So is Facebook unstoppable? Not if more people suffer like this woman - and others take fright when they hear her tale.

Susan Arnout Smith is an  author and tells a horrific  story on Salon this week of her battle to get a pornographic  profile, using her name and picture, taken down from the world's most popular site.  Her punchline is the killer. After a months-long battle, she writes, " Not long ago in Salon I saw a story  that helpfully provided the customer service number for Facebook . I decided to call it to see if I could get a comment for this story. "When I pressed the customer service option at that number, an automated voice told me that talking to a real person was no longer an option." Below we publish some edited highlight from her tale. But for the full story visit salon.com

Susan Arnout Smith's tale

I'd hired Wiley Saichek from AuthorsOnTheWeb.com  to do some Internet P.R. on my latest book. He'd encouraged me to join Facebook for visibility. I'd begged off; Facebook sounded like a massive time suck. But, worried I was out of touch with the literary world, I relented -- and joined.

I was still in that first-week euphoria -- reestablishing connections, notes from people I hadn't seen or heard of in years -- when I got the e-mail from Wiley.

"Facebook" read the subject line. I expected a droll message welcoming me to the new century. Instead, what I saw rocked me back in my seat:

I pressed the link. There are moments that are burned into the heart. I saw my face. It was a photo taken off one of my websites. I saw my name. The persona they had created, using my name, my face, was pornographic, trolling for sex. I pay good money. I sat stunned. There had to be a way of connecting to a real person, somebody who could help me get this removed.

I tried the number listed in the front of the book. It no longer connected to Facebook. I called Palo Alto information. No listing.

I wrote Wiley: Help me. How do I get this to go away?

The short answer is, I couldn't. Not for a very long time.

The fake profile had been created the first of last year, before I'd even joined Facebook myself. When I discovered it, it was autumn. That meant that for over eight months, anywhere around the globe, if someone had Googled my name and the word "Facebook," this fake profile would have appeared, pretending to be me.

Wiley immediately e-mailed me instructions from Facebook: Get on the fake profile, click an icon that identifies the profile as fake and type in the Facebook address for my real profile. He had already done this, as had an associate in his office. I braced myself, scrolled down the profile and clicked. I asked friends, family and trusted colleagues to do this.

Fake, fake, fake. Remove, remove, remove. Click, click, click.

Nothing happened. No response from Facebook.

Every day, I'd click onto the fake profile, hoping it was gone. Every day, it was there. I couldn't bring myself to read the entire thing. It made my heart bleed.

After two weeks, I clicked the "remove this fake profile" box again. I received an automated message from Facebook, telling me I'd already filed a report.

As time went by, and the fake profile came up next to the real one every time I Googled it, a slow rage burned in my heart.

Who were these people at Facebook? I visualized them throwing darts and eating pizza behind impenetrable walls

A month passed. Facebook hadn't responded. I stopped sleeping.

I felt humiliated. Powerless.  Our nephew, Ben White, an attorney practicing in Walnut Creek, Calif., decided that if we hadn't heard from Facebook in another week, he was going to take action to encourage it to dismantle the profile. But there was one thing he asked me to do first, and it was a killer.

He wanted me to get on the fake profile, and finally read it, every word. People had friended it. He needed me to look at their faces. See if I recognized anybody.

Reading the profile was like plunging into an icy pond from such a high distance it felt as if I'd slammed into a wall. And then the sensation of drowning.

I took a breath. Made myself read. The comments they had left behind were graphic, vicious.

Before I wrote fiction or essays, I was an investigative journalist. This was my new job: tracking down the people who had done this to me. Making them pay.

I started with the 22 friends on the fake profile. I burrowed into search engines, discovered the private things they'd kept hidden. I followed threads. Music I didn't recognize, television shows that didn't air in the United States.

I narrowed it down to a country. A city. Two schools. Religious schools. On the other side of the world.

I looked at their unmasked faces lined up like mug shots. I stared at the soft eyes, the bright smiles.

I took a breath. Wrote both of the school principals. Told them exactly what the students had done, what the impact was on me. And what I wanted. I wanted the profile down.

Within days, I heard back.

The principal wrote: We then alerted Facebook and the page has been removed.

The wording was vague. How did they get it down? I did not know. Maybe in their country, there was a support number that worked faster; maybe the principal of a school has more pull than a writer. I only know that when I looked for the profile, it wasn't there anymore. Finally.

Of course what I wanted to know, what I'd spent hours imagining and hypothesizing about is: Why me?

Nobody seems to know. Probably not even the kids.

In that same letter the principal had written: We have tried (checked texts used at school, followed links, etc.,) and we are as puzzled as you, why they have selected your name and image.

My guess? I wasn't real to them. I was a bouncy toy, a name, a face, pulled at random off the Net. Something they tossed into the air and batted around for a couple of months before they lost interest and moved on.

That, for me, is the scariest part