Rent-Way pursues critic posting Web messages
By Clint Engel -- Furniture Today, February 1, 2004
ERIE, Pa. — ERIE, Pa. — Rent-Way and its chairman and CEO are suing an anonymous Internet message-board poster charging that the person has defamed the rent-to-own company and its leader.
The company and CEO Bill Morgenstern say the messages from someone who posts on a Yahoo public message board "falsely charge Morgenstern with the commission of a crime" and have humiliated him and hurt his reputation and standing in the community, according to the suit filed in state court here.
The individual posts as "goodbyerentway" and is believed to be a former Rent-Way employee based on the content of some of the messages, said Ron DeMoss, vice president and general counsel for the RTO operator, which has 753 stores in 33 states.
Rent-Way has asked the court to issue a subpoena ordering Yahoo to disclose the defendant's name. Yahoo's policy has been to notify users when it receives such an order, informing them of its plans to comply while giving users time to hire an attorney to fight the move, DeMoss said.
While there have been similar lawsuits involving libel, DeMoss said he isn't aware of a comparable case in which a message-board poster has accused someone of criminal activity.
"I see this as the equivalent of stalking," he said.
"Goodbyerentway" has posted nearly 200 messages on the board in more than a year. They generally criticize company management, and many allege a link between Morgenstern and a three-year old accounting scandal that led to the conviction of three former company executives.
In a post this month, "goodbyerentway" said, "The World Trade Center housed some items that were burned up linking Bill to events (involving accounting fraud at Rent-Way). I did not say he was not smart when it came to this Fraud."
Some documents Rent-Way provided to the Securities and Exchange Commission for the accounting probe were indeed destroyed in the terrorist attacks, DeMoss confirmed, but he added that they were merely copies that were duplicated and supplied again to investigators. Nevertheless, that's the kind of content that has led Rent-Way to suspect that "goodbyerentway" was once an employee.
In a post after former Rent-Way President Jeffrey Conway was sentenced to 13 months in prison for his role in the $60 million accounting scandal, "goodbyerentway" wrote to "Bills" Morgenstern and two other top executives:
"Just because you apparently got away scott-free {sic} as they say does not mean that the truth will not come out.… When you help a criminal survive, it will all come back to bite you all!!"
Even if free speech and privacy issues foil Rent-Way in this case, DeMoss said the posts have affected the morale of some employees, and they need to know Rent-Way disputes the charges and is "at least making a public statement it's not true....
"We want our employees to know that we did not just sit back and say this is not important to us, because we think it should be," he said.
Rent-Way and Morgenstern are seeking unspecified amounts in compensatory and punitive damages.
Late last year, Rent-Way pursued another Yahoo poster who used the names "curtcantspell" and "kurtcantspell" and claimed to be an employee. In his posts, he suggested that he was engaged in various prohibited activities from sexual harassment to racial discrimination to embezzlement, DeMoss said.
In a settlement this month, the poster confirmed that he is not a current employee and apologized on the message board for false statements. He said he worked for Rent-Way for eight years — five as a store manager — but his employment ended early last year.
"The fact that we were successful in the 'curtcantspell' case caused us to give more serious thought to this one too," DeMoss said. Based on that experience, he said, Rent-Way expects a court to rule on the subpoena seeking the release of "goodbyerentway's" identity within three weeks.
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