Seizure-inducing tweet breaks new legal ground

Suspect faces charges for ‘attack’ on reporter

The arrest of a Salisbury, Maryland, man accused of giving a wellknown journalist a seizure by sending him a flashing image online represents a new kind of prosecution for a new kind of crime.

The journalist, Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald, suffered a seizure in Dallas after viewing the flashing animation when he received it via Twitter late last year, according to a statement from the Justice Department. Eichenwald had written about his epilepsy and publicly described a similar attack several weeks before the Dec. 15 incident, and authorities said the alleged attacker sent Eichenwald the image in an attempt to hurt him as revenge for what he saw as the reporter’s critical coverage of President Donald Trump.

Experts on cybersecurity said the incident was not the first in which technology was used to expose medically vulnerable people to injury, but some said it was the first time they’ve heard of prosecutors bringing criminal charges in such a case.

Authorities took John Rayne Rivello into custody Friday on suspicion of sending Eichenwald the image along with the message: “You deserve a seizure for your post.” Rivello has no previous criminal history, according to public records.

Legal experts compared the alleged crime to sending a letter bomb in the mail, or to purposely giving a person a dangerous allergic reaction.

“What is new, because of the technology, is the ease with which certain individuals can be targeted across state lines by remotely distant perpetrators,” said Andrea Matwyshyn, a law professor at Northeastern University.

Eichenwald declined to comment Saturday and referred questions to his lawyer, who did not respond to a request for comment. In his essay describing the first incident last fall, he said he received a video that contained a strobe light, with flashing circles and images of Pepe the Frog — often used as an alt-right meme online — flying toward the screen. He avoided a seizure by dropping his iPad. The similar message on Dec. 15 triggered convulsions.

Rivello, 29, apparently knew that Eichenwald would be sensitive to the images, authorities said. His father, David Rivello, declined to comment Saturday about his son’s arrest when reached by telephone. Several other relatives did not respond to requests for comment.

Online, Rivello has been exuberant about his hard-right politics, often tweeting dozens of times per day about his support for Trump and his frustration with anyone out of step with the White House agenda.

“This reminds me of a boy who cried wolf over a Pepe cartoon,” he wrote on March 10 in response to a tweet by Eichenwald about a white woman at an airport complaining about being racially profiled at the security checkpoint.

“He accused me of ‘attempted murder’ by deadly Pepe meme back in October,” he wrote about Eichenwald.

The taunts inspired some of Rivello’s 3,365 followers to post similar strobe images to Eichenwald’s Twitter handle.

Although the Constitution offers broad protections to critical speech in public forums, experts said it is unlikely Rivello could successfully defend his actions as protected expression.

“This doesn’t even get in the door of the First Amendment,” said Danielle Citron, a legal scholar at the University of Maryland. “It doesn’t have expressive value… . It doesn’t express someone’s autonomy of views and opinions. It’s not contributing to the marketplace of ideas.”