Cougar de-clawed: Judge orders JoCo woman to pay millions for cyberstalking man

A Kansas City judge awarded a New York man $7.3 million in damages on Tuesday, for years of harassment suffered at the claws of a Johnson County cougar. The woman, outed by the Star as 48-year-old Jessica Wright of Leawood, originally hired the man, identified as Lewis Heacker, now 23, to babysit her kids when he was 13. Then she couldn’t quit him. Psycho cougar, qu’est-ce que c’est!

Over a three-year period beginning in 2005, someone with access to Wright’s Internet account allegedly made 500-ish harassing phone calls to Heacker and another 50 or so to his girlfriend — everything from messing with voice mail to faking an orgasm, said Dan Curry, Heacker’s attorney. Wright has never admitted anything and hasn’t been convicted of a crime.

Curry told The Pitch that calls to Heacker were masked using SpoofCard so they appeared to be from his girlfriend, and vice-versa. A petition for damages filed in Jackson County circuit court says Wright “promised to marry” Heacker, claimed Heacker “had impregnated her” and also claimed that “she had aborted the pregnancies” between February 2002 and November 2004.

The judge’s award includes $5 million in punitive damages, which amounts to a gigantic bitch-slap to all female harassers of underage kids. Curry said this is one of the largest awards ever to a person subjected to cyberstalking in Kansas City.

Stay tuned for an update after today’s 1 p.m. press conference.