I may have heard the name Hunter Moore over a decade ago, but I had forgotten the whole scandal at the center of Netflix’s three-part docuseries The Most Hated Man on the Internet. I had seen people like Hunter Moore before. I had gone to school with them. I had worked with them.
Moore was your typical Millennial stereotype – a tattooed wild party animal type who only like partying and getting laid. I had seen the type so many times before. He was the wild voices on the Girls Gone Wild videos. He was the drunk guys wearing Polo shirts at keg parties trying to get into a young co-ed’s pants. He was the guy at my schools who only dated girls to have sex with him. I’m reminded of a scene in The Rules of Attraction where the male characters talk about girls they “fuck” now. They don’t talk about dating. All they care about is having sex with the women.
I can hear them saying, “Relationships are for (insert homophobic slur here).”
Moore had developed a website http://www.isanyoneup.com, which started out as blog posting pictures of musicians and entertainers partying or doing silly things. This was the Jackass Generation, young people who thought they were going to live forever so why take precautions. And then, they began to start sharing nude pictures. Yet the nude pictures increased the website’s traffic.
However, not everyone was a willing participant and Moore and his followers, nicknamed The Family, messed with the wrong person. A young woman, Kayla Laws, had taken pictures of herself that she emailed from her phone to her Gmail account. But somehow they ended up on the website. So, did pictures of dozens of other women. Someone was hacking accounts and finding pictures. It just so happen, Kayla, had one helluva Mama Bear with Charlotte Laws, a talk show host, author, and activist. She was married to a lawyer, Charles Parselle, who initially thought it would all pass.
But it didn’t. It only got worse as The Family began to send threats online and through fax machines to their house. The website was doing a lot of bad things and ruining people’s lives. A teacher had pics posted and was unaware until after she was fired. People hid behind computers and smartphones and said all they wanted with impunity. However, that would come crushing to a head when Moore appeared on Anderson Cooper and sat next to two people who had been posted on the website without consent.
The docuseries shows how just over a decade ago, a lot of people didn’t care. The best way to avoid pictures ending up on the website was not to take any, they said. It was classic victim blaming. Someone sends a picture to a loved one and it appears on a porn site and it’s been criticized. Yet, no one can really look at Moore and see that what he was doing was innocent. Sadly the laws weren’t in place.
However, there were questions if the website was commiting illegal acts through cyberhacking as well as posting pictures that could be consider child pornography. This is how James McGibney, a former Marine and entrepeneur, got Moore to sell the domain name for a meager $12,000 to shut it down. The irony was despite all the money Moore was getting from the heavy traffic, he was very much broke. And when yoiu see how Moore was living, you’ll understand why.
Moore wasn’t interviewed even though he had initially agreed to interview but I’m guessing he backed out following the Anderson Cooper fiasco because he knew director Rob Miller would have better control of the footage. Considering in 2015, Moore pleaded guilty to charges of aggravated identity theft and aiding and abetting in the unauthorized access of a computer, everything here is public record since Moore is a felon. An accomplice, Charles Evans, was convicted of hacking and identity theft in connection with the case. The FBI agents leading the investigation say that Moore and Evans were not smart in their ways.
Some people interviewed say Moore was one of the first online trolls, but I think it was there far before. I remember some of the old chat rooms from the late 1990s and there were trolls then. Moore was just able to tap into a section of people online who were misogynistic, sexits and prejudice. It’s one thing to hide behind a user name and say something, it’s another to say it to someone sitting a few feet away from you.
I think what also affected the case was a decade ago, there wasn’t much concern about revenge porn. In a previous post, I talked of the infamous Pamela Anderson sex tape which was stolen. People were more about victim blaming. Yet if Larry Flynt has an FBI surveillance tape of John DeLorean being sold cocaine, that’s illegal. The problem with our laws is there’s always has to be people who suffer greatly until legislators decide to do something about it. These women not only lost their jobs and had their reputations ruined, some even tried to end their own lives.
It’s not surprising Moore only served two-and-a-half years. It’s not like he killed someone or rob from rich people. If anything, I look at the Netflix docuseries as getting his face out there for everyone to see. He wanted to expose innocent people. The filmmakers can now expose him and I’m sure Netflix sent this to their legal department before it went to air. But you won’t forget Moore’s face after seeing this and you definitely won’t forget what he’s done.
The question is do you feel about him. Was just giving people what they want or if he’s a scumbag who deserves this scorn?
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 