Man convicted of forging racist email

PHILADELPHIA — A Broomall man who worked as an international tabloid journalist was convicted this week of forgery, identity theft and tampering with public records after state prosecutors said he “wielded electronic devices as weapons” by creating a racist email he claimed came from a Delaware County official.

Nikolaos Hatziefstathiou, 28, was found guilty by a jury Thursday after a four-day trial in Media. In addition to the conviction for creating the fake email, jurors convicted him of impersonating Liam Stack, a reporter for the New York Times, and ABC News correspondent Stephanie Walsh in an attempt to interest county prosecutors in his claims of harassment by a local police officer.

Hatziefstathiou, known as “Nik the Hat,” published a story on his website, YC News, in 2019, saying a confidential source forwarded him an email from a supervisor in Delaware County’s adult probation and parole department.

The email, reproduced by Hatziefstathiou in the article on his site, used the n-word and mocked the county’s Black residents.

Senior Deputy Attorney General Kelly Sekula, the lead prosecutor on the case, said Hatziefstathiou’s actions were part of a “pathetic effort to bolster his own profile.”