When Stacy Pershall's boyfriend broke up with her by e-mail, she was crushed.
This is what she wrote in her online journal on Tuesday:
- "This is it. I'm not going to do it again. I'm in a world where people aren't even kind to each other. I think it's just time to check out. I'm not worth loving even when I try with all my might to be someone else. Even when I say, 'I would give you anything. I love you so much.'*
Skutch knows I'm going. He's meowing at me. Sweet kitty."
Her friends frantically posted messages to her journal, begging her to contact them or to get help. But a few hours later, a webcam on her site showed Pershall, 29, slumped over her toilet and surrounded by open pill bottles.
Her journal buzzed:
- "Oh my Stacy! You don't want to do this. I know you are going through one hell of a time right now ... but NOBODY is worth taking your life for. I just said a prayer for you. Please hang on." *
Another visitor wrote:
- "I called the Brooklyn Police Department a few minutes ago. I don't have her address, but I gave them her phone number. I'm sorry Stacy, I know I promised not to, but I don't want you to die!" *
Her online friends watched the drama unfold on their monitors as first the cops entered Pershall's New York apartment, then the paramedics.
After she was taken away, updates on her condition were posted on the site. A nurse at Long Island College Hospital, where she had her stomach pumped and spent several days recuperating, confirmed that Pershall was released on Friday afternoon.
A lot of folks, including a commentator at Plastic were creeped out by the episode. Others doubted its authenticity, and one guy actually set up a site poking fun at the event.
But Pershall, reached by phone a few hours after her return from the hospital, denied that she tried to kill herself and asked that nothing be written about her.
"I was just trying to take some Advil to get a few hours sleep," she said, refusing to discuss the matter.
But her estranged husband, Glenn Becker, told a different story.
"This is almost a duplicate of her last suicide attempt a year ago, which was also on cam," said Becker, who stated the presence of Web cameras throughout their home was a bone of contention between the couple.
Becker said Pershall, who has a BA in theatre and an MFA in Electronic Art, teaches visual arts at a local college.
"She's the most amazing person I know," Becker said. "Inside her there's an angel, but it's a tormented angel. My dream is to figure out how to help her find peace inside ... but I'm not sure people can do that for one another."
On the parody site, the webmaster posted a still from Stacy's pill-popping video along with his own disparaging commentary. Queried in an e-mail about the motive of the site, "Daign" said:
"I often find that people who are very heavily involved in Net 'culture' such as the cam girls take themselves entirely too seriously. I believe the Net has become a haven for people who are socially inept."
The owner of LiveJournal.com, where Pershall and about 245,000 other people post their diaries, said he has received complaints about suicide threats before, but he wasn't aware of anyone actually succeeding.
In her online diary Friday afternoon, Pershall talked about fielding calls from the media and said her pill-popping gave her five seizures and "did a little heart damage, but nothing serious."
- "Nothing like the way my heart is damaged from being lied to. Nothing like the damage that comes from finally letting myself fall really in love and then have it jerked out from under me,"* she wrote.
Then she asked her boyfriend for another chance:
- "I won't blow it again. He has to trust me that I'm smart, that he's precious to me, that I won't do ANYTHING to screw it up. For all the frightening behavior that I exhibit, I exhibit ten times as much joyful and exuberant behavior. And it's all there, waiting, and I will never stop longing to share it with him. *
I love him."
