Lying Liars
*The part about the bone is true

By Gene Weingarten
Sunday, June 15, 2008

HAVE YOU EVER heard of gossipreport.com? It's a controversial, six-month-old Web site that encourages people to gossip about their friends and neighbors. The gossipers are anonymous, but the people being gossiped about are identified by name and often by photo. The site's motto is "You tattle, we tell."

Now, I know what you are thinking. You are thinking: Wow, that's a bad idea! But you're thinking that only because you haven't visited gossipreport.com. If you'd visited it, you'd know it is a colossally, horrendously bad idea, like sausage-flavored soda, or "The Holocaust on Ice," or "Gigli II." It violates just about every norm of human decency.

A stroll through gossipreport.com establishes that it is the exclusive province of empty-headed, mean-spirited, vulgar, provincial, petty losers who can't spell. Here's an actual example:

"I heard she got divorced cause she stapled the bed sheets around her first husband real tight then beat him with a fryin pan. He told everybody he got in a 4 wheeler accident but . . .''

And a user named ihearthank writes:

"Lacey seems to have it all together, but I know something about Lacey that no one does . . . Lacey eats her toenails."

And:

"Talk about the biggest looser! He has .02% blood in his alcohol. Last summer in a drunken state he threatened to kill all my cats, then two of my cats vanished and only one came back! Oh, and did I tell you what he did to my chainsaw? He spiked my two-cycle engine gas with either kerosene or diesel . . . "

And there is the occasional vicious backhand:

"She is a very sweet and genuine person. However, I've been hearing lots of rumors that she is bulimic . . . "

One news story about gossipreport.com discovered teen-agers who were terrified to go to their high school because of what their classmates had said anonymously about them. If the creators of gossipreport.com defended it simply on the grounds of free speech, they would just be irresponsible jerks. But in media mailings and an interview with the press, founder Elizabeth Bloch has actually said that her site's gossip is important, the work of citizen journalists who community-edit to delete the dubious, the malicious and the unfair. "We're about finding the truth," Bloch has said.

That's when it occurred to me to test out the site's noble quest for truth. I asked a few friends of mine to create dippy pseudonyms for themselves, and together we started savaging me on gossipreport.com. My profile features the photo at the center of this page.

"He carries that stick EVERYWHERE," reports shortskirt123. "It's a walrus penis bone. And he uses it to club ducklings to death. In front of children!"

"This guy never changes his underpants," writes trashypants. "I mean, never! I know because I have a contact at the laundry he uses. There's never any underpants!"

Here's another:

"Young women are always throwing themselves at him, and he treats them like dirt. Once, this pretty thing shows up at his house late at night and says, 'Take me.' So he does! He takes her pocketbook, locks her out of the house and calls the cops, says she's a stalker. I lost two hundred bucks and spent that night in jail. I mean, my friend. This happened to my friend. I want him dead, except I also want him so bad."

Gurrlegs 27 writes: "I was standing on line at CVS and this guy was behind me . . . TOTALLY staring at my butt. And I was like what are you looking at. And he goes, at is a preposition, you know. And then he kept staring at my butt."

Porky wrote: "I watched him rob a convenience store without a weapon. He goes in and tells the cashier she has to give him everything in the register. She says why, and he says, 'because you want to do it for me, and you know it.' There is like this pause and she does it! She even put in that little rubber-thumb thingie they use to count bills."

From sacksofsugar: "When I went with him my doctor had to double my birth control. Those things of his are baaad."

As I write this, a week has passed, and all of these items remain on the Web site, even though they are patently bogus and ridiculous. I have to say, the site doesn't seem to be doing too splendidly as a whole, traffic-wise. Six of my items are now in gossipreport.com's top-10 most popular postings of the week, almost certainly because of the eyeballing by my friends and me.

Gossipreport.com needs more posts! Imagine what would happen if everyone you knew posted ludicrously overheated, completely ridiculous stuff about you, until the site was overwhelmed by silliness, and no one could tell what was intended as truth, and what was parody. Some freaked out high school kids would be grateful.

Gene Weingarten can be reached at weingarten@washpost.com.

Chat with him online Tuesdays at noon.