The Paw West Donezo impersonation, harassment, and apology incident

The Paw West Donezo impersonation, harassment, and apology incident began when an anonymous troll turned Lindy West’s recent bereavement into material for an online attack. The account borrowed her dead father Paul West’s identity and used details about his family and illness to make its message more personal than the routine abuse West received. Its creator later apologized, donated money in her father’s memory, and spoke with West in a recorded interview. The encounter did not resolve the broader problem of online harassment; its significance lay in the unexpected movement from deliberate cruelty to remorse, conversation, and a changed response to later abuse.

Background and Trigger

By the summer of 2013, West had been writing about fatness, shame, and the right to value her own body. Encountering Leonard Nimoy’s The Full Body Project had given her an image of fat women presented with dignity rather than ridicule. She had begun to question the assumption that her body had to remain hidden and had stopped treating other people’s contempt as the measure of her worth. That developing self-acceptance mattered to the later explanation of the troll’s motive: he would say that her happiness with herself had angered him because it exposed his unhappiness with his own life.

The attack arrived amid what West describes as a period of routine hostility. She was already receiving rape threats and insults about her weight, appearance, and work. Against that background, the message from Paw West Donezo initially seemed like one more abusive tweet, not an event that should have distinguished itself from the stream of others. But the account purported to speak as her father, who had died about eighteen months earlier. West remembered him as a kind person and could not reconcile the cruelty of the message with the father she had known. The account’s use of his identity made the abuse different in kind from an insult directed only at her.

The Impersonation and Its Personal Reach

The account’s name combined Paul’s name with a reference to his death. Its profile bio insulted West while implying that her siblings were acceptable by comparison, and its location was given as a derogatory description of Seattle. The profile photograph was a familiar picture of her father seated at the piano in the living room of the house where she had grown up.

That image carried details of family life the impersonator could not have understood in the same way West did. Some piano keys still held the gray marks left when her father had penciled in note names for her as a child. She remembered that she had not practiced enough and that he had pretended not to be disappointed. The account thus appropriated not simply a name, but a photograph attached to specific memories of her father and childhood. West had once wept at the sale of the family home, but she later distinguished the loss of a place from the death of a person: the account had reached into a grief whose meaning was not interchangeable with ordinary online insult.

The impersonator had apparently spent time identifying the correct Paul West among many people with that name. The account’s creator knew that West had a brother and a sister, had read the obituary she wrote shortly after her father died, and knew that Paul had died of prostate cancer and received treatment at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. Those details made it clear to West that the person behind the account could have known how recently the family had lost him. She describes her usual emotional armor as insufficient against that knowledge.

At the time, Twitter did not yet have a report function, and West saw no straightforward remedy that could undo the use of her family’s memories. Ignoring the account would not, she thought, correct the harm or restore her father. She chose to answer publicly, not because she expected to bring him back or guarantee that the troll would change, but because her own mental health mattered and because other women had told her that her responses offered them a way to answer abuse. Her decision opposed a familiar expectation that women should absorb online hostility silently.

The Apology and the Donation

The week after the incident, West wrote about Paw West Donezo in a Jezebel article on trolling. She wrote from evident pain, and a few hours after publication the account’s creator contacted her by email. He said that his trolling had not begun because of her position on rape jokes. Instead, he connected his anger to her apparent happiness with herself, which made him confront his own unhappiness. He also acknowledged that he had used two other Gmail accounts to send insults and said that he had deleted the PaulWestDunzo email address and Twitter account.

The apology was striking to West because she had not previously received remorse from a troll, and had never heard of another person receiving one. The sender attached a receipt for a fifty-dollar donation to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance in her father’s memory, designated for the center’s area of greatest need. The donation did not erase the impersonation or the grief it had exploited. It did, however, turn the institution that had treated her father into a concrete point of acknowledgment: the sender had learned who Paul was and chose to make a contribution in his name.

West returned to her daily routine of hateful messages, repeatedly weighing whether to ignore, block, report, or engage. Yet the apology stayed with her. She wondered whether the sender had really changed and what she might learn from him. Because she still had his email address, she wrote to ask if he would speak with her. After several months of waiting, he agreed to help.

Recorded Conversation and Aftermath

Within days, West was in a recording studio with a phone, speaking to the former troll for This American Life. She asked why he had chosen her. He explained that her writing about being fat had drawn his attention. In the conversation, he acknowledged that women writing more openly and forcefully could feel threatening to him. He also recognized the contradiction between claiming to respect women in his personal life and seeking women out online in order to harm them emotionally.

The interview lasted two and a half hours. The former troll described the period as a low point: he hated his body, his girlfriend had left him, and he spent each day at an unfulfilling job. He called his life passionless and said it had been easy to direct his frustration at women online. West listened without treating these circumstances as an excuse for what he had done. When she spoke about her father’s recent death and the particular cruelty of impersonating him, the man sounded defeated and apologized. West says she had not meant to forgive him, but believed him and found herself doing so. She was tired, and the conversation ended with mutual thanks rather than a claim that the harm had vanished.

The encounter did not become a prescription that people must forgive their abusers, nor did West promise to respond compassionately to every person who attacked her. Trolls continued to consume her time and tax her mental health. After the radio story aired, six more Twitter accounts used her father’s name and face; another invoked her abortion to accuse her of killing a grandchild. Yet the conversation changed the timbre of her later responses. She found it easier to feel pity rather than fear or hurt, while maintaining that she could not provide purpose to anonymous strangers or erase the consequences of their actions. The incident’s ending is therefore qualified: abuse persisted, but West had gained evidence that a person who had intentionally harmed her could recognize the person on the receiving end, express remorse, and act differently.