Iravani turned next to AutoAdmit. She complained that she couldn’t concentrate on her work, was now embarrassed to be seen in public, and had begun therapy. “I can’t tell you how much I would appreciate it if you would simply deactivate this thread and make my life go back to normal,” she pleaded in an email. “I am a nice person and don’t deserve this humiliation.” This time, Ciolli, who’d grown impatient with such complaints, snapped back in an AutoAdmit post, writing, “Do not contact me...to delete a thread, especially if I have no idea who you are and have never spoken to you in my entire life.” If he kept receiving similar requests, he warned, he would just post them all on the message board for everyone to see. The discussion about Iravani then metastasized, appearing on a website (which Cohen and Ciolli were not directly involved with) that linked to AutoAdmit called T14Talent. Without her knowledge, Iravani had been entered in a contest to name the “most appealing women” in the top 14 law schools in the country.

In the meantime, ReputationDefender launched a campaign to embarrass Auto­Admit into cleaning up its act. It put up a new website and mounted a petition drive urging AutoAdmit to police its message board and respond to complaints. ReputationDefender also contacted the deans of several law schools. After Harvard Law School students were targeted, the dean, Elena Kagan (President Obama’s choice for solicitor general), sent an email urging students to boycott AutoAdmit, which she called a “new and highly efficient mechanism for malicious gossip.”

With Ciolli’s encouragement, the online beauty pageant was quickly terminated. But ReputationDefender’s ac­tions whipped the AutoAdmit community into even more of a frenzy, with Iravani caught in the crossfire. When one poster wrote of wanting to “titty fuck” Iravani, another, who called himself “a horse walks into a bar,” ordered, “Get in line,” and said he wanted to make an ice-cream sundae out of her, “complete with whipped cream, sprinkles, and a cherry.” Then Yalels2009 offered a series of “fun facts” about Iravani, including that she had “whored around like a feral cat.” Another contributor, Whamo, suggested Iravani had “the clap.” In the meantime, a poster retrieved a Washington Post article from 1994 relating how Iravani’s father, a former World Bank official, had been charged with using forged checks to buy her a Thoroughbred horse. Iravani was 10 years old at the time; the incident was something she had never divulged, even to her closest friends, and the night she saw it plastered online, she was upset enough to go to the hospital.

Even by the merciless standards of the message board, this post apparently crossed the line. It takes something, after all, to move “Josef Stalin” to pity. “People, this is sick,” this particular poster wrote. “Have you forgotten there’s a real human being behind this? A flesh-and-blood girl, and apparently a somewhat emotionally fragile one? This isn’t funny anymore. It’s becoming evil.” Still, feeling not just aggrieved but evidently invulnerable, the abusers kept at it. In an email sent to members of Yale Law School’s faculty on March 9 and CCing Iravani herself, one “Patrick Bateman” (the name of the serial killer in American Psycho) denounced her as a damaged character out to suppress free speech. Then someone posted the letter on AutoAdmit. For Ciolli, who’d grown progressively more frustrated with the site, the letter was the last straw, and he quit the website. When another poster begged for a cease-fire, Whamo shot back, “No way. Let’s keep pushing it!” Things intensified further when the women went public with their cause but withheld their names. First, they spoke to the Washington Post, which wrote about the matter on March 7. Two days later, Heller, her face obscured and her voice slowed, went on Good Morning America.

Someone at Google was obviously reading or watching: On March 9, the company notified Cohen (by posting on AutoAdmit) that the website had violated Google’s terms of service by placing its ads alongside adult or mature content. Google’s post cited a thread entitled “I stick my Asian dick inside white pussy at Georgetown.” Fearing that any interference would prompt the kind of mass exodus that had sunk the Princeton Review’s message board, Cohen had kept his hands off his own site. But the result, he now concedes, was that he lost his website to “parasites” and “freaks.” Even his timid, belated attempts to weed out the worst abuses, an effort Ciolli seconded, prompted open rebellion. Cohen stopped visiting the site altogether; when his girlfriend pulled it up onscreen, he walked out of the room. “Looking back, I was naive and a weak leader,” he said.

Soon, AutoAdmit was the talk of Yale Law School. People were checking the site constantly—thereby, of course, moving the scurrilous links higher still on Google. When a group called Yale Law Women held a meeting in support of Heller and Iravani, most of the law school, including the dean, Harold Koh, turned out. Quietly, the school attempted to ferret out the miscreants in its midst, going so far as to interview any gym-goers who might be able to identify the man who described Iravani’s getup. “It’s a shit storm,” one Yalie who’d posted on AutoAdmit emailed a friend. “There’s a semi-restrained witch-hunt mentality right now.”

Not everyone agreed with the women. Posters had targeted another first-year student, Caitlin Hall, so viciously—“Who will Caitlin Hall (prestigious bitch) fuck first at Yale Law?” read one thread—that she had almost decided not to come to New Haven. But Hall thought it preferable to ignore such taunts or deal with them quietly rather than turn them into a cause célèbre. Other students, including some women, considered Heller and Iravani overly sensitive and felt that Heller had overstated her employment difficulties. (She eventually landed a summer job at the prestigious San Francisco firm of Morrison & Foerster, reportedly earning $3,080 a week.) But for all of Yale’s vaunted devotion to free speech, few students felt free to speak out.

Some concerned Yale students weighed a number of options. One was finding out the firm where Ciolli would be working upon graduation and pressuring it to withdraw its offer. It turned out to be the Boston law firm of Edwards, Angell, Palmer & Dodge, which in April rescinded its offer. The message board violated “principles of collegiality and respect that members of the legal profession should observe in their dealings with other lawyers,” the firm’s managing partner, Charles DeWitt, wrote Ciolli.