[jschick88]

A first-year university student — one of 18 people whose anonymous aliases are named in a defamation suit filed by former Leafs general manager Brian Burke — is baffled by the attention his post has received.

Zack Bradley is the 20-year-old Carleton University journalism student from Oshawa behind a Wordpress blog who posts under the alias “THEzbrad.”

“It’s a crazy idea, right? . . . I thought it was just a rumour. I said speculation,” Bradley told the Star on Monday. “What I said wasn’t probably true and I just removed it because I don’t want anything bad to happen in the future.”

About a month ago, Bradley said, a lawyer claiming to represent Mae contacted him twice through private messages on Facebook requesting that his post — which was published online on Jan. 17, a week after Burke was removed from the helm of the NHL team — be taken down by a certain date or he would face legal action.

“I thought this can’t be that important if he messaged me on Facebook,” Bradley said. “I really didn’t take it seriously.”

“When I posted it, there wasn’t anything really on the web about it,” he said. “It got a lot of views, and so I guess that’s why he’s not liking it so much.”

http://www.thestar.com/news/crime/20..._big_deal.html