It is also ZZ5 who keeps bringing up the subject of murder, from her own "homicidal impulses" to her love of the pagan Pan, or panic, to her snuff-film and dismemberment obsessions. And it is she who writes the most suggestively about her sexual interests.
Her imagery sometimes turned gory or lewd. "who cut your's off you 2 holed freak..." is hardly the stuff of the classic "Let me count the ways" courtship epitomized by Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning.
ZZ5 testified that in fact large parts of her cyberwriting were copied or paraphrased from a very different genre, Naked Lunch, the notorious Burroughs novel. The book, she wrote Gray, was her "bible."
Zutzut5: "...give me two cunts and a prick of steel and keep your dirty fingers outta my sugar bum, what do i look like a purple assed reception already .... i've found a person quite excited by the idea of making our own snuff film, even if this time we only pretend to slaughter...and how was death induced... (perverse curiosity)."
Even a generation ago, few women would be so enthralled, or admit to being so taken, with a book of male fantasies. But in cyberculture, male and female tastes, like male and female identities, are often indistinguishable.
Similarly, ZZ5's peculiar e-mail verbiage conjures such traditional diagnostic indicators of mental disorder or frank psychosis as "word salad" or "loose association" or "confabulation." It ranged from disjointed ideas triggered by loosely homonymic words ("yaddahda yahdada" to Yoda to Star Wars nostalgia) to wild flights of rhyming or near-rhyming ("Ya, its all a surreal deal, steal me a ticket to next week's episode").
But ZZ5 gave some of the teariest, hand- and teeth-clenching testimony seen in a courtroom. As one juror later commented, "she turned her crying on and off as if on cue." She was far too savvy for such a diagnosis.
Notwithstanding the often graphic nature of her own, or borrowed Burroughs' writing, ZZ5 resorted to many traditional feminine ploys in her electronic seduction of Gray. At one point she tried to pique his curiosity, and perhaps to awaken his jealousy, by describing her new boyfriend, a man with eight voices that, she wrote, "live in an apartment building in his head." She tried to arouse Gray's sympathy, revealing tantalizing bits of information to draw him into her life crises.
She also lured him with flattery. "...you're filled as in chock full o' exact esoteric references, which amaze the bejesus out of me," she writes. "how do you know about such out of the way, your-mom-probably-wouldn't bepleased-resources..."
At times, beneath Zutzut5's tough and gory cybertalk lurks your familiar single woman surfing the net for her IRL (In Real Life) Mr. Right. "I may love you...," she wrote. "yes its official, when shall we marry?"
ZZ5 and Gray turned a comer in their relationship five nights before their ill-fated date. In a long e-mail ZZ5 wrote of death, dying and her own "semi existential crisis" regarding morality. Her outpouring is precipitated by the suspected rape of a dorm-mate.
ZZ5: "Last night i was sitting in the emergency room...and i sat there, a bloody rag at my feet, from a stranger infected with hiv, probably, blood smear on my pants from her...and on the tv there was a cartoon...these monkey warriors in outter space...and ...survivor kamikaze pilots...I want to go home. But can't. I'm so sad..."
"Life can be very creel at times. It is a killing joke," Gray replied to this seeming cyber-cry for help. It's at this point that he also gave ZZ5 his phone number "If you need to talk to someone .... "The nearly five-hour phone call that followed was the prelude to their calamitous off-screen rendezvous.
S&M SNUFFED OUT
Although her e-mail showed that ZZ5 was very much a liberated woman of late Nineties cyberculture, the cyber-sex trial judge reached back into an earlier era of male-female relations and applied the rape-shield law. The law is intended to keep a sex-crime victim from being smeared in court by having her past sexual history cited as proof that she (or he) either asked for or consented to a violent sexual assault.
The law--which grew out of traditional views of women as the weaker sex, vulnerable and prone to being victimized by a strong and dominant man--was not meant to bar evidence or testimony bearing directly on the crime at issue. However, the judge edited out of the e-mail almost all of ZZ5's numerous references to interest in or experiences with S&M or bondage and domination, forms of sexual activity that involve submissive and dominant roleplaying and in which, in some instances, "no" can be taken to mean "yes." Practitioners, though, usually have "safe words" that clearly mean "stop."
As a result of the judge's decision, Jovanovic's lawyer couldn't ask ZZ5 why she had called herself a "pushy bottom" or had e-mailed Jovanovic that she had become another man's "slave and its painful, but the fun of telling my friends 'hey, i'm a sadomasochist' more than outweighs the torment." In addition, the lawyer was unable to put Jovanovic on the stand to ask him what it was in ZZS5's e-mail that had led him to believe she hoped and expected to have an S&M experience with him.
The rape shield law, which many legal experts believe was misapplied in this case, only wound up shielding perjury. It sanctioned ZZ5's denials about her email S&M discussions with Jovanovic.
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