewhat hard to believe…and I don’t read anywhere that she has taken any responsibility for what she did.
“A message at the MySpace site about the party, left on Wednesday at 12.10 (all spellings as on the website)
heyyy, have you heard anything from the party or have any updates. just apparantly we have some info that there was press there this mornin, talk of the woods is that there was helipcopters n cctv vans around the estate on the night but i was in the house then so i dunno
A reply, apparently from Rachel Bell… left on Wednesday 12.38
haaa i no was’nt in any other photo’s!! ekkk well i hope u liked the party ..was fuckin wild like!!!hmmm another lol???xx”
Yes, she sounds very sorry indeed… what a horrible child to have. I read things like this and I’m even more relieved I’m childfree.
Oh, and how long before the Internet – and social networking sites of course – are blamed for this? Of course, the stupid kid would never have been able to have a wild house party it without “Da Innanet…Or MySpace”
Original story by Martin Wainwright, The Guardian, April 14
Technorati Tags: MySpace, childfree
Woah, I guess I need to go delete MySpace lol.
There have been a lot of hackers around MySpace recently so her version of the story may be true. I know a couple of friends who’s accounts were hacked but those weren’t genuine hackers, just lame spam attacks. One of them was pretty weird actually, a friend of mine posted a spam comment on my myspace and then she couldn’t log in. She said she never posted the spam comment. However, when I deleted the spam comment, she was able to log in and I thought this was really weird.
Websites which offer social networking do have their pro’s and cons. It’s only that MySpace has become so huge in recent times that it comes in the limelight for all the wrong reasons. I think it depends on the user. People just go on adding “friends” even though they don’t even know them and ultimately one of them turns out to be a hacker and your account is gone, and all your pictures and stuff as well. Personally, I think one should never give away the correct address or post pictures of oneself on such a site because it isn’t safe. But people continue doing the same and end up getting themselves and the website screwed. I just hope this brings sense into them.
As soon as I posted this I got a ping back from a Splog called Pimp My MySpace blog. I deleted it because it framed my post with”written by britgirl for MySpace News” and loads of ads… anyway, on this splog were several comments, presumably from readers - all asking how they could hack into their boyfriend’s/girlfriends/friends MySpace blog…”cuz they didn’t trust them.” Hmm. Not very confidence inspiring.”
Rachel still admitted to inviting 60 people though… kind of a stretch when parents said none).
I agree one should never give real names, addresses and so on on sites like MySpace… it’s asking for trouble.
Man, If I had ever done this when I was living with my parents, both of them would have kicked my ass from here to Australia and back! Can you say “slam-dunk”!?
Well, so far I haven’t run into any real trouble on MySpace [knocks on some wood!!], even with my chat handles posted on it, but wife Christine had a run in with someone who hacked a friend’s account and posted some bad HTML on her comment box. Result: her page was f–ked up for awhile. It would have been ok, IF it had been properly written, but, oh well… that’s education for you! (Speaking of education, have schools these days gotten away from teaching kids how to write in the “good” English!?)
I agree that her MS page COULD have been hacked by her friends or others…. but from what with the story reading like it does, I highly doubt it. When kids are that scared, they’ll think up any wild explanation at first before thinking of the consequences of tall yarns!
Chris, you say your parents would have kicked you til you arrived Down Under, I would’ve been dead.
That’s it. My parents would’ve gone to jail for murder but probably get off on a justifiable once the jury hears what I did.
What an stupid brat they have. I wonder if that’s reason enough to put her up for adoption (but then, who would take her).
LOL, my parents wouldn’t even believe I had a Myspace. However when they would, they’d probably kill me and make it look like I committed suicide because I screwed everything up. Waah, that was rather clever. I just hope they don’t read this
Hackers do a lot of damage at MySpace. I have friends who’ve had to change their passwords several times or completely delete their accounts because of that. In the case of that kid, I’d have to be very skeptical about her excuse as to why the party got out of hand. Her “friends” at MySpace may have jacked her up online, in which case, she needs to hang around some new people. On the other hand, it was probably another stupid teenage thing to do, in which case, her parents should hold her accountable for all of the damage. If it takes her until she is 30 years old to pay it off, tough.
Hillari - Yep, she shouldn’t be allowed to wriggle out. But with her mother worried about the state of the girl’s mind (as in oh, dear, what if she does something to her self?)… fat chance of that happening. My response, if she wants to top herself, let her go right ahead. She seems to be too much of a coward for that.
Strawberry and Chris - If I did something like that, I’d be dead. But it would never enter my head to invite people round… sod’s law would be that my Mum and Dad would come back to the house having forgotten something!
Ish - LOL!