Elayna Katz made it perfectly clear to the waiter that she didn’t want olives on her pasta. But that’s what she got. And peas and celery were substituted for asparagus on another dish. Plus the service was slow.

The final straw came when the waiter asked her to pay for two entrées, including a dish she’d returned.

Soon after, Katz, 42, posted two negative reviews on restaurantthing. com — the first time she’d ever written an online review — about her unsatisfactory dining experience at Mambo Nuevo Latino restaurant in Ottawa’s ByWard Market.

That should have been the end of it. Instead, Mambo’s 41-year-old owner Marisol Simoes retaliated by unleashing a two-year campaign to humiliate the reviewer by depicting her as a lonely, unstable, sexually insatiable transsexual. Eventually, though not sufficiently soon for Katz to avoid embarrassment, Ottawa police charged Simoes under Canada’s rarely used criminal defamation laws. Last month she was found guilty of two counts of libel in an Ottawa courtroom and will be sentenced Nov. 8. She faces up to five years in prison.

It is a case that captured worldwide attention because it has revealed the darker side of online reviewing and the revenge scenarios that it can prompt. Indeed, some academics are concerned online revenge tactics may become more common as the Internet insinuates itself into the fabric of our culture and allows individuals to act on impulses with apparent impunity. Other academics are investigating why women are more inclined to seek revenge from the safety of their computer.

University of Miami psychologist Michael McCullough is the author of Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct. He believes the thirst for revenge has become hard-wired in us over thousands of years.

“The function of revenge is largely to deter the person who’s harmed you from doing it a second time or to deter would-be offenders by giving them an object lesson in what happens to people who harm you.” Fortunately, he thinks the instinct to forgive is stronger than the instinct to retaliate.

Revenge, he says, operates like a powerful craving. “People who are in the thrall of the desire for revenge are in the thrall of an insatiable appetite. They look like people who are trying to get a fix of some kind of drug.” He says brain scans of people who are plotting revenge are similar to the scans of people with drug cravings.

McCullough says some people dream up revenge fantasies because, “it’s pleasing for them to imagine the suffering. They don’t want to eliminate the person who has offended them. They are saying, ‘I’m happy for us to coexist. I just don’t want you reaching out and harming me in the future.’ ”

The problem with seeking revenge on the Internet is that, “you don’t actually get to witness the suffering of the person. It can be unsatisfying that way. It’s much more difficult to calibrate the pain you’re going to cause somebody.”

Cheryl Dellasega, a humanities professor at Penn State University and the author of Mean Girls Grown Up and When Nurses Hurt Nurses, has written a lot about women’s approaches to conflict.

She believes teenage girls who engage in cyberbullying are far more likely to continue Internet bullying into adulthood than men. “It’s much harder for a woman — in person — to be cruel — face to face. But on-line you can sort of let loose and think that nobody’s ever going to track you down or hold you accountable. And it’s easy: 24/7 you can go online and write things.”

She worries on-line bullying among adult women may soon become “normative behaviour.”

So Dellasega is heartened that the case of the Ottawa restaurateur and the novice reviewer is getting global attention. “If there are legal repercussions, that may change things,” she says.

Dellasega has a few words of advice for anyone considering an act of on-line revenge. Print it out and look at your message on paper. It can be very sobering. Reread it to make sure your emotions are under control. Avoid using ALL-CAPs and overusing exclamation marks for unnecessary emphasis. In short: “Be aware of the things that can be taken two ways.”

Katz’s experience is a cautionary tale. Shortly after her reviews were published in 2009, worrisome messages began popping up on Restaurantthing, which carries the same kind of citizen reviews as Yelp and Urbanspoon. They revealed Katz’s full name as well as information about where she works, her job title and work phone number. (Katz had left her business card with Mambo staff in the hopes Simoes would contact her to discuss her dining experience.) The messages slammed Katz, insisting she was “crazy” and should be “locked up” in the Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre.

But it was a full year before Simoes, who with her husband also owns Kinky, another Ottawa restaurant, acted on her ultimate revenge fantasy.

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Pretending to be Katz, Simoes dispatched a series of highly sexualized e-mails to Katz’s bosses — the CEO and 75 directors at the Federation of Canadian Municipalities — where Katz works in human resources. In her emails impersonating Katz, Simoes declared the reviewer was “a tiger in the bedroom,” adding that she was transgendered and liked threesomes and group sex. Then she set up a dating profile on an adult website in the “men seeking men” category using Katz’s name. It, too, contained lewd declarations.

Humiliated and at her wits’ end, Katz finally went to Ottawa police. It was a lengthy procedure. Constable Henri Lanctôt says Ottawa police initiated an investigation in June 2010. Charges were laid February 2011.

Katz says the experience has been embarrassing, especially at work.

“I’d only been working there for one year but they were very supportive of me. They were concerned for my safety. No one could come in the building and see me without an appointment,” says Katz.

Katz says the Mambo review was her first experience with online criticism. She has since continued to post restaurant reviews, insisting she’s not going to let this incident stop her. “I was shocked,” she says, by the worldwide media attention the story attracted.

Assistant crown attorney John Semenoff, who prosecuted the case, places Katz’s complaint in a category that includes cyber bullying. He doesn’t care to speculate on the future of these cyber wars as more people turn to the Internet to settle differences. “This was just a case of who-done-it,” says Semenoff.

In the end Ontario Court Justice Diane Lahaie determined it was Simoes who had the “strong motivation, ill feelings and opportunity” to commit the crime.

As the sentencing date approaches, Katz says she feels vindicated enough by the guilty verdict.

“I won,” she says.

dgraham@thestar.ca

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