[kj] OT: Update on that scandalous NYC Craigslist exchange

[B. Oliver Sheppard]

Acquisitive Craigslist Post Reddens Faces All Around

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN
New York Times
October 8, 2007

Last month on Craigslist.com, someone who described herself as a
“spectacularly beautiful” 25-year-old placed a personal ad seeking a husband
who made at least $500,000 a year, because “$250,000 won’t get me to Central
Park West.”

As her post hit the blogs, it received a scathing response from a man who
said he fit her description and told her that her proposition was a bad
business deal. “In economic terms, you are a depreciating asset and I am an
earning asset,” he wrote, because “your looks will fade and my money will
likely continue into perpetuity.”

Last week, this exchange spilled over into the e-mail world, where the it
turned into a popular item to send to friends as a joke. The difference
between this and other outrageous share-mail messages, however, was that
instead of remaining anonymous, its ostensible author signed his name and
the company where he worked, which happened to be the investment banking
division of JPMorgan Chase.

This detail, which may have provoked nearly as much mirth as the contents of
the exchange, made the correspondence either more or less credible. Would
someone with a big job at a prestigious company really have linked his name
to a message that read in part: “You’re 25 now and will likely stay pretty
hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in
earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!”

The man who is widely credited with writing the response did not respond to
a voice message, but the media relations department at JPMorgan Chase
confirmed that he worked there and said that he was not the author. Rather,
a company spokesman said, he had forwarded the e-mail message to friends,
and the signature setting on his e-mail accompanied the response when it
wound up on blogs.

By this account, the employee was just an accidental sexist, the latest
object lesson in the dangers of e-mail getting into the wrong hands — the
Wall Street equivalent of a Pittsburgh Steelers coach who passed along an
e-mail message with a sex video to the National Football League
commissioner, among others.

“Your workplace computer does not exist as a tool for forwarding jokey
things,” said Will Schwalbe, an author of “Send: The Essential Guide to
E-Mail for Office and Home.”

As for the legitimacy of the original posting by the husband seeker, a
spokeswoman for Craigslist wrote in an e-mail message that “it does look as
if the post was made sincerely.” A message sent to the Craigslist mailbox
seeking comment yielded no response.

Craigslist declined to say how many people responded to the personal ad
(which asked, among other things, for names of bars, restaurants and gyms
where rich single men hung out). And so far, the identity of the responder
remains a mystery too.

“I wish we wrote it because I think it’s great,” said John Carney, editor of
DealBreaker, a Wall Street gossip site that posted the exchange on
Wednesday.

Mr. Carney said that he had received the zinger in an e-mail message from
someone other than the author, and his source did not know who wrote it.
(The response never appeared on Craigslist itself.)

On Thursday, Howard Lindzon posted it to his blog. After a commenter asked
who wrote it, Mr. Lindzon responded “me,” but then said in a telephone
interview that he had been kidding. The traffic the posting drew was
serious, though. Mr. Lindzon usually gets about 3,000 daily visitors, but
popularity-rating sites digg.com and reddit.com linked to the item, drawing
more than 100,000 visitors and crashing his server.

Brett Michael Dykes, a blogger notorious for fake listings on Craigslist,
said he had received about 40 e-mail messages accusing him of posting the
husband-seeking personal ad. But he said he had not written it and was
stumped about its provenance.

“I’ve probably read it five or six times, and I go back and forth,” Mr.
Dykes said. “Sadly I think it may be real. I have met in New York City that
type of girl.”

By now, Mr. Dykes said, a blogger would have taken credit for the listing if
it were a hoax, but “who would want to step from the shadows and say, ‘I’m
the gold digger’?”

And Mr. Carney said he was not holding his breath that the Wall Street type
would step forward. “In the age of ultrasensitivity to sexual harassment,
people might think that this guy’s response about women being depreciating
assets is not exactly how they want their firm to be perceived by the
public,” he said.