Assembly Worker Punished for Using Pseudonym to Praise Speaker Online The New York State Assembly on Monday reprimanded an employee who had used a pseudonym while posting comments on the Internet defending Speaker Sheldon Silver's handling of a sexual harassment scandal. The employee, Bill Eggler, 48, may have done some of his postings on state time, according to the Assembly, which said he had acted on his own when writing comments under the name Sophia Walker. The pseudonymous comments, which were first reported by The New York Post, appear to go back at least to 2010. "The employee is being formally reprimanded, his access to the Internet has been taken away, and we are reminding all Assembly employees about our Internet usage policy," Michael Whyland, a spokesman for Mr. Silver, said. Mr. Eggler works in the Assembly's correspondence unit, which handles mail, but he has previously worked in the communications office. He appears to have used the name Sophia Walker in other contexts - for example, listing her as the editor in chief of an offbeat blog with which Mr. Eggler is affiliated. In a comment posted earlier this month to a story published by The Times Union of Albany, Mr. Eggler, under the Walker name, praised Mr. Silver's handling of sexual harassment accusations against Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez. Mr. Silver censured Mr. Lopez, a fellow Democrat, this summer after two female employees accused him of harassment, but the speaker was criticized after it was revealed that he authorized a confidential settlement this year with two other women who had accused Mr. Lopez of harassment. "Silver has already taken EVERYTHING he can from Lopez," Mr. Eggler wrote. I honestly cannot fathom how anyone, through anything short of rank partisanship, can possibly accuse the Speaker of administering a slap on the wrist. In another Sophia Walker comment, Mr. Eggler wrote, "This entire affair is nothing more than election year scandal-mongering, all of which will fade away after the taxpayers foot the bill for a costly, perfunctory and pointless investigation that will find no significant wrongdoing on Silver's part." After the 2010 election, a comment attributed to Sophia Walker said that Carl P. Paladino, a Republican who ran for governor that year and who was a frequent critic of Mr. Silver, could "go crawl back under his rock." This is not the first stridently pro-Silver commenter to seek to defend the speaker anonymously on the Web. Until last year, the writer or writers of a blog, NextGenDems, defended Mr. Silver's handling of previous Assembly sex scandals, among other things, leading to speculation in Albany that it was written by someone with ties to the Assembly. Assembly officials have said they did not know its author. The state's Republican Party started a petition drive last week to call for Mr. Silver's resignation as speaker of the Assembly in the wake of the Lopez scandal. Mr. Silver has dismissed that idea, noting that Republicans have wanted him out for years.