Christopher Stone Is Not Actually a Trojan Man

Gawker posed a very inflammatory question yesterday: How Did the Owner of a Barely-Legal Teen Gossip Blog Get Into a Prestigious Law School?

The law school in question is USC Gould School of Law, currently ranked #18. Gawker commenters wondered whether this was a misuse of the term “prestigious.”

The gossip blog owner in question is Christopher Stone, 31, who runs Sticky Drama and Sticky Noodz, dedicated to teenage gossip and teens’ nude photos, respectively. It’s a successful blog business model, as you can well imagine. The Sticky Drama site is currently down, but you can check out its tumblr. We sacrificed a few IQ points by looking it over: It’s a mish-mash of cute boys, half-naked girls, and screenshots of Facebook conversations about rape. The site most recently gained notoriety for launching 11-year-old Jessi Slaughter into the public eye, resulting in a cyberbullying frenzy.

Gawker describes it like this:

StickyDrama and its sister porn site, Sticky-n00dz, are two of the worst sites on the Internet, built on exploiting teens and tweens’ insecurities and then publicly humiliating them. Stickydrama is a crowd-sourced gossip blog that chronicles the lives of “E-celebs.” Sticky-n00dz is similar, but focused on nude pictures. E-celebs are kind of like regular, “In Real Life” celebrities, except their fame exists solely on social-networking sites like Myspace, Twitter, and the live webcam community Stickam.com, from which StickyDrama gets its name.

When Gawker is saying you’re a cesspool….

After seeing Stone tweet about law school — “lol @ all the Efagz pissed that I got into law school–ALL that I applied to. And my entire application was based on StickyDrama. So, nyah!” — Adrian Chen at Gawker asked his Twitter followers where Stone was going. Chen then wrote:

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Attention, USC law! This man spends his free time harassing teenagers and videotaping live rapes… Admissions officers at the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law just admitted him to their 18th-ranked program earlier this week.

We reached out to USC. They say Gawker got it wrong…

A spokesman from USC Law School told us via email: “[T]here is no truth to this… [T]his person is not attending USC Law School… nor matriculating this fall…”

Gawker wrote:

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Stone hasn’t confirmed that he’s going to USC, but we’re almost certain he is because:

* A search of the USC student database turns up one “Christopher Stone” with an email address of christws@usc.edu. Christopher Stone legally changed his name from Christopher Watermeier, so the email handle fits, assuming he took his given name as a middle name.
* Stone says on his Formspring account that he’ll be able to drive from his downtown LA condo to “any classroom on campus” in less than 30 minutes. This rules out the other major LA law schools: UCLA (too far) and Loyola (too small—he wouldn’t refer to “any classroom on campus”).
* USC has one of the best entertainment law programs in the country—a field that Christopher Stone is clearly looking to get into.

But James Grant, USC Law’s assistant VP of media relations, told us that no one by Christopher Stone’s name or his alternate name has applied to or been admitted to or will be matriculating at USC Law School. He was adamant. “There’s no truth to this,” Grant told us. He did note that there is a Chris Stone — a not uncommon name — at USC Law School, but he teaches property and environmental law.

We reached out to Christopher Stone as well. He has an impressive résumé — Facebook reveals degrees from Berkeley and NYU. With a good LSAT score, he could certainly score a spot at a top school. We asked him where he’s going if not USC, whether he really wrote about his gossip sites in his applications, and why he even wants to go to law school given the current job prospects. He told us:

First, permit me to thank you for your fair and neutral questions. Gawker is on a witchhunt for me & often sends me accusing “questions.”

Second, for obvious reasons I prefer not to discuss where I will be attending law school — at least until the first day of class in August.

As for the employment, most analysts are now writing that the legal profession’s job market should pick up by 2012, & I’ll graduate in 2013.

And yes, my personal statement & letters of recommendation were based entirely on StickyDrama, namely the John Hock & “Router” cases.

In the Router case, Stone sued a “pedophiliac cyberstalker” and lost, but found out his identity and encouraged vigilante justice victims to contact the FBI. In the other case, John Hock was charged with rape after allegedly posting a video of himself sexually assaulting his girlfriend on Sticky Drama Stickam.

Lastly, I would like to add that Gawker is publishing libelous misinformation from “anonymous” sources without fact-checking.

As far as we know, Stone is still going to law school; it’s just not USC.

It’s too late now, but we would have advised him to do it like Lat and Elie: go to law school first, then write a gossip blog.

UPDATE: Gawker has now updated its post to note that Stone is not attending USC.

How Did the Owner of a Barely-Legal Teen Gossip Blog Get Into a Prestigious Law School? [Gawker]
StickyDrama: The Teen Gossip Blog Run By a 31-Year-Old Pornographer [Gawker]
StickyDrama’s Owner Recorded a Live-Streamed Rape and Blogged About It—But Didn’t Report It [Gawker]
Sticky Drama [Tumblr]