Canadian Restaurateur Found Guilty of Online Review Revenge Libel Spree

A Canadian restaurant owner has been found guilty of criminal libel after striking back at a woman who wrote bad online reviews of one of her restaurants. Marisol Simoes sent racy emails claiming to be Elayna Katz to Katz's employers after she wrote a bad online review of Simoes' Ottawa restaurant, Mambo. Simoes also set up a fake dating website profile for Katz. Both the emails and the profile said Katz was a transsexual who was into group sex and threesomes. (Read more on Simoes' virtual revenge spree here.) The harassment campaign went on for a good two years.

Katz told the Ottawa Citizen she feels "vindicated" by the verdict and "It's slightly ironic that the one thing [Simoes] was trying to avoid was the one thing that came out of all of this." That is, a media shitstorm in which thousands of people ended up reading the bad Mambo reviews. Oops. Simoes will be sentenced in November.

· Restaurateur guilty of libelling customer [Ottawa Citizen via @jandrewpotter]
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