Operator of Paw West Donezo

The Operator of Paw West Donezo was an online troll who made a deceased man’s identity into a weapon against his daughter, Lindy West. The impersonation was especially cruel because it drew on details the operator had researched about Paul West and his family, turning a fresh bereavement into targeted harassment. After West wrote about the account, the operator admitted responsibility, apologized, and eventually agreed to speak with her on a recorded call. His story moves from deliberate anonymity to an unusually direct reckoning with the person he had harmed.

Identity and the impersonation

The operator’s real name is redacted in the account of their exchange, and the book gives no further biographical identification. What it does establish is that he created an account using the name of West’s father, Paul West, who had died eighteen months earlier. The account’s name combined Paul West’s first name with a declaration that he was done being alive. Its bio called its supposed owner an “Embarrassed father of an idiot” and added that the other two children were fine. The stated location was “Dirt hole in Seattle.” These details made the account more than a generic insult: its performance depended on pretending that a dead father was speaking about his family.

The operator had taken time to make that performance convincing. He found the correct Paul West among many people with the same name, apparently using the obituary West had written two days after her father died. He knew that Paul West had died of prostate cancer, had been treated at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, and had two other children. The precision mattered. West had endured a high volume of rape threats and other abuse during Rape Joke Summer, and she initially considered herself armored against another stranger’s insults. But this message arrived through the identity of someone she loved, and the research behind it made the attack feel intimate rather than incidental.

From harassment to admission

At the time, Twitter had no report function, and West understood that the impersonation was not something she could address through an effective platform remedy. Ignoring the account, she reasoned, would neither bring her father back nor make its operator understand the harm. She chose to respond publicly, in part because she wanted other women to have examples of how to answer abuse and because she rejected the idea that trolls should be treated as inhuman monsters. That choice did not make the original attack less painful; it gave her a way to act without accepting the demand that she simply endure it.

The week after the impersonation, West wrote about it in a Jezebel article on trolling. A few hours after publication, the operator contacted her by email. He admitted that he had created the account and an associated email address, and said he had deleted both. He also acknowledged sending insults through two other Gmail accounts. In his apology, he described the conduct as the lowest thing he had done and said that reading West’s article made him recognize that a living person was receiving his abuse, someone who had never harmed him. The article did not erase the attack, but it disrupted the distance and anonymity that had allowed him to treat a stranger as a target without consequence.

The recorded conversation

West later returned to the daily routine of hate mail and the recurring decision whether to ignore, block, report, or engage. The operator’s remorse stayed with her as a point of comparison: he was the only troll she had encountered who had apologized. She still had his email address, so she wrote to ask whether she could learn anything from him and whether his change was genuine. After months of waiting, he agreed to help. Within days, West was in a recording studio, speaking to him over the phone for This American Life.

Asked why he had chosen her, the operator said his attention had centered on her writing about being heavy and the difficulties of being a woman of size. He also acknowledged that women speaking more openly and forcefully felt threatening to him. West explained that she wanted women to hear those voices become louder, rather than retreat into timidity. Their exchange brought the hostility into contact with the public work it had tried to punish: he had targeted her partly for making visible the very subject she intended to address.

The operator described the contradiction between his self-image and his conduct. He said he worked with women and had been able to point to his mother, sisters, and former girlfriends as evidence that he did not hate women. But he recognized that he could not claim to be fine with women while going online to seek them out and insult them. West found the admission striking because men who harass women often deny misogyny by treating each individual attack as unrelated. The operator’s willingness to connect his behavior to hostility toward women gave their conversation an explicitness she rarely heard from trolls.

He said he no longer trolled and called that period a low point. He described hating his body, being dumped by his girlfriend, and spending his days at an unfulfilling job; he characterized his life at the time as passionless and said it had been easy to take his frustrations out on women online. These circumstances were his explanation, not an excuse that could undo the harm. The recorded conversation lasted two and a half hours. It was nervous and self-revealing, but also grueling for West: every second hurt, even as the call made it possible to hear the operator account for what he had done.

Remorse and its limits

When West asked whether he could imagine losing someone, the operator said that he could and apologized again. West believed that he sounded defeated. She had not intended to forgive him, but found that she did. She told him that she received abuse every day and that this had been the cruelest thing anyone had done to her because her father had only recently died. She also thanked him for apologizing, noting that she had never heard of another troll doing so. The operator responded that he was glad she had found some solace; he seemed surprised and relieved that she had not answered his remorse with further cruelty.

The ending does not present the apology as a reversal that cancels the impersonation, nor does West’s forgiveness establish that the operator’s change can be independently verified. Instead, the encounter holds two facts together: he deliberately weaponized a family’s grief, and he later recognized the person on the receiving end as human. His admission gave West a rare account of how misogynistic harassment can coexist with a self-conception of being decent to women. Her decision to speak with him, while still naming the injury, turns the episode into an inquiry into accountability: not a demand that victims reconcile with harassers, but evidence that an apology and a changed understanding are possible without making the original harm disappear.