The fake Facebook profile I could not get removed

I'll never know why the kids did it, but there it was: Sleazy, horrifying, and I was powerless to get it taken down

By Susan Arnout Smith
Salon

I've been a writer a long time, but chances are, you don't know my name.

I've written thrillers, been an essayist for NPR, won the Stanley Drama Award as a playwright and was finalist for a PEN-West for a television movie. In other words, I write and get paid for it, but I'm not Mary Higgins Clark or John Grisham. And yet somebody thought it was a great idea to steal my identity and put up a fake profile on Facebook with the privacy settings removed.

It was a colleague who alerted me. I'd hired Wiley Saichek from AuthorsOnTheWeb.com the year before to do some Internet P.R. on my latest book. He'd encouraged me to join Facebook for visibility. I'd begged off; Facebook sounded like a massive time suck. But, worried I was out of touch with the literary world, I relented -- and joined.

I was still in that first-week euphoria -- reestablishing connections, notes from people I hadn't seen or heard of in years -- when I got the e-mail from Wiley.

(More here.)