TROIS-RIVIERES, Que. - Four high school students and their parents are being sued for $225,000, for allegedly mocking another child who did a video project depicting himself acting like a Star Wars character. Ghyslain Raza, 15, who has become known as the Star Wars Kid on a number of Internet sites, made a video of himself doing martial arts moves with a broomstick, imitating the combat style of Jedi knights in the Star Wars series.
He left the cassette, made for a school project, in a cabinet at school and it disappeared. Images from the cassette then showed up on the Internet. The boy’s parents say in the lawsuit that four other youths put it on the Web, along with messages that attacked the boy’s private life and his reputation.
In the lawsuit’s statement of claim, the family says the boy was so widely mocked at his private high school that he dropped out. He had to finish the year at a facility specializing in child psychiatry at the Trois-Rivieres Regional Hospital Centre. He “will be under psychiatric care for an indefinite period of time,” according to the statement of claim. “Ghyslain had to endure and still endures today, harassment and derision from his high-school mates and the public at large,” it states.
Millions of people looking for information on Star Wars have seen the images on a variety of Internet sites, the lawsuit says, and even the New York Times has done a story on Ghyslain.
KFS doing what he does best. The parents need to sue the people who spread it and made fun of him. Not the ones who posted it. I doubt they had a clue this would happen.
