Local man who claims he invented e-mail sues Gawker, which says he didn't

V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who says he invented e-mail as a 14-year-old in 1978, is suing Gawker and its owner for at least $35 million, claiming articles in 2012 that questioned his claim got him fired as an MIT lecturer and that a follow-up in 2014 lost him paid speaking engagements and other jobs around the world.

Ayyadurai, who now lists our own Middlesex County as his home base, says he built a program he called EMAIL while working as a young research fellow at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. He has said earlier work on the ARPANET network that became today's Internet was merely text messaging, not the full-bodied e-mail system with cc and bcc fields he says he built.

In his suit, filed yesterday in US District Court, Ayyadurai claims that not only did the articles lose him business, they caused him great emotional distress.

He says this means he's entitled to damages above the $35 million he sets as a base amount, especially since the author of two of the three articles is, he claims, a drug addict who should never have been let near a word processor.

Gawker is a company that routinely engages in wrongful conduct, and specifically, writes and publishes false and defamatory statements about people, invades people’s privacy and other rights, and publishes content that is irresponsible and that no other legitimate publication will publish.