ARCHIVE 7/16/08: Benoit Wikipedia Hacker Police Video Snippet (Part 3 – Why We Should Care)

Benoit Wikipedia Hacker Police Video Snippet (Part 3 – Why We Should Care)

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

No one is saying that Matt Greenberg murdered Chris, Nancy, or Daniel Benoit, or had prior knowledge of the crimes.

But that doesn’t mean that the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office’s barebones and conclusory hearsay – “Greenberg is ‘harmless'” – should stand as the final public word on the matter. I say this for at least four reasons.

First, Greenberg resides in Stamford, the headquarters of World Wrestling Entertainment. In his anonymous Wikipedia apology, he said, “I am not connected to WWE or Benoit in anyway [sic].” But the police record so far does not show that he was questioned about this assertion in any depth.

Second and more intriguingly, Greenberg had been “warned several times in the past for vandalizing and posting erroneous information on Wikipedia,” according to the online journalist Corey Spring. On the Wiki entry for actress and former wrestling personality Stacy Kiebler, Greenberg reportedly inserted the edit, “People want to @!$%# her in her lovely @!$%# and whip her ass til the dawn of day. Many people fantasize about ramming their cocks up her @!$%#.”

On the Wiki page for basketball player Ron Artest, according to Spring, Greenberg was responsible for adding, “Artest is a piece of @!$%# nigger!!!!!!!”

Other reports last year had Greenberg and a circle of his friends at UConn vandalizing the Wiki information for Naugatuck, Connecticut; among other things, they made one of the friends the city’s mayor.

But the real kicker is that, amidst this sophomoric behavior, Greenberg’s unauthorized Wikipedia edits were said to include one random act of kindness: He hacked into the bio of Chavo Guerrero and removed ethnic slurs. And Guerrero was one of the two recipients of Benoit’s final text messages – some 19 or 20 hours before Greenberg edited Benoit’s Wiki page to say that he had missed the pay-per-view because his wife died. So the question naturally arises: Is Guerrero a friend or acquaintance of Greenberg’s?

Third, that 20-hour gap raises the possibility that no matter how inadvertent Greenberg’s own role might have been, the frenzy of online gossip surrounding Benoit’s no-show in Houston that night might have contained elements of conscious truth – because an insider told it to someone who told it to someone, who proceeded to feed it through the new-tech information food chain of online discussion boards and chat rooms.

Fourth, major news media, like the cops, were guilty of misleading the public in their hasty dismissal of the Wikipedia chunk of the Benoit story. I’ll have more to say about this aspect of my investigation down the road.

Irv Muchnick