Amanda Todd, the Canadian girl who committed suicide after being tormented by bullies, continues to be bullied online on her Facebook tribute pages as well as on YouTube videos. In a welcoming turn of events, activist group Anonymous has named a man the group says was the girl's primary tormentor.
Anonymous made public the name of Todd's alleged bully as Kody Maxson, a 32-year-old man from New westminster, British Columbia. The post describes him as the man who "extorted amanda todd for pictures. This is the pedophile that social engineered Amanda Todd into supplying him nude pictures." Anonymous also revealed his address and his online id name.
Amanda Todd, 15, died last Wednesday, a month after posting a chilling video on YouTube in which she says in seventh grade, she met a man online who asked her to take a photo of her topless, in which she did and that photo has haunted her ever since, leading her down a path of anxiety, depression and drug and alcohol abuse.
She says that a year later she received a message from a man on Facebook threatening that if she didn't give him a show, he would send the webcam picture to her friends and family. She says police later told her the man followed through with his threat.
Anonymous, which often uses a caricature Guy Fawkes mask as its logo, claims Amanda Todd's tormentor has also made postings to child pornography sites.
"We generally don't like to deal with police first hand but were compelled to put our skills to good use protecting kids," read an email sent by Anonymous to Canada's CTV News. "Ironically we have some good people in Vancouver who brought this to our admin's attention. It's a very sad story that affects all of us."
The man who Anonymous identified as Todd's bully appeared in court on Monday on charges of sexual assault and sexual interference with a minor, unrelated to Todd, CTV reported. The man claims he was Todd's friend and pointed the finger at a New York man who was harassing her.
Watch a video below by Anonymous citing Amanda Todd's tormentor:
The man himself has now been threatened online by others vowing to carry out vigilante justice, a development that worries Vancouver defense lawyer Eric Gottardi.
Amanda Todd shared in her YouTube video that soon after, the bullying started again and she began to cut herself. Amanda moved to yet another school, where, after a boy began flirting with her, a troupe of girls from her first school came and beat her up. "Kids filmed it," she writes. "I was all alone and left on the ground."
"Teachers ran over but I just went and layed in a ditch and my dad found me." When she went home with her dad, she drank bleach in an attempt to kill herself, but was saved after a rushed trip to the hospital.
"I'm struggling to stay in this world, because everything just touches me so deeply," Todd wrote as the description for the video. "I'm not doing this for attention. I'm doing this to be an inspiration and to show that I can be strong."
She changed schools and found a new group of friends in an effort to leave behind the bullies. Then the man created a Facebook profile, using her uncensored photo as his profile picture. "Cried every night, lost all my friends and respect people had for me... again... then nobody liked me," she wrote in the video.
