I'm scared - help

[NightOwl27]

I got the following scary email. I know little about
the law because I was trained in another discipline.
I am afraid of these words but I am not sure if I should
be. The context is that I got into a nasty argument
with someone that is running a bulletin board web site
for tropical fish. It was a trivial silly argument but
it has escalated into nasty personal attacks on both
sides. These were posted on the bulletin board.

I got mad at him because he was a bully. He
threatened to have my AOL account closed and have me
banned from the net. I doubted his ability to do this
and continued to argue with him. I have tried to
reconcile with him but he will not have it. He ignores
my conciliatory postings to his site.

Here is the scary thing he sent:

I am emailing you to officially state for the record that as of this date
January, 03 2001, you are no longer welcome to post message to the message
board located on my website at http://www.fishzine.com. Any further post made by
you on this message board and anywhere else on the website http://www.fishzine.com
will be considered to be a hostile attack against the server in attempts to
destroy the good name and reputation of http://www.fishzine.com. In doing so you
are attempting to keep others from visiting fishzine.com and you are hereby
officially notified that these actions will not be tolerated and that any
and all legal measures will be used to restrain you from having the ability
to continue these attacks, and to seek restitution for any and all damages
caused by your actions, including by not limited to the above mentioned
items.
Brian Warner
Owner, and webmaster of http://www.fishzine.com
Webmaster@fishzine.com




----------------------- Headers --------------------------------
Return-Path: <webmaster@fishzine.com>
Received: from rly-yb04.mx.aol.com (rly-yb04.mail.aol.com [172.18.146.4]) by air-yb05.mail.aol.com (v77.31) with ESMTP; Wed, 03 Jan 2001 19:38:01 -0500
Received: from pop137-mc.mail.com (pop137-mc.mail.com [165.251.48.113]) by rly-yb04.mx.aol.com (v77.27) with ESMTP; Wed, 03 Jan 2001 19:37:38 -0500
Received: from c564117a (maxtnt03-abe-27.fast.net [209.92.8.27])
by pop137-mc.mail.com (Postfix) with SMTP id EC95A5BE73
for <Nightowl27@aol.com>; Wed, 3 Jan 2001 19:37:36 -0500 (EST)
Message-ID: <000b01c075e6$924817e0$1b085cd1@c564117a>
From: "Brian Warner" <webmaster@fishzine.com>
To: <Nightowl27@aol.com>
Subject: Official Notification
Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2001 19:37:50 -0500
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3


X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.50.4133.2400

Should I be afraid of this? I never mean't to harm him or
his company. We just got into a silly argument about a fish
and it escalated into this nastiness between us. I never
spelled out any four letter words. I was accused of having
poor reading comprehension and I said he was stupid. Silly
childish stuff I think. Should I be afraid of him because
he intends to sue me for damages he claims were done to his
company? I could let go but I don't want to because he was
so arrogant and it seems to me he does not deserve to win.
Please tell me my rights. Can I continue to post to his
site and disagree with him? Please help me?

Jake

 

[Jack Mevorach, Esq.]

You're scared, want help but want to win your battle. Is that correct? What's most important to you?

 

[NightOwl27]

I am scared because I am unsure about legal implications
of what I have done. I don't believe I have done anything
wrong in a moral sense. I am not interested in a costly
legal fight over this. It is not worth it. At the same time
I don't want to be run off by a bluff.

I want to hear that this threat of legal action is a bluff
that has no legal merit or I want to hear that I should drop
it now to avoid a pointless costly legal battle. Either way
I would know what to do.

I have very little experience in these matters.
I don't know what criteria to apply to decide if the threats
have legal merit. I don't know if it is realistic to expect
I could be dragged into court over this.

Jake