My posts here have been deleted or moved. You can find me at Blogger now.

Earlier today I was surfing through my blogroll and on one of those blogs I found a link to a blog that has a name nearly identical to mine: 4 Little Birdies. Woah, I thought, what are the chances?! So I clicked on it out of curiosity. And there I saw a post that was mine. Damn. This has happened before — I had a blog about birth issues that contained some writing that will in some form eventually make it into my book, and someone took one of my posts there and put it on her own blog uncredited. I wrote to her to tell her that she needed to remove it or I’d take legal action, and she responded by attacking me for reading her “private diary”. Fortunately she did remove it, but the experience left me shaken, and was part of the reason I took down that blog.

When I again saw my words on another person’s blog today, uncredited, posted as if they were her own words, I had a shock reaction. It felt as if I’d been assaulted. My body felt wobbly, my heart started pounding, I felt sick to my stomach. She had even taken out my kids’ names and substituted her own kids’ names. Surreal and violating. My thoughts, my feelings, presented as her own. I thought, how dare she, and I got really angry. And then I found four other posts she copied. Five all together.

When she wrote back to me she offered the explanation that at the time of the postings she had been having mental health issues. However, she didn’t remove the posts until I demanded it. She knew they were there; she chose to keep them there. She claims that she’d forgotten about them, but that’s a little hard for me to swallow. I’m guessing that it’s for the same reason she felt able to copy me in the first place — I’m nobody to her, so perhaps to her it didn’t feel like any of my words really belonged to me. But they do. They came out of my heart and my head. They are me.

There’s also the problem of the blog name, which she hasn’t given me an answer to. The right thing to do, of course, would just be to change it. I’m hoping she decides that her kids and handiwork (both of which she posts many beautiful pictures of) deserve better than to be represented by something stolen from someone else.

Update: She is not going to change the name. She claims that she had already decided on the name and came across my blog only when she did a google search to see if her blog name came up, and mine came up from which she then conveniently took posts from to start her blogging career.

Update: I now know of six people whose work she’s plagiarized. Some of those people have gotten in touch with her and most of the posts (those that I know of anyway) have been removed. There’s one left because the author wasn’t concerned enough to pursue the matter. Two of the plagiarized posts were from Inside My Head, similar in content to mine: personal thoughts and experiences. The difference being that they were actually posted quite recently, in May of this year. So I guess the “mental issues” are ongoing. Those two posts were not removed along with mine, and not removed in fact until the other blogger contacted her. What this says to me is that this woman has no intention of removing any other plagiarized posts until they are identified, and her contriteness when I confronted her was absolutely false.

I am furious and feeling like a dupe. So at this point I really have no problem outing her. Her name is Sebrina Wilson. She has just made her blog private, so I guess now she can impress her friends and family with “her” writings stolen from others, and she can do this to her little heart’s content without the silly real authors getting upset about it.

Update: She writes to me, “My blog is disabled. I hope that “outing” me on your blog has brought you some comfort.”

I responded, “It has not. But I hope it keeps you from doing this again. You have a lot of nerve implying that I did something wrong by exposing you, considering the extent of your plagiarism (six individuals that we know of,) your dishonesty (you “forgot” you’d copied my posts, while having just recently plagiarized someone else) and the fact that you only removed the posts you’d stolen from others when they became aware of them. You don’t seem to understand the seriousness of what you’ve done and I am only sorry at this point that there does not seem to be any way of prosecuting you. Please do not contact me again, I will consider it harassment.”

Update: When I first wrote this post, I also started a thread at Mothering.com asking for advice about it. I did not mention her name, as it’s against the user agreement for that forum, but strangely she (username: sebrinaw) found the thread (scary stalker undertones there), outed herself when she didn’t have to which is weird enough in itself, and apologized not to me but to the community. Nearly a month later she apparently had a change of heart. I logged on to find the content of this post completely gone. I can only assume that she complained to the blog host who made the decision to delete this post without informing me. Next thing you know she’ll be having a lawyer sue me for “libel”.