Recently, a woman in the United States went on trial after she was charged with posing as a boy to cyberbully a 13-year-old teenage girl who later committed suicide.

Lori Drew, 49, used a fictional online personality on the MySpace social networking website to make friends with Megan Meier, whom she afterwards teased and ultimately bullied, which led to the girl hanging herself after receiving several heartless messages from the woman posing as a 16-year-old boy.

One of these messages told Megan that the world would be better off without her.

Megan Meier, who was a neighbour of Drew and also friends with the latter’s daughter Sarah, killed herself back in October 2006, when her virtual relationship with the boy named Josh Evans (the name under Lori Drew created her MySpace profile) came to an end.

Prosecutors in the case have revealed that Drew, helped by others, decided to sign up for a MySpace account and afterwards create the aforementioned profile after Megan had a fight with the woman’s daughter.

Moreover, they stated that the sole purpose of Lori Drew’s actions had been to emotionally harass Meier, by constantly teasing and humiliating her.

Drew was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which is usually used against hackers, since she could not be tried under another law within the state of Missouri.

Nevertheless, given that Drew also violated the social networking website's terms of service, which forbid people from using false registration information or coming into possession of minor members’ personal details, federal prosecutors in California claimed jurisdiction over the case, because MySpace has its headquarters in Beverly Hills.

Lori Drew’s lawyer requested that a mistrial be declared, on the grounds that emotional harassment was not adequate to computer fraud cases, but his request was to no avail.

The 49-year-old woman has been charged with conspiracy and three accounts of accessing protected computers without having an authorization to do so, Drew denying all four of them.

For each of these counts, she could be sentenced to a maximum period of five years in prison.

This Wednesday, Los Angeles court jurors heard arguments in the cyberbullying case, prosecutors’ opening statements claiming that Megan Meier suffered from depression and attention-deficit disorder, conditions of which Drew had been aware and had preyed on to humiliate the 13-year-old girl.

On the other hand, defense lawyer for Lori Drew said that the woman had not been at home the time the above-mentioned message had been sent, adding that all the messages had actually been sent by her 18-year-old assistant Ashley Grillsand.

Nevertheless, the lawyer also said that Drew had known about the account but had not actively been involved in the harassment.

Christina Meier, Megan’s mother, also testified in the case, stating that she had notified the police when she noticed that the messages her daughter was receiving from Josh Evans had become of a sexual nature.

Wednesday’s hearings disclosed that Megan Meier had answered Josh’s message by saying “You are the kind of boy a girl would kill herself over.”