Dorm rumors

Juicy Campus helps college students spread secrets and lies - and ruin one another's reputations

NICK NAPOLITANO, a student at Boston College, says, ''You'd think that people [at BC] would hold themselves to a higher moral, ethical standard.'' (Essdras m suarez/globe staff)

Imagine being the young woman at Boston College who was described on an Internet gossip site as "the biggest slam pig of them all, a disgusting disease-infected whore."

Or the young man at Boston University who was said to be organizing a "gay parade" and needed "hot guys" to volunteer. "Be prepared to convince me of your gayness."

Or the freshman at Northeastern who was described in X-rated terms as "a ho."

Across the country, college students are trading personal postings about their classmates, from the "ugliest sorority girl" at Truman State to "frat fags" at Clemson. Some postings simply state a person's name with the command "Discuss" underneath. And they do, often in highly profane and personal terms.

Juicycampus.com has taken college gossip to a new level, transmitted instantly and anonymously. Students can post whatever they please - true or false, trivial or traumatizing - about whomever they please. The result is a free-for-all message board that makes bathroom scribbles look like kid's play. The website was started 15 months ago on seven campuses and has spread to 500 colleges. Boston is a particularly busy locale, since it hosts 300,000 college students on dozens of campuses.

Matt Ivester, a 2005 graduate of Duke University, founded Juicy Campus, whose slogan is "C'mon. Give us the juice." The site states: "This is the place to spill the juice about all the crazy stuff going on at your campus. It's totally anonymous - no registration, login, or email verification required."

The writers may be anonymous, but their victims are very much identified. At BC, one thread names a student and asks, "Is this girl a straight-up ho or what?" At Northeastern: "Who hooked up with hockey players this year? Name them and comment." People did. The girl at Northeastern who "looks like a Muppet" got off easy. Ditto for the BC freshman who was merely called "a real tool."

Some shrug Juicy Campus off as silly; others think it's toxic. Whichever, it gets a million visits a month. "It became incredibly popular incredibly quickly," says Ivester, 25, who was president of his fraternity at Duke. "There are 2,400 four-year institutions in the US, and we'd like to be on every single one of them." It is solely up to Juicy Campus, headquartered in Los Angeles, to add campuses to its roster.

Ivester says he loved gossiping with fraternity brothers at Duke. "So why not have a place where you could share ridiculous, hilarious, entertaining high jinks of campus life?"

The problem is that such high jinks often degenerate into pernicious postings that some deem libelous and others call hate speech. Mike Carollo, a Boston University freshman, tried to laugh off the recent posts about him. "But it definitely hurt a lot," says Carollo, 18, of Freehold, N.J. "Things were said about me that weren't true, about my sex life." Carollo, who is gay, was called "a whore," and "that was one of the way nicer words."

Carollo is the one who was falsely said to be holding a gay parade and needed "hot guy" volunteers. He was particularly upset that it gave his address: "This takes it to a whole different level. The website is completely horrible."

The fact that the comments are anonymous encourages the more scurrilous chatter. "It's cowardly, because people are protected by anonymity," says Pilar Landon, a senior at Boston College. She was the victim of a thread that began: "What do you think of Pilar Landon?" There were only three responses: "Don't even get me started" was one, the second called her a profane name, and the third came to her defense. As editor of the school newspaper, The Heights, Landon is visible on campus. "I've had to have a thick skin because of my position on the paper," says Landon, 21, of San Diego.

Classmate Nick Napolitano's alleged sex life was also mentioned. "In my eyes, if you're writing on this site you're complete losers," says Napolitano, 21, of Rochester, N.Y. "BC is a really good school, a Jesuit school, and you'd think that people would hold themselves to a higher moral, ethical standard."

Claire Harvey, a Duke sophomore from Brookline, is embarrassed for her school, too. Because the founder went to Duke, it was one of Juicy Campus' first sites. A recent posting listed the 12 girls who live in Harvey's dorm suite. This girl was fat. That girl was ugly. This one was anorexic. That one was a slut. "My group of girls was pretty torn up about it," says Harvey, 19.

Gossip targets at some schools have reported getting emotionally devastated and even physically ill over the postings. Some have said that it ruined their entire academic year.

But Ivester remains unabashedly proud of the network he created. Legally he thinks he's covered. Guidelines on the site state that users must agree not to post material that is abusive or obscene - though the rules seem to be honored mostly in the breach. Juicy Campus says it isn't responsible or liable for the content and doesn't vouch for its "reliability, accuracy, legitimacy, or quality."

That doesn't impress the attorneys general of New Jersey and Connecticut, who are investigating Juicy Campus for fraud for not enforcing its own policy against offensive material. And Google removed the site from its advertising network because it violated the company's ban against "excessive profanity."

Some colleges have considered blocking the site from their servers, but administrators don't want to be seen as censors, and students who live off campus would simply use their own Internet service provider. But last month Tennessee State University decided to block access. In a scathing letter posted on the Juicy Campus blog, Ivester said TSU had joined "the ranks of the Chinese government in Internet censorship."

Ivester has spent much time defending his "entertainment" website, saying that it's all about free speech. But doesn't the caliber of the conversation bother him? He says he doesn't like "the personal attacks or mean-spirited stuff," and in response to complaints, posted a letter reminding users that "words can hurt" and "hate isn't juicy."

Though some may question his sincerity, Juicy Campus seems on fairly firm legal ground. Under the Communications Decency Act of 1996, site operators who don't edit, moderate, or screen content cannot be treated as the authors of such content. "Juicy Campus, under the way the law is written now, can't be held responsible," says Dale Herbeck, who teaches cyberlaw at Boston College. Nor is Juicy Campus obliged to take down defamatory material. "If you trash someone's reputation, it can stay up there forever," says Herbeck, who believes that Juicy Campus should police itself. "There should be a time limit on this stuff so that it vaporizes."

In case of a defamation claim, the plaintiff's lawyer would attempt to get the poster's identity through Juicy Campus. "So if someone said something horrific about you, you can't sue Juicy Campus, but you can go to court and Juicy Campus would have to serve up the individual and you could sue them," Herbeck says.

The First Amendment protects offensive speech unless it's defamatory. To recover damages, the plaintiff would have to prove that the words are both false and defamatory. That individual, once identified, could then be sued, says Herbeck, but the process is daunting for college students.

"It would have to be a really compelling case - if I had a job offer and you said something horribly defamatory, the prospective employer found out and terminated me," Herbeck says. "In that case I'd have a good financial claim. But for a lot of this, it's typical Juicy Campus 'He's-a-drunkard, she's-a-slut' stuff. It's hard to see a huge damage claim."

So far, posters appear to have been protected from the threat of lawsuits by the cloak of anonymity. But that guarantee isn't ironclad. Twice, Ivester has turned over URLs to police: when a student from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles threatened to shoot others on campus, and when a Colgate student wondered if he could get classes canceled by starting a shooting spree. With the students' Internet addresses in hand, police apprehended them.

In the end, what goes around comes around. Ivester is often described in lewd and obscene terms on his own website. The post that called him a "low-life scumbag" was among the more polite comments.