In this story from the Washington Post, it was reported that a few individuals were alleged to have identified fellow poster’s actual identity on autoadmit.com, a popular pre-law and student discussion forum in the US. Subsequently, they posted defamatory and abusive entries directed at and about those identified. Some of the victims, law students from top US schools, had connections to a prestigious US firm that took on the case pro-bono in a effort to identify the online attackers. Recently, their efforts met with success.

From wired.com:

“AK-47 was one of a handful of students heaping misogynist scorn on women attending the nations’ top law schools in 2007, in posts so vile they spurred a national debate on the limits of online anonymity, and an unprecedented federal lawsuit aimed at unmasking and punishing the posters…Now lawyers for two female Yale Law School students have ascertained AK-47’s real identity, along with the identities of other AutoAdmit posters, who all now face the likely publication of their names in court records — potentially marking a death sentence for the comment trolls’ budding legal careers even before the case has gone to trial.”

Read the full story from wired.com here.

The Wall Street Journal Law Blog first commented on the story here.