It just seems like there's better ways of dealing with this than the court system. Namely due to the expense. If they were harassing him, why not just notify the AOL mods? IMO, they are very good at dealing with online abuse. I run a small message board on my Web site, and a couple of times, I've had to ban AOL members for posting abusive messages. IP banning doesn't work well with AOL, because they're so large and they use dynamic IPs, but an e-mail to AOL gets the perpetrator suspended from AOL for two weeks, which usually fixes the problem. (Especially since they're usually kids, and when the parents find they can't log on because of what Junior's been up to, the hammer comes down.)

One of my other hobbies is tropical fish/plants. There was a guy who ran an online business selling them. He didn't do a good job, generating numerous complaints on mailing lists, message boards, Usenet, etc. Rather than trying to fix the problem, he slapped everyone who complained with a lawsuit. He bragged to his local paper that it was his hobby. He lived 5 miles from the federal court building in NY, where he filed the papers himself, while the people he sued across the country had to hire lawyers and pay thousands of dollars to fly to NY to appear in court if they wanted to fight. Most of them ended up paying him thousands of dollars to settle, not because he was right, but because they couldn't afford to take time off work, buy the plane tickets, etc.

He also sued Google, because searching on his company name brought up massive complaints about his business practices and many messages commenting on the lawsuits.

Eventually, a lawyer in Alabama got fed up, and set up a defense fund. He asked for PayPal contributions (some people were added to the lawsuit just for contributing). Then he countersued in Alabama, and when the guy didn't show up to defend himself, won a default judgment of $50,000. The guy immediately claimed bankruptcy (having put his assets in his wife's and son's names), but the lawyer successfully took his domain name to satisfy the judgment.