Co-worker gets restraining order for harassing emails.
News Anchor in Wisconsin Gets Unsettling Emails
The news anchors that you watch on your local morning news always seem to get along and generally have some silly, somewhat corny banter going on between them. They often seem like happy people ready to greet you each morning with news. However, the personalities that they put on for the camera are often a façade, and you don’t really know what’s happening behind the scenes. Sometimes, things get strange and creepy, and sometimes, the law gets involved. That’s just the start of what happened in Wisconsin to a pair of morning anchors.
The Creepy Emails
Amy DuPont was a news anchor on Channel 19, and she started to receive a number of vile and nasty emails over the course of an entire year. The emails never seemed threatening, but they were harassing. There were a number of derogatory comments about her and her work, as well as about her child. While she tried to ignore them at first, it eventually got to her, and she decided that she needed to do something about it.
She searched for the name of the person who signed the emails and discovered that he was a registered sex offender. Naturally, the situation became more frightening at that point, so she involved the police. They were able to subpoena the IP address of the sender of the emails, and found out that the source was not actually from a registered sex offender. Instead, they came from the IP address of Zach Brown, the morning meteorologist who was on the show with her.
She took out a restraining order against him, and he was fired from his job at the station. However, because the emails weren’t threatening, they weren’t going to file criminal charges against him. It was then determined that it wasn’t actually Brown that sent the emails, but it was his roommate Jonathan Edwards instead. He was aware that the emails were being sent though, as he told the court in 2009, and they originated because he was jealous of the attention that Amy was receiving. Brown also said that Edwards had sent the messages because he thought that DuPont had been mean to him.
He said that he eventually asked his roommate to stop sending the emails, and that he did not realize that it was harassment. When Amy was seeking a restraining order, she told the court that she had talked with Brown about the emails when she started to receive them and how they had made her upset.
The restraining order the court provided required that Brown was not to have any contact with Amy, and that he had to stay at least 100 feet away from her home and that he had to stay away from her child.
This goes to show that no matter how friendly or close people might seem, it’s impossible to tell what’s happening behind that smiling veneer of joviality. Brown and Edwards are fortunate that the emails were not threatening, and that they did not get into greater trouble.