A little under 18 months ago, I wrote a blog about my experiences with some trolls on the Amazon forums. I won’t go into too many details (if you want to read the original post, it can by found here) but suffice to say, I was attacked by an organised  group and as is my way, I took them on.

Now this battle went on for some considerable time and dragged in all kinds of people including authors and websites the majority of whom were based in the US. However, central to it all and the person who became my nemesis, was a troll who hid behind the moniker of Anna Karenina.

Anna, like most trolls, was an attention and power seeker. Using multiple identities on all kinds of sites relating to both reading and self-publishing, she built up a powerful network of equally disturbed people whose sole remit was to destroy the confidence (and sales) of authors through the simple tactic of posting poisonous and even fake reviews of their work then slaughtering them if they responded. And by slaughtering, I mean abusing to the extent where some actually became suicidal.

How do I know that? Well not because they had any impact on me because I have a thick skin and besides, my market is the UK, not the US, but because I stood up to them. And by doing so I encouraged others to do likewise, albeit less vocally than I.

Together, a group of us went on the offensive and over a period of months, by putting together all kinds of seemingly unrelated snippets of information we eventually discovered Anna’s true identity as well as her place of work.   Yes, our Anna is a middle aged single woman who teaches second grade at a school in San Francisco. Yes, a teacher. And astonishingly, we also discovered that she carried out much of her trolling from the school whilst she was actually supposed to be teaching!

Now, at this point I stepped away from the fight primarily because the amount of time it was consuming was impacting on work. However, yesterday I took a fresh look to catch up on the latest news and lo and behold, it appears that queen troll has got her comeuppance. Not only have some of her victims and a number of high profile anti-troll campaigners been in direct contact with the school authorities complaining about her but a number of parents at the school have been made aware of events and are far from happy at the idea of their offspring being taught by such an obviously disturbed woman. Indeed, as far as I can tell, she is close to losing her job for contravening the schools policy regarding IT use. As if that wasn’t bad enough, her personal details have been spread all over the web which can’t be much fun.

Sympathy however, is in short supply from me. I’ve seen the kind of misery this woman created for people and if you believe in karma as I do, the worm turning on our ‘Anna’ is the very least she deserves.

.

In other news, as you may have seen if you are following things on either Facebook or Twitter, Top Dog will be released in DVD format on May 28th. You can pre order it by clicking here.

A number of people have asked me about cinema screenings as well as possible events surrounding the release and whilst I can confirm that there will indeed be some, I can’t as yet give you any details. Keep an eye on Facebook and Twitter and all will be revealed!

Ahead of that, the end of April will see filming commence on the urban revenge thriller We Still Kill The Old Way which will again be produced by Jonathan Sothcott (Top Dog, Vendetta) and will be directed by Sacha Bennett who many people will know from the movie, Bonded by Blood.

I’ll post more about that over the next couple of weeks but if all goes to plan, it’s going to be an amazing experience and tremendous fun to work on!

These next few months are going to be quite something. Happy days indeed!

 

troll, greenstreet, sex, porn, pornography, oral, top dog, british film, screenwriting, author, actor, action, hooligan, violence, trolling, amazon, goodreads