Other than being known as The Most Hated Man On the Internet, who is Hunter Moore really? I must say I was quite disappointed with the latest Netflix true crime docu-series because the producers/writers didn’t even attempt to provide an answer.
I wanted some explanation, a peek behind the door of the “nondescript beige house” in a “leafy town, just north of Sacramento” where, it turns out Hunter Moore lives in his parents’ home.
Talk about personifying the ugly troll spewing out venom onto the Internet from his parents’ basement. Ha!
I wanted to know how/why he became a self-designated “professional life ruiner” which is what he was to dozens of women whose nude photos and photos of them engaged in sex acts were posted, without their consent, on his revenge porn site, IsAnyoneUp.com.
But for that information, I had to go to — you guessed it–the Internet where I could access a couple of articles about the low-life. (More on that below.)
Determined Trio
Okay. I get it. This docu-series apparently was not supposed to be about the sociopathic tendencies of Hunter Moore and what drove him to be that way– although the producers have had plenty of experience documenting the rise and fall of the biggest scumbag sociopaths out there. After all, executive producer, Alex Marengo and his production company, Raw TV, brought us The Tinder Swindler and Don’t F*ck With Cats.
In this true crime documentary, however, the focus is on the determined trio that went after Moore in 2012 and ultimately brought him down. The trio was spearheaded by Charlotte Laws, the angry, tenacious mother, whose daughter Kayla was featured on the website where Moore posted her nude photo and invited comments about it. Then there was Jim McGibney, a former Marine, and Jeff Kirkpatrick, the FBI investigator who spent a couple of years pursuing Moore.
At this point, a viewer might think like Moore himself: “Well, I didn’t take the photos.” It’s the women who take the photos. Or, women who let their boyfriends take the photos without wondering what might happen to those photos if their boyfriends or husband become vengeful exes.
And, isn’t there a lesson here that should have been learned a long time ago: Don’t do or say anything that you wouldn’t want to see go viral on the world-wide web.
Not That There’s Anything Wrong With It
That’s judg-y, of course. And, priggish. If you’re young and have a beautiful body, nothing at all wrong in flaunting it. But. But. But…
That’s not what happened in Kayla’s case. She took the nude selfies, and emailed them to her own email account. Turns out her account had been hacked. That’s when mom, Charlotte decided to go after Hunter Moore.
To be clear, there is no federal law making it a crime to post revenge porn or intimate photos of another on the Internet. There are laws however making it illegal to hack or gain unauthorized access to computers.
At the end of the first episode of this 3-parter, Charlotte and her husband, Kayla’s stepfather, an attorney, threatened Moore with legal action for breach of copyright in stealing Kayla’s photo — and got him to take it down. As a viewer you sit and wonder: Well, where are we going with this, now?
Only Just Begun
Turns out, Charlotte Laws was not done. She had found another 40 victims who’d had nude photos of themselves posted to the site. Many of the women had had their email accounts hacked just like Kayla.
Charlotte contacted the FBI who opened an investigation into the hacking. In the meantime, James McGibney, the former Marine and a founder of an anti-bullying website, bullyville.com, determined to go after Moore himself. He established contact with Moore and eventually offered him $12,000 to buy the site, which McGibney promptly took down, redirecting visitors to his anti-bullying website.
This infuriated Moore’s rabid fans and followers, and egged on by their “adulation,” Moore promised a new website where he would re-post photos with the victims’ names, addresses –and directions of how to get there. He expressed no remorse about the lives he’d ruined. In fact, anyone asking him what he thought about it, got outrageous answers, like: “If someone killed themselves over that. Do you know how much money I’d make?”
Putrid Acts
At the same time, he went on a tour as a D.J, hosting IsAnyoneUp parties all over the country. Journalist Alex Morris of Rolling Stone was assigned to write a cover story about him, and went on tour with him. She witnessed booze and drug-fueled orgies, with women lining up to sleep with him, posting photos of themselves carrying out whatever putrid acts Moore had asked them to perform.
Charlotte Laws posted his home address on Twitter. Moore’s fans retaliated by threatening her and Kayla’s lives. Charlotte and Kayla lived in fear with metal rods under their beds in case one of Moore’s acolytes broke into the house.
Case against Hunter Moore
Steadily, however, the FBI was building a case against Moore. They’d figured out how the women had been hacked. This is a particularly enlightening part of the docu-series with a very real lesson to be learned.
If you don’t know by now: Do not allow anyone posing as a FaceBook friend to use your cellphone number as a favor to receive a verification code to open his/her email account which he/she claims they’ve been locked out of. The verification code you receive will be for your own account to which the hacker will then add his/her email as a user on your account when you pass the code on to him/her.
Too long to explain it fully here. If you’ve never heard of this scam, I’d recommend viewing it in Episode 2. Those scams are still being used in one form or another.
In any event, the FBI’s investigation which is thoroughly and vividly documented in this 3-parter, eventually led to the arrest of Moore and his hacker accomplice. Moore pleaded guilty to felony charges, one each of aggravated identity theft and aiding and abetting in the unauthorized access of a computer.
Unrepentant Smirk
Throughout the series, he is pictured in videos and photos as cocky, with a self-assured swagger and eyes that always look as if he is mocking the world. His expression appears to be fixed in a constant, unrepentant smirk. His message? There are no limits to his debauchery, and anyone is fair game for him and his website.
Alex Morris, the Rolling Stone journalist, who visited Moore in his parents’ Sacramento home before going on tour with him described the house as “immaculately clean and aggressively suburban.” She writes that he was named Hunter after his father’s favorite pastime; and that his mother, Jeannette was “both surprisingly sane and unsurprisingly baffled by her son’s career” when Morris spoke to her.
She adds to the somewhat scant picture by writing that Moore was expelled from his private Christian school at the age of 13.
For what? Mostly for getting into fights with other kids.”I was an angry little kid,” he told Morris. To which Charlotte Laws adds: “He’s a guy who is filled with hate. He hates women.”
It’s Village Voice reporter Camille Dodero –who appears in the documentary, and who elicits perhaps the best answer as to what turned Hunter Moore into the ‘professional life ruiner’ he became.
Ethnic Nose
In an article in 2012, she gets Moore to talk about the cyber-bullying of kids who Moore calls “weak-minded people.”
He tells Dodero: “The shit I went through? Fucking 10,000 times worse than these fucking kids.”
Dodero writes in that article: “I ask him what he went through that was so much worse. ‘Dude, I got jumped all the time,’ he says. ‘I got made fun of all the time. For me, I got made fun of for my nose forever. I have a very ethnic nose… I hated my nose. I felt insecure about my nose.'”
“What people want,” Moore had told Alex Morris of Rolling Stone “is to hurt one another, and to get back at the people who hurt them.”
It’s a very familiar story of the abused and bullied turning into bullies and abusers themselves. Which is what Moore became (after he got a nose job!)
That, of course, wasn’t any sort of mitigating factor to offer the judge presiding over his criminal case. Moore didn’t really have a leg to stand on; he didn’t even try to offer an apology to any of the women whose lives he had ruined.
He was sentenced to 30 months in prison, and banned from Twitter.
One thing I found interesting as well that wasn’t addressed, was how did they find the accounts to hack? There are millions of accounts out there, how they did happen to find accounts that had nude pictures? Was the hacker using some type of keyword algorithm that keyed on words like Pics in the subject line? I would have liked to known that!
Totally agree with your question. I will try to find an answer for you soon.