Online harassment through impersonating Paul West

Online harassment through impersonating Paul West was a 2013 Twitter attack in which an unknown user turned Lindy West’s deceased father into a false online persona. The account’s personal details and familiar photograph made the abuse more than another insult: they brought her father’s memory into the ongoing harassment and showed how little protection blocking could provide when the account itself remained online.

Account and Timing

On an ordinary midsummer afternoon in 2013, eighteen months after her father’s death, West received a mean message from an account called Paw West Donezo. She could not recall its exact wording and had not saved it. What made the message distinctive was not its obscurity or inventiveness, but the person it purported to come from. West knew her father had not sent it; he was dead. The account was not a communication from him but an impersonation designed around his identity.

The incident came during Rape Joke Summer, when West was already facing sustained online abuse, including rape threats and insults about her weight. She describes herself as having become armored by the volume of attacks, and says this particular message should, by ordinary standards, have been no more consequential than the rest. Yet the account pierced that defensive distance. Its force lay in the way it redirected harassment from West’s public presence toward her private experience of losing her father.

The Fabricated Persona

The account’s name combined Paul West’s first name with a reference to his death. Its bio presented him as ashamed of West and contrasted her unfavorably with his other children. Its location field made a disparaging reference to a hole in Seattle. These details constructed a counterfeit version of a father speaking contemptuously about his daughter, not simply an anonymous user insulting a stranger.

The profile picture intensified that connection. It showed Paul at the piano in the living room of the family home where West grew up. Some keys still bore the graphite marks he had made when she was small, writing down the names of the notes to help her learn. West remembers that she did not practice enough and that her father pretended not to be disappointed. The image therefore linked the account not only to his appearance, but to a particular family history and to an ordinary gesture of care.

The house itself had become part of West’s experience of loss. When her family sold it, she was twenty-five and cried on its stairs with an intensity she later understood differently: a place could feel like a death, but it was not the same as the death of a person. The photograph placed the impersonation inside this layered memory. In using a picture of Paul at the family piano, the account borrowed an image attached to childhood, home, and her father’s presence.

Research and Personal Harm

West concludes that the account’s creator had deliberately researched her family. The person had identified her father among the many people named Paul West, found the obituary she had written two days after his death, and learned that he died of prostate cancer and received treatment at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. The profile also reflected knowledge that West had a brother and a sister. These details led her to conclude that the creator must have known how recently the family had lost him.

That apparent knowledge changed the meaning of the account. Its insults were not merely general attacks on West’s appearance or work; the impersonation used information about a recent bereavement to make those attacks more intimate. West had endured a stream of abuse during the preceding months, but found that this kind of targeting exceeded the protection her accumulated defenses could offer. The decisive harm came from the collision between a public platform and memories she regarded as among her safest and sweetest.

The image also recalled a loss for which West still wanted one more exchange with her father. During his final lucid period, the family called her brother in Boston, and Paul told him he had been a special little boy and that he loved him. West remembers that her father said little after that. She writes that she would give anything for one more sentence, or even 140 more characters. Against this memory, the impersonator’s use of his identity did not resemble the contact she wished she could recover; it manufactured words in the place where his real voice was absent.

Blocking and Its Limits

At the time, Twitter had no report function. West recognized that she had little practical recourse: the account was not, as she understood it, an act that the law prohibited, and the conventions of online life treated such conduct as inevitable while placing the burden on the target to endure it. She blocked Paw West Donezo and tried to move on. Blocking stopped the account from appearing to her, but did not remove it or prevent it from continuing to use her father’s identity.

The difference between not seeing the account and making it cease to exist is central to the episode. West knows the persona remains behind the screen, still representing her father and still using his memory against her, even though she can no longer see its posts. The act of blocking offers a narrow personal boundary, not a remedy for the underlying violation. The closing exchange turns that gap into a question of public expectation: she is told to feel safe because the harm is hidden from view, and that changing the culture is supposedly impossible.

The incident therefore connects intimate grief to the practical limits of platform response. Its particular cruelty depends on the contrast between Paul’s remembered care—the penciled notes on the piano keys, his effort not to show disappointment—and the fabricated father presented by the account. West cannot recover the lost voice, correct the impersonation through the available platform tools, or know why the creator chose to target her this way. Blocking leaves her with distance from the messages, but not with resolution.