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HealthSouth's CEO Exposes,
Sues Anonymous Online Critics

By MICHAEL MOSS Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL July 7

Richard Scrushy, the chief executive officer of HealthSouth Corp., was making the rounds of investor conferences last fall when analysts pulled him aside to ask if he had seen the latest Internet banter. A bulletin board devoted to his company had turned into a broadside.

One posting called the company, which provides rehabilitation services, a house of cards starting to tumble. Others predicted that he would be probed for billing fraud. A series of messages alleged that executives were swapping their spouses, with one poster going so far as to boast of his supposed affair with Mr. Scrushy's wife.

Hardly a cybersophisticate, Mr. Scrushy had never even heard of the electronic board owned by Yahoo! Inc., where the messages were piling up. "Here I am, the CEO of a multibillion dollar company, and I'm having to answer about what some weirdo has said on a message board," Mr. Scrushy fumes.

So he jumped into the fray. Using cybersleuths and shoe?leather detectives, Mr. Scrushy has begun unmasking the message writers on his board, and he is suing some to put a stop to their postings. One enthusiast turned out to be the husband of a disgruntled employee. Another was an ex-employee.

Many of the anonymous posters aren't even aware that HealthSouth knows who they are and may sue those whose messages it deems defamatory. The latest target for its detectives is someone with the online name "gletel," who recently posted that HealthSouth had been downgraded. It hadn't been.

Until the Internet came along, the traffic in opinion about stocks and bonds was largely ?? and for the most part calmly ?? controlled by Wall Street analysts. The message boards, however, let all comers vent their feelings, and that's the root of a growing problem for corporate executives: To ignore the postings is to risk seeing them grow even more outrageous and spread.

Some companies have gone straight to the message boards to try reasoning with posters. More are trying to thwart those of their online critics who promulgate falsehoods, which is complicated by posters' use of secrecy software to protect their anonymity. When the brokerage firm E*Trade Group Inc. discovered that a problematic poster on its Yahoo board was using secrecy software, it hired a computer whiz to slice through the shields. "My non-anonymizer was better than his anonymizer," crows Henry Carter, E*Trade's vice president for compliance.