But you can follow up on them, especially in an article where the first-person account is part of a larger story about cyberstalking.
E.g., "We then contacted a lawyer who specializes in stalking, who told us that..."
E.g., "I emailed the professor mentioned earlier in the article to find out if criminal/civil settlements ever result in such an arrangement in cyberstalking cases."
Or, "While the lawyer couldn't reveal the nature of his relationship with Danny, I certainly was under no such obligation. We hired a private investigator to go through the records I had kept of the cyberstalking and harassment, to try to piece together who other potential victims may have been."
If this were a blog I wouldn't have commented at all. I can understand if the author took the call from the lawyer as a potential signal that the harassment was over and wishes to devote 0 more time going forward to dealing with this person. But it's not a blog-- it's a journalistic story about a person using every legal avenue available to stop the harmful behavior of an abuser that spanned decades, and how every single avenue fell short of stopping the abuse. That story is frustratingly incomplete because we don't know what it is that actually put a stop to the abuse, and it appears nobody took further steps to explain it.
I'm not interested at all in the drama of the incident.
I'm interested in what steps were necessary to force a lifetime harasser to find a lawyer and a) agree to provide that lawyer with at least a partial list of victims of his online attacks, and b) also agree to allow the lawyer to contact the family of those victims and request a response if the lifetime harasser ever tries to contact the victim again.
But you can follow up on them, especially in an article where the first-person account is part of a larger story about cyberstalking.
E.g., "We then contacted a lawyer who specializes in stalking, who told us that..."
E.g., "I emailed the professor mentioned earlier in the article to find out if criminal/civil settlements ever result in such an arrangement in cyberstalking cases."
Or, "While the lawyer couldn't reveal the nature of his relationship with Danny, I certainly was under no such obligation. We hired a private investigator to go through the records I had kept of the cyberstalking and harassment, to try to piece together who other potential victims may have been."
If this were a blog I wouldn't have commented at all. I can understand if the author took the call from the lawyer as a potential signal that the harassment was over and wishes to devote 0 more time going forward to dealing with this person. But it's not a blog-- it's a journalistic story about a person using every legal avenue available to stop the harmful behavior of an abuser that spanned decades, and how every single avenue fell short of stopping the abuse. That story is frustratingly incomplete because we don't know what it is that actually put a stop to the abuse, and it appears nobody took further steps to explain it.
Edit: added word "journalistic" for clarification