12:00 AM, 10-APRIL-06
"Star Wars kid" Ghyslain Raza, the Canadian teen whose lightsaber fighting was caught on video and posted on the Internet, and his parents reached an out-of-court settlement with the families of three former schoolmates who were sued for making Raza an object of ridicule, the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper reported.
The settlement came on the eve of a civil trial set that had been set to begin April 10, which would have scrutinized one of the world's first and most-publicized cases of cyber-bullying, the newspaper reported.
Raza and his parents had sued for $351,000 in Canadian currency (about $305,000 U.S.), saying that the experience left him unable to attend school. "It was simply unbearable, totally. It was impossible to attend class," Raza said. Specifics of the settlement remain confidential.
The three students accused of circulating the video were Michaël Caron, Jérôme Laflamme and Jean-Michel Rheault. Proceedings against a fourth, François Labarre, were dropped after Raza acknowledged that the allegations against that student were based on hearsay.
Under questioning, Laflamme and Rheault conceded their role in spreading a video that Raza, then 15, had made of himself and left on a shelf in the school TV studio. Laflamme said he discovered the tape in April 2003, when he took school equipment to film a varsity football game. He showed the tape to Rheault, who made a copy of it.
Caron, who said that he didn't even know the two other pranksters, said in examination that as the tape was being e-mailed among students, he created a Web site and posted the video on it.
According to court filings, the video first appeared on the Internet on the evening of April 14, 2003. About a month later, one U.S. Web blog that had posted the video said it had been downloaded 1.1 million times. Raza's lawyer said in a court filing that the video was so widely circulated that one Internet site solely dedicated to the two-minute clip recorded 76 million visits by October 2004.
News Article
well... maybe bullies will just have to go back to BEATING THE LIVING SNOT OUT OF GEEKS again.
here's a break down of the new moves he taught us;
honestly... this dweeb did it to himself.... and i can't believe he made money off the guys who made him famous. he was on American Dad becuase of them...
honestly, where's the gratitude?