Laura Varteressian is a grown woman who spends her free time gleefully attempting to embarrass and damage the online reputations of professional writers.
For the past decade or so, Laura Varteressian has maintained a blog called Terribly Write, in which she publishes and mocks those writers for typos that were not caught and fixed by editorial staff in time for publication on the third-party sites that employ them. She goes out of her way to tag each post with the author’s name, effectively SEO optimizing her character assassinations.
Despite being publicly called out — and practically begged — by some of the writers she’s targeted, Laura Varteressian refuses to remove writers’ names, forcing them to bear, as one writer called it, a “digital scarlet letter” that can and does affect that writer’s ability to secure future work and pay her or his bills. The irony: Laura Vareteressian refuses to divulge her own name on her blog, Terribly Write!
Maybe she’s got an ax to grind and will get over it? Probably not. Laura Varteressian has been actively doing this since at least 2008!
Here are some excerpts of comments left on Terribly Write by professional writers who have discovered Laura Varteressian’s hateful posts in Google searches of their own names:
“Please help me – I’m getting lost in the logic here… Terribly Write is damaging a writer’s reputation by pointing out errors introduced by the writer’s editors?”
“A solution to consider: Remove all mentions of the byline (whether it’s in a screenshot or in text form) in these critiques — past, present, and future. Link outs to the original article are fine and justified. But to publicly name the writer — thereby forcing them to wear a lifetime badge of shame via their Google search results, directly threatening their future career — is to presume it’s the writer’s failing in all instances. I’m ready to shed my electronic scarlet letter, Laura. Please do the right thing.”
“Laura, you are a coward.”
Laura Varteressian’s decade-long actions are more than just petty — they’re the mean-spirited acts of a bully and are bordering on criminal. They also seem to be personal, as she used to work at Yahoo!, one of the sites she targets most frequently. If you happen to know, meet, work with, live near, or befriend Laura, be aware that she is someone who is capable of hurting people via a seemingly neverending online reign of terror.
Laura Varteressian’s behavior, while grossly unethical and unthinkable, is somehow protected by internet law. We invite you to send your ideas for ways in which we can stop Laura Varteressian from hatefully lashing out at professional writers. How can we get her blog taken down or, at the very least, writers’ names removed? Email us at [email protected] or leave a comment in one of our blog posts.
Thank yuo. (See what we did there, Laura?)