Et Tu, Kerri?

Today I had another run-in with Kerri Kendall. Sort of. And not in a good way.

Celebrity fan sites often get accused of a certain amount of virtual incest — newly scanned pictures on one site pop up on other sites within a few days, with the result that many fan sites for any given celebrity have nearly identical material. Even sites that don’t directly steal their pictures from other sites but get them from anonymous newsgroups unwittingly contribute to the inbreeding, since many pictures posted in newsgroups have their origins in other sites. Consequently, accusations of cattle-rustling between webmasters is fairly commonplace.

So it came as no great surprise when “Mike”, the webmaster of kerrikendall.com and kerrikendall.org, sent me a rather friendly email asking that I remove some of the photos in my Kerri Kendall gallery (he had a list of specific pictures), which he claimed to have shot himself. I agreed to this and took down the offending pictures right away. He then sent me another email thanking me for removing the pictures (and for peppering my page with links to his site), and for the next few days we exchanged pleasantries and chit chat.

But then things took an unexpected, ugly turn: Someone also named Mike — this one representing Exotic Design Group — sent an email to my webhost demanding that my entire site be removed, insisting that while I had agreed a few weeks back to remove The Iconophile’s picture archive altogether, I had not in fact removed a single picture. Since neither claim was true, and since neither I nor my webhost recognized the email address as someone we’ve heard from before — and in any case, whatever "EDG" was, it certainly had no authority to command the summary removal of all the pictures on my site — we wrote this off as a scam.

The plot thickened, though, when I learned that EDG Mike and Kendall Mike are in fact one and the same person — Mike Wilson — a tidbit I gleaned from a bill he sent my webhost in May demanding some $31,000 for pictures still on my site that he claims to own. I wrote back to him and asked why he doesn’t just email me about what pictures on my site he still feels are his (since, as far as I can tell, none of them are), but never heard back from him. Worse, when my webhost arranged to have a meeting with Mike to try to reach some sort of understanding, Mike’s response was simply to send him another, larger bill. (He wants $100,000 now.)

So are Kerri’s people in fact trying to hustle The Iconophile and its host? It certainly looks like it. Originally I had our entire correspondence with Mike posted here à la Lenny Bruce for Kendall fans to judge for themselves, but apparently the legality of that fell into question (Mike was reportedly livid that I had posted his Jeckyl and Hyde-like email), so you’ll have to make due with second-hand summaries. Stay tuned, though — I’ll certainly do what I can to keep the interested Kendall fan abreast of what her inexplicably hostile webmaster is up to as our little soap opera continues...