[Times art: David Williams]
Ten years ago, they might have scrawled her name and number on the locker room wall. ''For a good time call . . .'' But with the advent of computers and music-swapping software on the Internet, teens have powerful new tools at their disposal, ratcheting up high school taunting to a frightening new level.
By JENNIFER FARRELL
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 8, 2001
I'm just telling you the truth . . .
There's really nothing against you,
till you went up against me
and went to hell, Miss Jaclyn.
-- lyrics from Ms. Jaclyn, by the 352 Boys
* * *
SPRING HILL -- Jaclyn can't even remember how they met.
It was last year. She was a 15-year-old sophomore at Springstead High School in Spring Hill; he was a sophomore at Central High, west of Brooksville.
They had some of the same friends and, soon, she and Sherman Shahin were talking on the phone and messaging each other on the Internet nearly every day.
Transcripts of their Internet conversations are full of the studied boredom of adolescence and the shorthand of the digital age. "Whats up?" is followed inevitably by: "Nuttin much." Sometimes the answer varies to: "Chillin," or "Just hanging out here bored."
"u love me right?" Sherman asked Jaclyn late last June, after school let out for the summer. Seconds later came the answer:
"of course i love ya sherm."
Often, they typed past midnight, with exchanges like this:
* * *
Sherm: i am sleepy
*jac*: oh fine be like that i guess i will tlak to you tomorrwo then maybe
Sherm: goodnight baby
*jac*: night
* * *
Jaclyn initiated many of these chats. She teased Sherman about "liking" her, then told him she couldn't be sure he'd be honest about his feelings. At one point, Sherman wondered if Jaclyn was dating one of his friends.
* * *
Sherm: did u mention me?
*jac*: i havent told him that i like you yet i am tellin him tonight cuz he said he was callin me after he got outta wokr
Sherm: well I'll wait until that happens . . . because once again I am tha good guy and now maybe you can see that
*jac*: yeh i know you are and you are just looking out for your friend which makes it better.. and that is fine for right now and i will tell you what happens after i talk to him tongiht
* * *
As summer glided by, Sherman started going to Jaclyn's house, and they swam in the pool and hung out with her family.
In August, they went back to their respective schools. They still talked on the Internet and the phone, but at some point, she began to withdraw. Jaclyn mentioned other boys she was seeing, and her part-time job at Publix seemed to take up most of her free time.
By September, Sherman was feeling neglected. It showed in his messages, like this one in capital letters, the Internet equivalent of shouting:
"WHERE YOU BEEN? TOO GOOD TO TALK TO ME?"
It was two minutes till midnight, and Jaclyn's answer was brief: "no i havent been home a whole lot lately . . . workin and my friend was in the hospital and stuff sorry babe"
"yeah yeah yeah," Sherman wrote back.
* * *
Sherman and his friend Matt Clark call themselves the 352 Boys, a name they took from the area code in Hernando County. They aspire to be rap stars, and they've already got the chunky jewelry, the baggy clothes and the cocky swagger. "It's a God-given talent," Sherman says.
Matt is 15, a freshman at Central, the taller and quieter of the pair. He figures he'll go to business school, then work behind the scenes in the music industry. He will produce nothing but hits.
Sherman, a shameless flirt and reserve guard on the varsity basketball team, is 16 and longs for the limelight. Maybe he'll be a news anchor. Or a SportsCenter host.
"I want to be on TV," he says between gulps of two Big Macs he wolfs down at McDonald's, one of his favorite haunts. "I want to be an actor. I want to be in the spotlight. I want to be someone who's known."
They've put together two CDs, mostly song parodies. The first, called Ghetto Economy, they sold at school from their backpacks for $5, which they say netted them close to a thousand bucks. That bought them a lot of fast food, and a keyboard and recording equipment for work on their next album, Survival of the Fattest.
They made a movie parody called Sunday, based on the 1995 cult favorite Friday, and charged friends $3 to watch it. They are at work on the sequel, Next Sunday.
Their song lyrics are thick with sexual innuendo and are sometimes racist and violent. Titles include Sand N----, I Need a Fat Girl and I'll Rail You.
* * *
"We represent where we come from," Matt says. "We rap about stuff that we do for real."
Says Sherman: "We'll make fun of people, but we really don't mean no harm. We don't hurt nobody."
That's all they did, he says, when they transformed a popular Outkast song into a graphic sexual parody, with Ms. Jackson becoming Ms. Jaclyn.
The song was payback for the time Sherman says Jaclyn overreacted to a passing reference to her in an earlier 352 Boys song by slapping him in front of his friends.
"Someone comes to your school, some girl comes up to you, what are you going to do? You can't hit a girl. That's disrespectful," he says. "That's where you make your stand, you don't directly talk about her, but everyone can hear what you don't like about her."
Sherman says he and Matt have nothing to apologize for.
"It never said her (last) name. We told her, 'Go ahead and sue us.' "
* * *
This one right here,
goes out to all you sluts, whores
It ain't your fault,
your mama was a slut,
your daddy and even your little kids will be sluts
* * *
Jaclyn was alone the first time she heard the song. Her younger sister told her it had been posted on Napster, a music-swapping site on the Internet that allows anyone with a computer to download and share music for free. She logged on one night at home and listened, then immediately deleted the file from the family computer. Jaclyn didn't want her parents to find the song, and she didn't want to preserve it for others to copy the next time she signed on to Napster.
One morning before school, she heard whispers in the halls. A boy in her first-period marketing class had gotten hold of a copy of Ms. Jaclyn and was planning to play it before the bell.
"I told Bobby, 'Please don't play it,' " Jaclyn remembers. "I was flipping out."
Class was quiet until the final few minutes, when Bobby Colon walked to the side of the room and stood next to a bank of computers. He leaned over, inserted a CD and pressed play.
Most of the 25 students in class had already heard the song, but Jaclyn still felt embarrassed and humiliated. She remembers yelling at the teacher to make it stop as one girl stood up and danced.
* * *
At home that afternoon, Jaclyn asked her mother: "What does it take to be home schooled?" Then she asked how long until the rest of the family would be moving to another town, where her father had started a new job managing car dealerships.
Her mother called her father, and he rushed home to Spring Hill.
Jaclyn's parents, Donna and Joe, had noticed changes in their daughter: Her grades had slipped, she had gained and lost weight, and they heard her pacing the house in the middle of the night. But only now did she finally tell them everything that had been going on.
Her car had been keyed in the parking lot at school, then later at work. She had gotten into a fistfight at Taco Bell with the girl who had danced in class.
The boy who had downloaded the song from the Internet for Bobby had set up a parody Web site about Springstead, where students could sign in under fake names and write anything they wanted. Many took the opportunity to trash Jaclyn. She also was the subject of a sexually graphic cartoon slide show on the site.
"When kids get harassed like this over and over, an adult couldn't take what she's taken over the last six months," says Donna, 39. "They would have cracked."
* * *
Forever never seems like that long
when you's a whore
I know more guys who went through you
than a door
* * *
Sherman had promised Jaclyn that he wouldn't post the song on Napster. After it showed up there, he told her Matt must have done it. Jaclyn's father reached Sherman over the computer to get Matt's address, then Jaclyn came on and told Sherman her father was going to contact the police and the boys' parents.
This computer exchange between Sherman and Jaclyn took place in the span of two minutes:
* * *
Sherm: well i mean since you want to bring this legally I am sick of hearing this
Sherm: I mean honestly
*jac*: well i really dont wanna do this to you but matt f----- up my life so im gonna f--- with his a lil and this has nuttin to do with me my parentsare pissed so gert over it
Sherm: no I'll call the sherrifs office anytime you would like, because you find one time your name was used in that song and then u can actually do something
*jac*: i didnt do anyhting to you guys to deserve this you took apoon yourselfs to ruin my life
* * *
A few minutes later, Sherman wrote: "u started it."
Jaclyn replied: "no i didnt i didnt f------ do anything to you.... whatever tho go f--- yourself sherman...we used to be friends and this s--- came out of nowhere......im leavin bye"
* * *
Yeah we sang this song
But let bygones be bygones
And you can go on and get your f--- on
* * *
Jaclyn's parents complained to administrators at Springstead, to the school resource officer and to the Hernando County Sheriff's Office. They got little satisfaction.
The song wasn't made in school and contained no overt threat of violence, so everyone told them nothing could be done. The school resource officer told Jaclyn: "I think you need to get a little bit tougher, Jackie."
Joe was furious at what happened and frustrated that no one could help. He called Matt's mother, but she brushed him off, saying boys will be boys. The school "looked at it more as a bunch of kids screwing around," he says.
He still seethes at Sherman and Matt's attitude. "They freely admit it, and they don't care, and nobody can touch them. . . . They know they can pretty much do whatever they want."
Donna admits that she's had trouble keeping her temper. "I tried the legal avenues. I tried all the school avenues. My kid's being victimized on a daily basis. . . . No one's willing to take responsibility for it."
Springstead principal Dot Dodge told the family that she had suspended the three students involved in the classroom incident and reprimanded the teacher. Beyond that, the principal said, there was little she could do.
The principal at Central had heard of the 352 Boys but said he didn't know the particulars of the song. "We can't deal with all the things that happen with our youngsters in the community," Dennis McGeehan said. "There are a lot of misuses of technology. Kids can today do things in a much broader scale."
Bob Breeden, who runs the computer crime center for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, says students harassing each other via computer is a growing problem. Sheriff's deputies in Madison County are investigating a parody Web site where students can sign on with fake names and taunt each other. One girl posted a hit list that named high school students who should die. She was suspended for two weeks.
The Student Press Law Center estimates that at least half the high schools in America have underground Web sites. That translates to at least 10,000 such sites across the country, probably more, with more going online every day.
Breeden says First Amendment protection of free speech limits what his agency can do for someone like Jaclyn.
"We have problems with this all the time," he says. "It's not a criminal matter, it's a civil matter."
Joe and Donna have contacted a lawyer.
"Hundreds and hundreds of people have downloaded this song," Donna says. "This is the equivalent of having your name in the boys' bathroom times a billion. It's such a vicious assault. It's indescribable."
* * *
Yeah look, I know I started this but, s---,
now you don't want to be friends
And all your little-ass homegirls
are gonna get what's coming to them
* * *
The family has begun a new life in a new place. The Times is not publishing their last name to protect Jaclyn's identity in her new school. Her last day at Springstead was Feb. 16.
"It's been really hard on all of us," says Donna, who has a number of in-laws and friends in the Spring Hill area but was more than ready to get out. "I really don't feel as if we're leaving anything behind. It's time to just go."
The 352 Boys made good on their threat to fire beyond Jaclyn. A handful of her friends were featured in another sexually graphic parody. Having seen what happened to her, Jaclyn says, her friends opted to lay low.
Sherman's and Matt's mothers defend their sons' music.
"I'd much rather have them making CDs than out doing drugs," says Matt's 31-year-old mother, Cammie Clark. "They are doing a good thing. . . . I have copies of all their CDs. They've both been doing it since they were 9-year-olds. They're both honor students and they're good kids."
Sherman's mother, Bernie Garbinsky, says she was "blindsided" by the controversy over Ms. Jaclyn. She hadn't heard the song all the way through but says she is concerned about the amount of cursing in others she has heard. When she questioned Sherman about it, she says he told her: "That's what sells, Mom. Everybody does it."
Garbinsky, 38, says Sherman isn't supposed to use "bad words," but she hasn't been able to stop him.
"They're good boys, too," she says. "And then they talk like that, and it's, like, amazing."
* * *
This ain't just for Jaclyn
Next time any of you mother------
wanna f--- with the 352 boys
We take your f----- reputation
and break it into pieces
You heard me?
You heard the song
There's a lot of you coming up
* * *
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