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Cyd Duffin, principal of Colony High School in Palmer, Alaska, said a student tipped her off to a fake MySpace profile created of her last fall. Though MySpace deleted the page per Duffin's request, she filed suit against the social networking company after employees refused to reveal information about who created the page.

After the suit against MySpace recently gained media attention, the two students responsible for the page confessed to Duffin. They were punished — though Duffin did not say what sanctions they received. She said the two students "learned a valuable lesson that wasn't too painful."

"I did not want to make it into a bigger deal than it was," Duffin said. "All I wanted to do was hold the kids accountable for their actions."

The site showed a picture of Duffin taken from the school's Web site and another altered to show her wearing Ku Klux Klan robes. The site said Duffin had sexually transmitted diseases, and was a drug user, bi-sexual slut and "the high priestess of the KKK."

But the MySpace profile also targeted minority and disabled students at Colony High School. The page said the school had "too many Negros, Asians and Mexican immigrants ... mother-fornicating Mexicans," Duffin said. The site made comments about deaf students, including, "God damn I hate them," according to Duffin.

Duffin said the comments directed towards Colony High School students are what motivated her to determine who created the page and punish them.

"As a high school principal, you better have thick skin. Kids are going to make fun of you," she said. "But when they targeted our minority kids and our disabled kids, I really felt like I had to stand up."

Under current Alaska law, Duffin could not ask law enforcement officials to investigate because state law does not make online harassment illegal. There is also no law that prohibits cyberbullying.

Since MySpace was unwilling to reveal the page's creators and local police could not launch a probe into the matter, Duffin filed a civil suit against MySpace on March 19 in the Los Angeles County Superior Court, where the company is located.

Duffin said she knew the battle would be tricky, but felt she had jurisdiction over the incident since it "came into the school doors." Though Colony High School's Internet filter prevents them from accessing MySpace, students were viewing the fake profile on their iPhones or Blackberrys, and it was the topic of conversations for weeks. In December, the Knightly News, the school's student newspaper, wrote a front-page story about the fake profile.

"You're really on thin ice, if even that, when you talk about things that kids create on their own time, by their own means, from home," Duffin said. "But I think when it walks in the door and directly deals with the kids inside your building ... and portrays our school as somewhere that is unwelcoming to [the minority/disabled] student population, there is definitely a problem with it."

After the students confessed to making the page, Duffin said it appeared to be "just a prank gone awry."

"Their explanation was they were just having fun, got carried away and realized too late that they had crossed the line," she said.

Duffin said Internet pranks and harassment are not things that students can "tear up and make go away." While she was able to get MySpace to remove the fake page, once content like that is posted it "kind of has an infinite life," she said.

After the initial student notified her of the page, a man searching MySpace for someone to date stumbled up on the profile and called the school. Duffin said it is "scary" that anyone could have found the page and thought it was genuine.

Duffin, who has been principal of Colony High School since 2002 and was awarded Alaska Principal of the Year in 2008, said the Internet creates certain problems when punishing kids for their misbehavior.

"In the world of the Internet, kids are just exploring a new territory, and the laws haven't caught up with it," Duffin said.