Late Wednesday night, we got an email from somebody identifying herself as Lee Whitnum: "I was wondering if you could remove any reference of me from your website," she asked. "I've had a really bad three years and I have been unable to get a good job because of the Internet postings. It all happened in August 2004." That was long before I got here, so I had no idea what she was talking about, but a Google search quickly filled me in: Whitnum (left) was the woman who briefly dated former presidential candidate John Kerry in the early 1990s, then used the experience years later as a plot point in her self-published novel, Hedge Fund Mistress (published under the pseudonym "Lee Roystone"), although the big fuss in the summer of 2004 was primarily about the online "scrapbook" she'd compiled of her brief relationship. (Richard Leiby of the Washington Post had about as sympathetic a summary of the story as you're likely to find.)

I explained to Whitnum that media outlets can't just rework their archives whenever people don't want to call attention to their personal histories. The fact that the websites for her novel and its publishing company, both of which were registered in her name(s), were still active (that's how I got her photo) and taking orders for the book further disinclined me from taking her request seriously—if she's not handling her online profile in a proactive manner, what does she expect everybody else to do? But, I told her, I'd be happy to run an interview about her current situation. No dice: "No one is interested in your site or me," she responded over the next few emails. "Other sites, more known than yours, have agreed to remove it."

Well, that would certainly be newsworthy if it were true, but when I challenged her to name some so I could contact them myself and verify her claim, she went into immediate shutdown mode, leaving me with nothing to write about but our brief exchange (although my interview offer still stands). I guess the moral of the story is that there's more than one way to "dooce" yourself, and the effects can linger for an awfully long time... especially when you don't even take the time to clean up your own online clutter. (One last letter from Whitnum yesterday morning suggests that she may be thinking that as long as she removes all references to "Lee Whitnum" from the public record, she can continue to enjoy whatever success she's had as "Lee Roystone" without attracting the attention of her future bosses. Sometimes making no choice is itself a choice.)