'Star Wars Kid' cuts a deal with his tormentors
TU THANH HA

From Friday's Globe and Mail

TROIS-RIVIÈRES, QUE. — As Ghyslain Raza recalled, whenever he walked by his high school's common areas, other students would jump on tables and chant, "Star Wars Kid! Star Wars Kid!"

There would be a commotion as they shouted and poked at him, trying to get a reaction. "It was simply unbearable," he said.

An otherwise ordinary teen in this Quebec small town, Mr. Raza had become a worldwide object of ridicule when schoolmates put on the Internet a video of him clumsily pretending to be a Star Wars character.

Three years later, Mr. Raza and his parents this week reached an out-of-court settlement with the families of three former schoolmates they had sued for $351,000 in damages.

The settlement annuls a civil trial set to begin on Monday that would have scrutinized one of the world's first and most-publicized cases of cyber-bullying.

However, documents filed in the case at the Trois-Rivières courthouse give new details about how a mean-spirited high-school prank turned into a global Internet cause célèbre.

Specifics of the settlement remain confidential.

Lawyers for the three schoolmates had suffered a setback after they were not allowed to introduce as evidence a transcript of a phone conversation Mr. Raza had with a blogger, Jishnu Mukerji.

The blogger had posted a transcript of the exchange on the Internet.

Conducted a month after the video and parodies of it began circulating, the conversation has Mr. Raza calling the spoofs "interesting" but not expressing much distress.

However, a judge rejected a bid to table a transcript of the chat and Mr. Mukerji was not available to testify.

The documents include transcripts of examinations under oath of Mr. Raza and of three students accused of circulating the video, Michaël Caron, Jérôme Laflamme and Jean-Michel Rheault.

(Proceedings against a fourth, François Labarre, were dropped after Mr. Raza acknowledged that the allegations against that student were based on hearsay.)

In the transcripts, Mr. Raza said the experience left him unable to attend school.

"It was simply unbearable, totally. It was impossible to attend class," Mr. Raza said.

He said the situation left him feeling drained of energy, and that he let himself go and no longer lifted weights to keep fit.

He said he was diagnosed with depression by a pedopsychiatrist at Montreal's Sainte-Justine Hospital and his lawyers, in their fillings, said they wanted to have a psychiatrist and a psychologist testify, along with producing his medical file.

Under questioning, Mr. Laflamme and Mr. Rheault conceded their role in spreading a video that Mr. Raza, then 15, had made of himself and left on a shelf in the school TV studio.

Mr. Laflamme said he discovered the tape in April of 2003, when he took school equipment to film a varsity football game.

He showed the tape to Mr. Rheault, who made a copy of it.

"I thought it'd be an interesting prank . . . I wanted Ghyslain to know what I knew of him, what I had seen," Mr. Laflamme said.

"All I did was take the cassette, digitize it on the studio computer to pull a joke on Ghyslain. After that, I had nothing to do with it," Mr. Rheault said he later told the school principal after the controversy erupted.

He said that when a school counsellor confronted him about Mr. Raza's misfortunes, he replied, "It's no fun what happened here, but that's the problem with the Internet. Things travel fast."

Mr. Caron, who says he didn't even know the two other pranksters, said in examination that as the tape was being e-mailed among students, he created a website and posted the video on it.

According to court filings, the video first appeared on the Internet on the evening of April 14, 2003.

About a month later, one U.S. Web blog that had posted the video said it had been downloaded 1.1 million times already.

Mr. Raza's lawyer said in a court filing that the video was so widely circulated that one Internet site solely dedicated to the two-minute clip recorded 76 million visits by October, 2004.

Mr. Raza conceded in his examination that he didn't express much anguish when he spoke to Mr. Mukerji in May of 2003 about his sudden fame.

He said he was cautious because "everything I said was textually reported on the Internet. I signalled in more or less subtle fashion my unhappiness."

Mr. Raza -- who appears on the video as a chubby, ungainly young man -- recalled how other students got on tables and chanted taunts at him. "There was about 100 people in those halls. It was total chaos . . . Any opportunity was good enough to shout 'Star Wars!' "

He said in one class, where a document was shown through a projector, other students scrolled the text, mimicking the opening of the movie, as they sang the Star Wars theme.

And whenever he was in a public place, he said, strangers would call to him.

"Hey! It's Ghyslain Raza! Star Wars Kid, hey!"

He left the school and eventually, got a private tutor.

No one would comment yesterday about the settlement, including whether it included monetary compensation.

However, previous proceedings in the case had included discussions about whether the families of the three defendants had liability insurance.

The families of the three defendants have varying financial situations, court documents suggest. Mr. Caron's court filings include a letter from an insurer refusing to provide liability insurance coverage, whereas Mr. Laflamme says in his examination that his father had savings of $500,000 from an inheritance.

Ultimaj once showed me the video while on vc one time. And i held the button talking about it. ANd while it was playing, my brother came up from behind me and asked if that was me..


......

I didnt think the star wars kid was that fat.


oh snap!

what a douchebag, too bad he'll still be a fat fag even after he gets his money from hard-working parents.

The kid has skills, at least he didn't drop his lightsaber any or fall over.

You're the biggest prick on the planet. You belong here:



^_________________________^

this kid's my hero and we're going to hang out someday

lol, sevu plate? thats funny.

whats the german say, I speak french >_>

he could so easily have become Canada's first famous person

First?

Here's a list of famous people from Canada:

http://www.canadians.ca/

Famous writers
William Shakespeare - arguably the most famous writer in the world.
Brontë sisters (Charlotte, Emily, and Anne), Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Dickens.

Famous Poets
Lord Byron, Robert Burns, and Thomas Hardy.

Famous Composers
William Byrd , Thomas Tallis , John Taverner , Henry Purcell , Edward Elgar, Arthur Sullivan , Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Benjamin Britten.
The Greatest Britons of all Time

In November 2002, the British public voted to find the Greatest Briton of all time. Over a million people voted. Here are the results:

1.
Sir Winston Churchill Sir Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill was a politician, a soldier, an artist, and the 20th century's most famous and celebrated Prime Minister.
2.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was an extraordinary Victorian engineer. He designed and
built amongst other structures bridges, ships, railways and viaducts
3.
Diana, Princess of Wales
From the time of her marriage to the Prince of Wales in 1981 until her death in a car accident in Paris in 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales was one of the world's most high-profile, most photographed, and most iconic celebrities.
4.
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin was a British naturalist of the nineteenth century. He and others developed the theory of evolution. This theory forms the basis for the modern life sciences. Darwin's most famous books are The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man.
5.
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was a playwright and poet whose body of works is considered the greatest in English literature. He wrote dozens of plays which continue to dominate world theater 400 years later.
6.
Sir Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton was a mathematician and scientist who invented differential calculus and formulated the theory of universal gravitation, a theory about the nature of light, and three laws of motion.
7. Queen Elizabeth I
Queen Elizabeth I
The daughter of King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth 1 reigned England from 1558–1603. Her reign was marked by several plots to overthrow her, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots (1587), the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588), and domestic prosperity and literary achievement.
8.
John Lennon
John Lennon was a musician and composer who was a member of the Beatles, the biggest rock band of the 1960s.
9.
Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson
Nelson is the greatest hero in British naval history, an honor he earned by defeating Napoleon's fleet in the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar.
10.
Oliver Cromwell
Oliver Cromwell was a military, political, and religious figure who led the Parliamentarian victory in the English Civil War (1642–1649) and called for the execution of Charles I. He was Lord Protector of England for much of the 1650s, ruling in place of the country's traditional monarchy.
11.
Ernest Shackleton
Ernest Shackleton was a British explorer of the South Pole who is best remembered for leading his crew to safety after the failed expedition of the Endurance (1914-16).
12.
Captain James Cook
James Cook was an explorer of the eighteenth century, known for his voyages to the Pacific Ocean. Cook visited New Zealand, established the first European colony in Australia, and was the first European to visit Hawaii. He also approached Antarctica and explored much of the western Robert Baden-Powellcoast of North America.
13.
Robert Baden-Powell
British soldier who founded the Boy Scouts (1908) and with his sister Agnes (1858–1945) the Girl Guides (1910).
14.
King Alfred the Great
King of the West Saxons (871–899), scholar, and lawmaker who repelled the Danes and helped consolidate England into a unified kingdom.
15.
Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
British general and politician. Commander of British troops during the Peninsular War (1808–1814), he defeated Napoleon at Waterloo (1815), thus ending the Napoleonic Wars. As prime minister (1828–1830) he passed the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829).
16.
Margaret Thatcher, Baroness Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher was the United Kingdom's first woman prime minister, and she held the office of PM for longer than anyone in the 20th century.
17.
Michael Crawford -Actor
18. Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria
Victoria's nearly 64-year reign was the longest in British history.
19.
Sir Paul McCartney
McCartney was a singer, songwriter and guitarist for The Beatles, the biggest rock band of the 1960s.
20.
Sir Alexander Fleming
British bacteriologist who discovered penicillin in 1928, for which he shared a Nobel Prize in 1945.
21.
Alan Turing
English mathematician whose works explored the possibility of computers and raised fundamental questions about artificial intelligence. During World War II he contributed to the allied victory by helping to decipher the German Enigma codes.
22.
Michael Faraday
British physicist and chemist who discovered electromagnetic induction (1831) and proposed the field theory later developed by Maxwell and Einstein.
23.
Owain Glyndwr
The last Welshman to hold the title Prince of Wales.
24.
Queen Elizabeth IIQueen Elizabeth II
Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II (Elizabeth Alexandra Mary), is the Queen regnant and Head of State of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and fifteen other Commonwealth countries. (including Canada lolz)
25.
Professor Stephen Hawking
British theoretical physicist noted for his research into the origin of the universe. His work influenced the development of the big bang and black hole theories.