Cyberstalking Twitter user charged with aggravated assault for sending strobe image that gave journalist a seizure

A Maryland man has been criminally charged after sending a tweet with an animated image of a strobe light to a journalist who has epilepsy, the Washington Post reports. The journalist was sent into a seizure after seeing the tweet, according to court documents.


John Rayne Rivello, 29, is facing charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for sending the image to Newsweek senior writer Kurt Eichenwald via Twitter in December. The image was accompanied by the sentence: “YOU DESERVE A SEIZURE FOR YOUR POSTS.”

The tweet triggered an eight-minute seizure for Eichenwald, who had written about his epilepsy before, including two months before the tweet. His attorney, Steven Lieberman of the Washington, D.C., intellectual property firm Rothwell, Figg, Ernst & Manbeck, said Eichenwald was unable to speak for a time afterward and was “almost fully incapacitated for several days.” Eichenwald’s wife tweeted shortly after the seizure that she would report the tweet to police as an assault.

Rivello sent the tweet from an account called @jew_goldstein, and prosecutors allege that it was motivated in part by anti-Semitism. Rivello also was arrested in Maryland for cyberstalking