"I first saw you the night you came into the video store where I work. Right away, the moment you walked in the door I knew you were an actress and I knew someday you will be a star. A BIG star!!! This website is dedicated to you, the woman I love, the woman that I will one day spend the rest of my life with. It's for you Julie."
So reads the introduction to a Web site which seemed at first look like a sweet cyberspace version of the secret diary of a lovelorn young man. The only sour notes were three: a) The Web site's creator claimed to have slipped a voyeurcam into the girl's apartment; b) He offered video streams of her on the site, amidst journal entries about his love for her and his anguish over her apparent indifference; and, c) The whole thing is a colossal hoax.
It's not that www.ForTheLoveofJulie.com doesn't look real enough. In fact, it looked and felt so real the Los Angeles County Sheriff suggested strongly that the site owners take it down. They thought at first that the site was real, says Deputy Sgt. Larry Balich to Wired - and that was precisely the point of it, says Tim Street of Spark Factory, the Santa Monica firm that created the Web site. Indeed, the site came back online March 17 with a disclaimer that it was, essentially, a work of fiction, and "Julie is not in any danger".
But it gets a little more tricky. On the firewall a user sees at the front door, a box pops up at once from Creepysites.com inviting the user in: "We found this creepy site quite by accident and had to hack around its password, and we're almost sorry we did. Look at this one first, because the guy who put it up is bound to get busted soon."
Guess who also owns Creepysites.com, a.k.a. Fortheloveofjulie.com? Tim Street does.
Here are just two of the entries in the journal about "Julie" he posts on the Web site: "Monday November 1, 1999. I bought a new video camera and I can't wait to tape you! I bet you're very photogenic. It'll be like a Hollywood screen test. Tuesday November 2, 1999. You at work waiting on me. I just love the way you asked me, "Do you see anything you like?" You are SO BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!!!!!"
The journal included links to images the author purportedly took of his crush on the video cam. But a check of the links the afternoon of March 17 by AVN On the Net showed the images replaced by text.
And some critics like Feminist.com president Marianne Schnall say they're not too thrilled. "Owners can say, 'Oh, we're not responsible for how people use the information,'" she said. "That's just not the right attitude to have. Violence against women is a really serious issue, and it makes you wonder whether sites like daterape.org (which was shut down earlier last week) and this trivialize these very important issues and it may actually encourage this type of behavior."
Street, though, says he's offering entertainment only, and gets thousands of views per day. "Whether this is true or not, the site's producers are making an effort to boost page views, and they've started pumping out press releases boasting that their site 'adds an interactive element to serialized content and brings Internet stalking and voyeurism to a heightened reality'," says Wired .
Hallie Bird, the 20-year-old Canadian actress who plays Julie, admits to Wired that the site is creepy. "There's one [movie] where you see my feet [while I'm] changing clothes, that was the creepiest one," she said.
Street's ambitions reportedly include turning the stunt into a feature film to pick up where the online journal leaves off, the magazine says, but he'd also like to avoid trouble with the law. "It's not like we're freedom fighters or anything," he tells Wired. "We don't want to rock the boat with law enforcement, but we're protected under freedom of speech."
