College Student Suspended for Insulting Woman Via Social Media

Said her legs looked like "bleached hams" in YouTube comments

MONTCLAIR, N.J. — Joseph Aziz admits he was "trolling" — internet slang for posting inflammatory comments online — when he wrote a comment below a YouTube video last fall saying a female classmate's legs looked like "a pair of bleached hams."

Aziz, a Montclair State University graduate student from Weehawken, said he never imagined the jab at a stranger's weight would prompt a complaint to university administrators, who forbade him from having any contact with the woman or talking about her on the internet.

He was even more shocked, he said, when Montclair State officials called him into a disciplinary hearing a few weeks later after he mentioned the woman's name while joking about the incident in a Facebook group he thought was private.

Aziz's punishment: a one-semester suspension and a note on his college transcript.