Monika Glennon, a Realtor and associate at RE/MAX ALLIANCE in Huntsville, Alabama, is still recovering after being subject to an onslaught of unfounded, online abuse.
In the past, real estate agents have been caught doing some questionable things, but this time it’s different. Glennon has no idea who her attacker was or why they were out to get her, according to this story. And it took years to get her life back.
The article, written by Kasmir Hill of Gizmodo, is titled "When a Stranger Decides to Ruin Your Life," and it is a case study on the risks we all take by having a strong online presence.
Her profession, family and life in general was great until, according to the article, Glennon “got a call at 6 a.m. one morning from a colleague at Re/Max telling her something terrible had been posted about her on the Re/Max Facebook page."
Her life then plunged into chaos:
“It was a link to a story about Glennon on She’s A Homewrecker, a site that exists for the sole purpose of shaming the alleged 'other woman.' The author of the Homewrecker post claimed that she and her husband had used Glennon as their realtor and that everything was going great until one evening when she walked in on Glennon having sex with her husband on the floor of a home the couple had been scheduled to see. The unnamed woman went into graphic detail about the sex act and claimed she’d taken photos that she used to get everything from her husband in a divorce. The only photo she posted though was Glennon’s professional headshot, taken from her bio page on Re/Max’s site.”
Glennon had no clue who these people were, but that didn’t stop the fallout. The story went viral.
“Within a year, Glennon was experiencing the repercussions: Her number of listings dropped by half. She estimates that she’s lost $200,000 in business since 2015,” the article states.
In the end, and after a huge legal bill, the poster was a complete stranger who once liked a comment Glennon made on Facebook.
Read the entire piece, it goes from worse to worse. But the good news is Glennon is free to live and work as before, but her behavior is forever changed.
“She locked down her Facebook account so that strangers have less access to her information and, importantly, can’t see her friends list. Surprisingly, she still comments on news articles. “But nothing too provocative,” she tells Hill.
