- LOS ANGELES -- An
America Online customer service rep illicitly surfs the company's customer
database, ferrets out private data on celebrity members and then hunts
them down online under a false identity, seeking fame and fortune in Hollywood.
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- Sound like a prelude to prison? Not in the case of Heather
Robinson. The former AOL employee managed to parlay privacy violations
into useful contacts in Hollywood. With the help of those contacts, Robinson,
25, landed a movie deal, and she's using her toehold in the industry to
advance another.
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- Later this week, Universal Pictures will start filming
Robinson's first movie, The Perfect Man, a romantic comedy staring Hillary
Duff and Heather Locklear. The film is about a teenage daughter who tries
to create a "nonexistent boyfriend for her dejected mother,"
Robinson said. The story is based on another of her youthful indiscretions
when she was 16 -- this one involving a stolen credit card and thousands
of dollars of purchases.
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- Some would say it takes Robinson's level of moxie to
succeed in Hollywood. In fact, the favorite legend in the movie business
is that of a hard-working kid who starts in the mail room and through ambition,
flexible ethical standards and political skill becomes a mogul. Judging
by her exploits so far, Robinson is well on her way.
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- "Although she's, at best, a scam artist, you have
to grudgingly admire this young woman," said Mark Ebner, co-author
of Hollywood, Interrupted, a book in which Robinson's exploits get a chapter.
"In a town of liars, cheats and thieves, it's small wonder she's been
welcomed."
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- Hired by AOL in 1997, her $6-an-hour job involved answering
subscriber questions, resetting lost passwords and solving billing problems.
With access to screen names, phone numbers, addresses and credit card numbers
through AOL's customer database, she gathered information on politicians
and movie industry power brokers to pursue her career dreams.
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- During about a year and a half of employment at AOL,
the woman, known by the AOL screen name "HooterR," contacted
or struck up online relationships with Goldie Hawn, Carrie Fisher, Tom
Hanks, Meg Ryan, producer Lauren Shuler Donner and the late comedian Chris
Farley, according to Robinson and Ebner.
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- "I asked my AOL supervisor, 'Are we allowed to contact
people?' -- and the answer was yes, as long as I followed specific policies,"
Robinson said. "It's hard to get into the entertainment industry.
If I weren't a good person they would have told me to go away."
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- She baited celebrities into online conversations by using
private information she had collected about them without their knowledge,
sometimes assuming false identities -- for instance, that of a lonely female
airline pilot.
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- Some of these online encounters led to sexually explicit
chat sessions. Robinson said she even had a real-world rendezvous with
an influential Hollywood producer that resulted in a back-seat sexual assault.
She claims to have evidence locked away in Arizona: a stained shirt, ¦
la Lewinsky.
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- AOL declined to discuss details of Robinson's employment,
but spokesman Andrew Weinstein said activities described in Hollywood,
Interrupted and a subsequent New York Observer interview would constitute
a violation of current and former company policy.
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- A document obtained by Wired News shows that Robinson
was disciplined at least once at AOL for inappropriate use of customer
data. A "Corrective Action Business Conduct" letter addressed
to Robinson three months after she was hired placed her on a 90-day probation
after a customer complained about repeated misuse of confidential account
information.
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- Weinstein said internal security is tighter seven years
later. He declined to state whether the company will pursue legal action
against Robinson, but said AOL's legal department is currently reviewing
the matter.
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- The one-time AOL employee may also have broken state
privacy laws.
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- "There could be a variety of legal complaints under
state law, and the celebrities themselves could potentially bring tort
claims under various state laws," said Pam Dixon of the World Privacy
Forum. "She's essentially an electronic stalker. It's unfair, unethical
and in some states, probably illegal."
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- Those issues aside, Robinson is attempting to turn the
online snooping into her second movie deal within a year. She's now shopping
a new semi-autobiographical feature film called E-Girl. A press release
promises the movie "will only depict the clever, amazing and heart-rending
aspects" of her "cyber subterfuge with major personalities and
power players."
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- Robinson had a colorful past even before she started
at AOL. The Perfect Man chronicles some of it. The movie is a sugarcoated
retelling of an episode in Robinson's teen years that resulted in felony
charges of fraud, theft and forgery, according to Tucson Police Department
documents.
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- In late 1994, Robinson teamed up with a high-school friend
and concocted a scam to assume the identity of an imaginary Air Force colonel
to romance Robinson's single mother, Janet Robinson.
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- Heather obtained access to an Air Force base near her
Tucson home and sent her mother photographs and love letters from a fictional
Col. Cunningham, duping the recent divorcÈe into believing she was
carrying on a virtual affair with an officer. Heather perpetrated the fake
affair for three months. She went so far as to send her mom a marriage
proposal consecrated with the delivery of a ring, which she bought with
a stolen credit card and altered ID swiped from an employee at the Air
Force base.
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- The girls were arrested Feb. 10, 1995, and confessed
to having used stolen credit cards to make more than $4,000 worth of attempted
purchases. Because Robinson had no prior criminal record, charges were
later reduced from felony to misdemeanor, resulting in a 120-hour community
service sentence.
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- "We were 16 years old, and I wanted to do something
good for my mom," Robinson said. "After the court stuff was done,
my mom put her arm around me and said, 'I understand why you did it and
maybe some day they'll make a movie about it.'"
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- And they are. Perfect Man is slated for release in 2005.
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- © Copyright 2004, Lycos, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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