For the past couple of years, I have been keeping up with the Janna St. James scam. I feel for the woman who fell victim to Janna’s lies. I felt like I could connect with her in some ways. The most goes back to nearly ten years. My first ‘web friend’ was named Janna. She was nice, kind, considerate, and abused by her step daughter and her own daughters, identical twins, who verbally and emotionally tortured her. She did not have any friends with cancer, but she used to spend time sending me emails and messages telling me how she wished she had money to spend. I sympathetically listened to her stories. I had met Janna in a chat room, however I had other friends online, some I had met in real life, and some whom I communicated only through a message board for writers and bloggers. I never introduced Janna to that board because of the language and the rips on people that weren’t very Christian.

When a major web hoax was uncovered in May of 2001, my blog was nearly a year old, and the entire thing shook me to the core. I felt cheapened. I felt sad. How could someone take my real life experiences and twist them into their own perverse fantasy? Since it was a blogging issue, it was a hot subject on the message board that I was a member of. While there were hundreds of bloggers, message boards, and general communities that were discussing this all over the web, I stupidly sent Janna a link to the board I was a member of so she could read up on what true writers thought about this. Within a week, she was a member there. In two weeks, she was posting regularly. In three weeks, she had her own blogspot.com blog. By the time a month went by, she was known as “Momma Janna” because she was counseling, laughing, and supporting all on the board. The average user was a college student, but Janna was in her 40s–the oldest person by age on the board–and one of the most-liked and well respected.

Janna became close to my friend James. Janna went so far as to read his blog and started making hints on the board and her own blog that she had been gang-raped in November 1979, by a group of minorities. She never went into great detail about what happened, but she claimed to have been visiting a friend on a farm (Janna St. James claims to have been raped in a cornfield by Mexicans). Soon Janna revealed to James that she had gotten pregnant during her rape, gave birth to a baby boy in the summer of 1980, and gave that baby up for adoption. How convenient! James was adopted! His real birthday is in July 1980! He was born in Chicago! Janna lived in Chicago! It wasn’t long before Janna had convinced James that she was his biological mother. For the next nine months, Janna screwed my friend James out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, computers, jewelry, and other things. I sent her a heart pendant from Tiffany’s as a peace offering, since I doubted her story. She made me feel like the worst person in the world for doubting her tragic tales.

What broke the hearts of the members of the message board was the fact that people saw how Janna’s antics were hurting James. He wasn’t really eating. He was never over weight, but he lost over 60 lbs. He was selling his blood. He didn’t pay his tuition to his college and was expelled. When I brought this up to Janna, her next words to me were, “James promised me $50. Why hasn’t he sent it?” That’s when I went postal. I cried. I screamed. I cussed at that selfish woman. This is where her story fell apart. The next day, she posted on the board to sabotage me. Because James was using a very old picture of a Japanese-American singer as his avatar on the board, Janna downloaded several recent photos of the singer, and posted them to the board, claiming he was one of the many men who raped her and must be James’ father. Now. The singer is very popular. Janna even created email addresses on AOL.com (where she was pinkprarie or something similar to that), and emailed my friend James from these addresses, claiming to be his father, and begging for forgiveness. She also posted on the board with this alternate identity, and claimed that I was trying to keep James from knowing his parents.

I wasn’t a moderator on that board, and our admin was on a road trip and couldn’t provide the IPs of Janna and James Sr. I publicly posted that Janna was behind both accounts. She and her alternate identity both misspelled “Osaka”–they spelled it “OsaCa”. This was back in the days before Wikipedia and Google spelling. Since my public post that Janna was putting James on, she dedicated her time to making false identities on the board to back her up and bash me–I was an alcoholic, my views shouldn’t be trusted, I was a cocaine addict, I was probably hallucinating, I had had a baby out of wedlock and the baby’s father was a drug addict, so I was immoral and a liar. This went on for three weeks until the admin came back on the board and posted screen caps of the IPs attached to the accounts–all the same as Janna’s–and he banned each and every account. No one had said anything bad about me publicly, but I wondered what they privately chatted about. Janna stirred the pot and planted seeds of disbelief in the minds of what few online friends I had. I banned all AOL.com IPs from my site. I canceled my own AOL.com account so I could view my site. I never communicated with Janna again.

I just have coincidences that the Janna I conversed with is the same Janna St. James. Much of what I had is lost. I have changed computers three times since I last conversed with Janna. I have packed away the emails. I don’t have her address anymore. James eventually was told by his grandmother that his own parents were dead and had been since he was a few months old; he was not the product of rape, and he had stayed in his family after his parents had died. Board members who saw through Janna’s pictures of the Japanese singer also brought up the fact that James was a brunette with blue eyes and pale white skin, not a hint of Japanese heritage in him. Because this was so emotionally tragic to James, I haven’t emailed him and asked him to give me the contact info he had on Janna. All I know is she had an AOL.com account from 2000-2002. I don’t know what happened to her after that. And I don’t think I want to.

I feel bad that I did not publicly talk about this when it happened. Reading the Janna St. James blog makes me feel as though I let a criminal walk away to get another victim. The Janna I knew also had no inhibitions about impersonating famous people to call me filthy names. Almost like Bindy’s Erasure scam. At the time that Janna was exposed, I thought she would slink off to the gutter which she crawled out of, like several other scammers my friends and I had uncovered on our message board. I never dreamed she’d rear her ugly head and scam more people. I know if I were a scammer and got caught, I wouldn’t keep coming back and going again and again and again. Especially if I knew people were watching for me, anyway.

That’s all for me for today. I don’t feel any better for letting this all out, and if you read all of that, you deserve a cookie. Or maybe a bran muffin. Whichever.

Oh, and answer this: Where do lies come from??