Lindy West and the Paw West Donezo troll

Lindy West’s relationship with the Operator of Paw West Donezo is a collision between bereavement and online harassment that becomes an unusual encounter with remorse. The operator uses details about West’s dead father to hurt her, then apologizes, makes a memorial donation, and agrees to speak with her on the radio. For West, the experience neither cancels the cruelty nor obliges her to forgive; it becomes evidence that a person who has tried to dehumanize someone else may still be reached.

The impersonation and its personal cost

One midsummer afternoon in 2013, about eighteen months after her father Paul West Sr. died, West received a hostile message from an account presenting itself as her father. The account’s name, Paw West Donezo, joined a play on his name with a reference to his death. Its bio described an embarrassed father of an idiot and contrasted West with two supposedly acceptable siblings; its location was given as a Seattle dirt hole. The details made the account’s performance of her father’s identity unmistakable, not a generic insult from a stranger.

The operator had researched the family. The account reflected knowledge of Paul West Sr.’s name, his prostate cancer, his treatment at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, and West’s brother and sister. West had written the obituary two days after her father died. The operator’s knowledge of the obituary meant that the impersonation drew on a recent and intimate loss, rather than merely borrowing a name. West’s usual defenses against the abuse she received during Rape Joke Summer did not protect her from this particular attack.

At the time, Twitter had no report function, and West did not see a practical way to stop the account. She blocked it and moved on, but blocking only removed it from her view: the account remained available to put words in her father’s mouth and use his memory to torment her. The episode exposed the limitation of the conventional advice to ignore trolls. Responding could be treated as taking the bait; silence could leave the impersonation and its harm untouched. West did not expect that ignoring the account would correct the operator or relieve her grief.

From public account to apology

West chose to respond, explaining that her mental health mattered more than a troll’s satisfaction and that speaking back could give other women language for facing abuse. Her reasoning also depended on refusing the troll’s dehumanizing logic: she regarded online harassers as human beings who had lost their way, not as monsters beyond recognition. A week after the impersonation, she wrote about Paw West Donezo in a Jezebel article on trolling, describing the episode with evident sadness, anger, and pain.

Hours after the article appeared, the operator emailed her. He said he did not know why or when he had begun trolling her and denied that the motivation was her position on rape jokes. Instead, he connected his anger to her happiness with herself, which had confronted him with his own unhappiness. He admitted to sending insults through two other Gmail accounts as well as creating the impersonation. He apologized and said that reading West’s article had made the reality of the person receiving his abuse finally register to him. He had deleted both the email and Twitter accounts associated with the impersonation.

The apology included a concrete act of restitution, though not a reversal of what had happened: the operator attached a receipt for a fifty-dollar donation to Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, designated in memory of Paul West Sr. for the center’s area of greatest need. West found the apology startling because she had not previously encountered, and had not heard of, a troll publicly expressing remorse. The donation linked his admission to the place where her father had received care, making the apology more than a general expression of regret while leaving the original invasion of family memory intact.

A recorded conversation

West returned to her daily routine of hate mail and the recurring choice between ignoring, blocking, reporting, or engaging. The apology stayed with her as a question about whether the operator had changed and whether his experience might help her understand what to do. She still had his email address, so she contacted him. After several months, he replied that he would be willing to help. Within days, West was in a recording studio speaking with him by phone; their conversation was recorded for This American Life.

Asked why he had targeted her, the operator described his focus on her writing about being a heavy woman. When West asked whether her being a woman mattered, he said it did. He described women’s increasingly forthright public writing as threatening to him. West explained that she wrote openly in part because she wanted women to see a woman speaking without timidity and to make women’s voices louder. His admission mattered in the context of a familiar denial: people could claim affection for women in their families while seeking out women online to harm them. In the conversation, the operator recognized the contradiction between his ordinary relationships with women and his deliberate insults toward them.

The exchange returned to the account that had impersonated her father. West asked whether he had lost anyone and whether he could imagine what the attack meant. He apologized again. West believed that his remorse was real, although she had not set out to forgive him; she found herself doing so. She told him that she received abuse every day, but that this had been the cruelest act anyone had directed at her because her father had died so recently. She also thanked him for apologizing. They exchanged pleasantries and ended the call without treating the conversation as if it could undo the loss or the harassment.

What the encounter changes

The relationship remains shaped by an imbalance: the operator initiated a targeted attack, while West bore its consequences and chose whether to engage. Her account does not turn his apology into a rule for other people facing abuse. She makes clear that nobody is obliged to forgive an abuser and that she does not promise compassion toward every person who insults her. The significance lies instead in a change in her own response: after the conversation, pity could sometimes displace fear or anger, without making the abuse acceptable.

The harassment also did not end with the interview. West continued to receive daily abuse and later had to report six more Twitter accounts using her father’s name and face, including one that invoked her abortion. The recurrence shows the limits of what one remorseful operator could change. Yet West says these later incidents became easier to handle. She could distinguish an individual act of cruelty from the whole person committing it, remembering the possibility that suffering and a search for meaning could underlie the desire to hurt others. Her conclusion is deliberately personal rather than prescriptive: the encounter gave her proof that humans can be reached, not a promise that every troll will apologize or that victims owe them another chance.