What do you do when you are about to lose a tenured job, your employer is investigating your fraudulent research and you've alienated a small cadre of supporters in an academic scandal over the explosive topic of guns?

Perhaps you invent an online persona to defend your work.

Readers might remember Emory investigated former history professor Michael Bellesiles (pronounced bell-EEL) for his 2000 book Arming America, which argued that guns were rarer in early America than previously imagined and that frontier America wasn't violent.

Only the book was wrong, and when reputable academics criticized it, Bellesiles couldn't verify many of the records he'd cited. Emory's investigators, charged with finding research misconduct, found Bellesiles violated all four of the major categories of research standards set by the American Historical Association, including fabrication.

Since Emory launched that investigation in the spring of 2002, the most vocal and intemperate online supporter of Bellesiles has been a man who goes by the handle "Benny Smith." Smith has posted seven times on the Wheel's Web site and on countless occasions at History News Network, a site run by George Mason University, at hnn.us. On our site, Smith identifies himself as a Detroit-based database administrator.

In December, when Columbia University was reconsidering the prestigious Bancroft Prize it had bestowed on Arming America, Smith went into a defensive frenzy and accused the Wheel of being led by right-wing gun nuts when we broke the story. "Anti-Bellesiles passion has apparently claimed the staff of the Emory Wheel," he wrote. Yet our reporting was on the money. Columbia did revoke the prize that month. Meanwhile, Smith was probably the only database administrator from Detroit who knew that Bellesiles had retained a lawyer, presumably to mediate with an embarrassed Columbia.

In a Dec. 15 post to an HNN discussion board, Smith wrote that Bellesiles should have "retained appropriate counsel early on." Mysteriously, Smith knew both that the professor had recently hired a lawyer and that he was previously without one. Remarkably, no newspaper had reported on Bellesiles' legal representation before (or after) Smith made his post. It's peculiar that someone with Smith's credentials would have any knowledge of the matter, particularly someone who insisted in a March 20 HNN post: "I do not know Bellesiles personally."

After a hiatus on HNN, Smith rematerialized again at the beginning of this month, ostensibly to promote the forthcoming release of a second paperback edition of Arming America, complete with a new forward and an updated statistics table. The book is scheduled for a Thanksgiving release from Soft Skull Press, traditionally a publisher of erotic literature and left-wing books.

Yet again, Smith is privy to things that no database administrator from Detroit could know. Outside of Bellesiles and perhaps a couple of people at Soft Skull, nobody could have described the forthcoming cover of Arming America the way Smith did on HNN.

"Book distributors are beginning to pitch the highly anticipated second edition," he wrote on Oct. 2. "If the NRA still has problems with the text, maybe they will find the accompanying book jacket photo less objectionable. The photo features a young girl with racks of guns behind her, a hauntingly poignant portrait of our gun culture today."

When contacted at a Yahoo! e-mail address, Smith wrote that he found the cover image online but didn't have the "Web site handy." He then lamented that the Wheel's coverage was clouded by right-wing demagoguery.

In any case, Soft Skull has confirmed that the cover will feature the image of the girl and the gun rack. But the publisher's Web site has no information on the book, let alone an image of its cover. Online retailers such as Amazon.com show a different image from an earlier draft of the cover, not the final version. So Smith knew what Amazon doesn't and what Soft Skull doesn't want the public to know.

It's telling that whenever Smith is questioned, he disappears or dodges, occasionally choosing to rant about the National Rifle Association and partisan politics that he claims ruined Bellesiles. For the record, I've called all of the listed Benjamin Smiths in the Detroit area. None had heard of Emory, much less Bellesiles.

Taking advantage of a medium that allows one to communicate anonymously would be acceptable in my book if deceit -- aside from the made-up name -- were not involved. But Smith attempted to spread lies about our paper's motives and denials about Columbia's reconsideration of the Bancroft. That crosses the line.

As for Bellesiles, who also uses a Yahoo! e-mail account these days, he did not respond to questions for this column.

Remember, Benny Smith couldn't be a Soft Skull employee, since he started posting long before that publisher picked up Arming America. Among Bellesiles' supporters, few know anything about guns; most feel he just got a bad shake. Yet Smith appears to be one of the only Bellesiles supporters online. He's also knowledgeable about guns and clearly has a handle on minutiae. For instance, he knew that Bellesiles attended a history conference in Wales earlier this year and suggested that he attended a history conference in Memphis, Tenn., in the spring.

In the e-mail sent to me on Monday night, Smith made another slip. He implied that he'd already read the new foreword to Arming America, written by a constitutional historian at New York Law School. "I hope you read the new foreward [sic] by Richard B. Bernstein," he wrote. "It also described how right-wing power politics can silence voices that we need to hear."

It is becoming increasingly apparent that one of two scenarios exists: Either Bellesiles and Smith are in cahoots and Bellesiles is using Smith as a mouthpiece in order to garner self-respect in the wake of his downfall, or Benny Smith is Bellesiles.

Either scenario is a disappointing turn for an already sad story.

Editor in Chief Andrew Ackerman is a College senior from Orlando, Fla.