Lesli Catsouras, the mother of Nikki , has just Mother of teen completed a memoir “Forever Exposed,” about her family’s journey coping with Internet trolls and cyber-bullies in addition to the toll-road-crash death of her 18-year-old daughter.
LADERA RANCH
The book began as therapy, a ritual through which Lesli Catsouras could work out her feelings of despair, horror, anger.
But now that it’s written, the Ladera Ranch mother is consumed by a fresh round of anxiety.
“My book has been such a huge part of me for so long, I’m afraid to let it go,” Catsouras says.
“At times it was all I had to get me through the rough days,” she adds. “Although I feel like I’m doing the right thing, it scares me to death.”
For Catsouras, “the proper thing” way going public with a wrenching account of dropping her 18-year-antique daughter, Nikki Catsouras, in a violent 2006 automobile crash – and the way info of Nikki’s death, which includes grisly snap shots and information accounts, have become a supply of enjoyment for a few Web users, in addition to ache for her own circle of relatives.
The tale of her journey, in a just-published memoir “Forever Exposed: The Nikki Catsouras Story,” is about loss, grief and the larger fight against insidious forces in cyberspace.
It’s also an act of courage.
Now that she’s publish her book, Catsouras knows the trolls will be back. The usually anonymous online commenters who harassed her family and turned Nikki’s death into an international news story have never totally gone away. And they figure to step up their harassment once they learn that she’s write a book about a form of pain that possible two decades ago.
The mission, she adds, is worth it.
“I hope this book will send a message to anyone who has taunted or bullied someone online, or is thinking about it. (When you do that) you don’t just harm one person … you can destroy an entire family.
“I’m hoping that with more awareness, things can change,” Catsouras, 46, says. “When you say things online, you don’t see the consequences.”
GRIEF AND HORROR
If losing a child is the worst pain imaginable, the Nikki Catsouras family has had to endure that and more.
Nikki was killed on the afternoon of Oct. 31, 2006, on the 241 toll road. She’d taken off in her father’s Porsche and, while driving as fast as 100 mph, she clipped another car and lost control.
The Porsche flew across the dirt median and into oncoming lanes before slamming into an unmanned toll booth in Lake Forest, killing Nikki instantly. Still strapped into the driver’s seat, she nearly was decapitated.
That was the start of the family’s horror.
In the following couple of weeks, because the Catsouras own circle of relatives became seeking to address Nikki’s death, snap shots of Nikki’s stays started out circulating online. Some of the photo images – leaked via way of means of folks that labored for the California Highway Patrol – have been followed via way of means of messages that disparaged the useless teen and her own circle of relatives. A faux Myspace web page became created that at the start appeared like a tribute to Nikki however led visitors to the awful images.
The CHP eventually accepted responsibility for the leak. And the leak eventually led to recently settled litigation that redefined law in California as it relates to death images and the privacy rights of surviving relatives.
For Catsouras and her family, the road from Halloween 2006 to today has been anything but easy.
Lesli’s husband, Christos Catsouras, 48, recently suffered a mild heart attack. His doctor says stress over Nikki’s death and the family’s crusade to get her images off the Internet – and the harassment from strangers – contributed to his ailment.
Nikki’s youngest sister, Kira, 13, still is forbidden to go online.
“My parents don’t want to run the risk of me seeing them,” Kira says of the pictures.
Her sisters Danielle, 21, and Christiana, 19, are extremely cautious about accidentally running across the photos. And in the early stages of the ordeal, Danielle, then a high school sophomore, school to be home-schoole when rumors s that pictures of Nikki would turn up in her locker.
A former real estate agent turned real estate broker, Christos saw his income plummet when he, too, stayed offline after the images went viral in late 2006. He and Lesli have spent thousands of dollars trying to get the photos permanently delete from the Internet with the help of a private firm, Reputation .com.
Of course, that’s only part of their misery. The family still grieves Nikki, a quirky, free-spirit teenager who was planning to study photography in college.
CATHARSIS
Lesli Catsouras started out writing her mind in a magazine at the anniversary of Nikki’s death. “It became an area for me to channel my grief, to get thru the occasions that, on the time, had been too painful to undergo in silence,” she says.
“Instead of yelling and screaming, I could write. And that could get all of the feelings out of me. I determined it to be very cathartic. I could suggest it to anyone, specially to a person who has misplaced a child.” Writing additionally became a manner for Catsouras to paintings thru her frustration over depictions of Nikki and her own circle of relatives that she determined now no longer most effective faulty however vicious.
Some Internet trolls wrote that Nikki became a spoiled wealthy child who deserved her fate. Others slammed Christos for supposedly letting Nikki force his car, despite the fact that she took it with out his or Lesli’s permission. Other anonymous Internet posters unfold incorrect information that Nikki were drinking, while in reality she hadn’t. Traces of cocaine had been determined in her system, however she became now no longer excessive while she were given in the back of the wheel.
For Lesli and Christos Catsouras, the pics and rumors had been an unpleasant sideshow that distracted interest from what they see because the actual egregious act: the CHP improperly freeing accident-scene pics. Roughly 1/2 of of “Forever Exposed,” which at approximately 88,000 phrases is a standard-period paintings of nonfiction, info the Catsourases’ war with the CHP and Internet trolls.
They insist the lawsuit wasn’t an strive at a cash grasp and say that their reduce of a agreement attain in January – $2.37 million – already has been consume up through prison and different charges stemming from their try to rid the Internet of the images. As for her book, Lesli says a part of proceeds will visit charity. “I’m now no longer preoccupied with how nicely it’ll do,” she says. “Forever Exposed” is to be had most effective as a web book, for $8.99; a paperback model can be to be had shortly, Catsouras says.
THE REAL NIKKI
“Forever Exposed” is shape in alternating chapters in each Lesli’s voice and the voice of her husband, aleven though Lesli wrote everything.
After a quick prologue, the ee-e book begins offevolved with the day Nikki fled withinside the Porsche, and greater or much less proceeds chronologically, with Catsouras filling in information of Nikki’s life, which includes her brush with demise while medical doctors discover a in large part inoperable mind tumor while she turned into 8. In the ee-e book, Catsouras writes that the mind tumor accounted for a number of Nikki’s erratic conduct as a teenager, which includes her experimenting with cocaine. One time, cocaine purpose a psychotic response that pressure Nikki to be hospitalize for seventy two hours.
But Nikki, opposite to a few Internet posters, turned into no birthday birthday celebration girl. Instead, Catsouras writes approximately a hippy-like youngsterager who cherished thrift shops and assisting the homeless. Danielle says she’s satisfied her mom wrote the ee-e book. “It turned into precise remedy for her,” says Danielle, an aspiring musician who works element time as a bookkeeper.
“I suppose the human beings who’ve bullied our own circle of relatives have to study this in order to see Nikki as a person, and now no longer simply as an image.” Christiana, a operating student, says she can’t study the ee-e book. “It’s too emotional for me,” she says. “I can’t get beyond the primary page.”
For Lesli Catsouras, completing the ee-e book has left her feeling restless. She and her husband, however, have a mission to hold them busy. They are operating on getting a regulation byskip in California that might make it unlawful for first responders to launch coincidence snap shots to the public.
The CHP and different regulation enforcement companies have rules in area that ban the practice, however it’s now no longer technically a crime – yet. “If anything, I wish our tale will unfold the phrase approximately cyberbullying and inspire others to be type online,” Catsouras says.