The Most Hated Man on the Internet (2022) s01e02 Episode Script

Episode 2

1
Looking out a dirty, old window ♪
Down below the cars in the city
Go rushing by ♪
Welcome back.
She has met more stars than Robin Leach
and Barbara Walters combined.
This is how she does it.
She lies her way into movie premieres.
She has crashed exclusive parties
and even got past Secret Service
for a private chat with President Reagan.
I've never been one to follow the rules.
So please welcome Hollywood's
number one star chaser, Missy Laws.
We're the kids in America ♪
Whoa ♪
When I was living in Las Vegas,
I taught myself how to party crash.
You wanna be their equal. You want
to be someone they would wanna talk to
and they would wanna meet.
Bright lights and music ♪
I like the glitz and the glamour.
And then I thought, "Well, there's
a lot of interest in this subject."
So I wrote a book about how to do it.
Missy Laws. Missy is the author
of the new book Meet the Stars.
If someone says
I can't get into a VIP area
or go past the velvet rope, it just
inspires me to try harder.
I think, "Oh, okay. I have to find a way
to get into this event."
And frankly,
there was always a way to do it.
So when it came to stopping Hunter Moore,
I wasn't gonna be intimidated.
I win. I always win. That's what happens.
So fuck you. You're not gonna stop me.
People said that he would come after me,
that he would ruin my life.
But he came after my daughter.
Now I am going after him.
Charlotte is someone
who does not give up on things.
Even though the picture was down,
Charlotte could not let it go.
The victims had no one else to
fight for them, so I was kinda the anchor.
I was there for them, and I'm certainly
not gonna walk away from that and say,
"Oh well,
now my daughter's picture is down,
so you're on your own, everybody."
I would never do that.
This is something she felt was
an unseen wrong
that she wanted to bring to light.
And she was gonna work hard and tirelessly
until that happened.
I wasn't too happy
about Charlotte continuing
'cause Hunter Moore
was a law unto himself.
Hunter had a set of followers
who I think were deranged.
How far they would go,
no one could say.
But she continued anyway.
From, like, 6:00 a.m.
until I go to bed at 9:00 p.m.,
I'm obsessively on the computer
getting information,
compiling information
about Hunter Moore and the victims.
It's the only way to fight
against someone like Hunter Moore,
because he's obsessed
with what he's doing. That's all he does.
It never stops.
People are submitting all the time.
I don't even know when he slept.
There was no way I'm going to prevail
unless I'm just as obsessed.
By the end of February 2012,
I had spoken to 40 victims
who were posted within the two-week period
that Kayla had been posted.
And I had learned that 40% of them
had never sent their pictures to anybody.
What I discovered confirmed my suspicions.
I thought that Hunter was hacking.
It meant anybody could become a target.
There was nowhere to hide.
It was really kind of shocking.
So I told Charles and Kayla about this.
My first reaction was,
"Wow."
"Good luck with that."
I mean, Charles just rolled his eyes.
I think he was like,
"Oh my God, what's she doing now?"
And, uh, Kayla was
Absolutely shocked.
This was not a one-time thing.
It was happening to a lot of people.
And it felt like Hunter Moore
had to be involved.
Well, I had these results of this survey,
and so I wanted to get them out there.
I was trying to contact reporters to say,
"I believe there's hacking going on,
and I think this needs to be reported."
But I couldn't get anybody
to, you know, take on the issue
or write an article about it.
There was one very prominent reporter,
and I talked to her
and told her what the story was.
And her response was,
"You don't have a story."
No one believed me.
And it was really an uphill struggle.
And so that's when I decided
to write my own blog.
It was the only way I was gonna get
the information out there.
But I was afraid to do it from my house
or even from Los Angeles
because Hunter or one of his followers
could figure out that it was me
from my IP address
and come after my family.
So I waited until I was on vacation
in Las Vegas,
and then I went
to one of the Internet cafes
in one of the hotels on the Strip.
I wrote the results of my survey,
including the fact that
40% of the victims I had spoken to,
I believed, had been hacked.
I wrote what Hunter Moore was doing
and how brutal his website was.
I published the blog
under the name Cassie Freedom.
I was thinking of freedom of speech
and the ability
to be able to say
the truth of what I knew.
I was feeling really good about it.
I was continually checking it
and refreshing.
But then all of a sudden
it was hacked.
I was just absolutely shocked.
Whoever it was
must have had a Google alert
on the phrase "Hunter Moore,"
possibly "IsAnyoneUp."
There was a button
that said, "Hey, click here."
And of course, I did not click on it.
It was clearly, in my view,
a virus and then the next thing I knew,
I was locked out of the entire blog.
And so I was totally freaked out.
I went from feeling really good
about posting it to being like,
"Oh my God!" You know?
'Cause I thought I was in control
a little bit when I posted the blog.
And then all of a sudden, they were back
in control again. I couldn't believe it.
The mic is yours, Hunter.
Basically, you're sending these pictures
to some cute boy.
It's your actions
that are getting you in trouble.
Don't take the pictures
and they won't ever be out there.
Hunter Moore
was definitely controlling the narrative.
It's just boobs, dude. Come on.
Yeah. It's just tits, dude.
Come on, damn.
The voices of the victims
were being silenced.
No one cared about our plight.
They didn't care what the victims
were going through at all.
And yet all these journalists
were lining up to interview Hunter Moore.
I liked writing about subjects
whom people reflexively hated.
I liked writing about things
that people would look at and go, "Ew."
I'm Camille Dodero, and in 2012 I wrote
about Hunter Moore for The Village Voice,
which was a news weekly
in New York City,
the largest alternative news weekly
in America.
Part of my job was to come up
with cover stories,
um, and to come up with features,
you know, that would get eyeballs.
I started considering Hunter Moore
as a profile subject in late 2011.
Today, I wanted to talk about
how to deal with haters.
At that point, there was lots
of vile behavior on the Internet,
but so much of it was anonymous
and people hiding behind things.
And this was a person who was claiming it.
A lot of people fucking wanna kill me.
But for me, as a human being
who doesn't give a fuck
He identified himself with this idea
of non-consensual pornography.
But he, uh, didn't expect
any accountability for it.
Of course, that that absolutely
made it fascinating to me.
You deal with hate by laughing
and being relevant
and getting your dick sucked.
So this is gonna be
a feature for The Voice.
You get to talk to Hunter
a bunch of times.
He would come to New York City.
I would hang out with him
and his entourage.
This would be, like,
the big moment to see Hunter in the world
and see the Internet come to life.
We went to his birthday party
at Webster Hall, this New York club.
For the few who don't know my website,
it's IsAnyoneUp.com, so please
In 2012, the site was growing.
Its popularity had spread across America.
Lots of girls showed up
specifically to, like, party with Hunter.
You know, kids with tattoos,
piercings, chopped hair.
Hot Topic kids.
Most of them
were, like, trying to make out with him
or following him around.
There's a lot of fucking dudes here,
but there's a lot of whores here.
There was one kid there
who told me that, you know,
"We all wanna be Hunter Moore.
Like, he has the best life ever."
He was a mini celebrity to them.
Hunter was glad
there was a reporter there to see it.
And he was playing that up.
And I thought I could outdrink
all you guys,
but the first hour that I was here,
you guys are fucking, like, machines.
After the club,
we go out into the street.
One of our group hails a limo somehow.
We're in this limo.
There's about 13 or 14 of us,
and Hunter seems to take this as a cue
to get, like,
very crazy.
He starts making out with
this girl that he was with that night.
He makes out with his male friend
"as a joke."
There was one girl
who had been fawning all over Hunter.
And then he starts, like, being like,
"Come on, baby, let's have sex.
Come on. Let's have sex."
And she's like, "No, Hunter, no!"
And, uh, they're on my lap at this point.
She said, "No."
But he didn't leave it alone.
He, you know, kept asking her.
I got the sense that Hunter's used to
getting people to do what he wants.
I definitely think
he had a bit of a god complex.
So when Hunter
was being interviewed by a reporter,
he would actually post it on Twitter.
That meant that I knew
what was happening.
And I knew I could try to contact
that particular journalist
and offer the victims' side of the story.
On April 2, 2012,
my profile of Hunter Moore was published,
and within two or three hours,
I got an email from a person
named Charlotte.
And I told her that I thought
there was a hacking scheme.
I didn't know if Hunter
was involved in it, but I definitely knew
there was a hacking scheme
associated with his website.
At the end of her email, she put,
"By the way, I'm not a victim, but I've
spoken to 40 victims from his site."
And that was totally remarkable to me,
that this person was contacting me
and had spoken to 40 victims.
I mean, I certainly didn't hold back.
I gave her any information that I had,
anything that I'd been doing,
anything the victims had been doing.
She knew everything.
She had provided me
with screenshots from the hacking,
messages from this strange email address.
She had reached out to the FBI.
Her detective skills were on par with
most investigative journalists
that I know.
Thank you.
The more we talked,
the more it became apparent
that there really might be something here.
There might actually be
a coordinated hacker,
which which had never occurred to me.
And from then on,
I just constantly worked on this.
Am I live? I think I am live.
But if Hunter was up to something illegal,
he certainly wasn't keeping a low profile.
What I do admire about you
is you don't hide behind an alias.
What I admire about you
are your massive balls.
Yeah.
He wanted people's attention all the time.
Just keep talking about me
and keep following my Twitter.
And he starts getting all this press,
like interviews, magazines,
and everything.
If you like the drama,
I mean, it's gonna get a lot worse.
This is a guy who started
on some niche corner of the Internet.
I don't know, dude. Everybody just wants
their five minutes, you know?
And he was now going mainstream.
So we gotta talk about a disturbing trend
that is happening online right now,
and it really can ruin your life.
When he was asked to do Anderson Cooper,
he saw it as a giant opportunity
to increase his brand and his visibility
and did not see it as a risk at all.
Today, you're gonna meet
the young man behind this website
to see how he justifies what he's doing.
But first, I want you to meet some women
who feel violated by what
this website has done to them.
Please welcome Melissa and Daveeda.
If you're doing something bad,
don't go on national television
to brag about it.
Do you feel bad about doing this?
You don't know these women.
You don't know anything about them.
I mean, that's kind of
what makes it easier, you know. I mean
You know, it is all anonymous.
I don't know these people,
and, uh, you know.
But they're sitting right here.
You don't feel any
No one put a gun to your head
and made you take these pictures.
But if we're choosing to send them
to somebody that we trust,
like, that doesn't mean that we
expect them to show up on the Internet.
And there's nothing we can do
to take them down.
We have no option to do that.
Hunter thought he was bulletproof,
but then he got
on Anderson Cooper's stage.
You know, he came off like a dick.
You know,
he thought that that Internet persona,
that attitude that he was able to kind of
edit and prune for an online audience,
he thought that would translate to TV,
but it absolutely didn't.
So you admit
what you're doing is not right.
Uh, I mean, just looking at my website,
I mean, it should kind of educate you,
you know, on technologies.
You have educational value here?
Is that honestly what you believe?
Not concerning towards, uh, you know,
underage kids with camera phones, yes.
I mean, ladies like this, no.
It was obvious that he felt no remorse.
He didn't care.
He was the king of the world.
Going on The Anderson Cooper Show
showed the world who he really was.
He told us, his followers,
that Anderson Cooper was, like, fake,
and that
that the things he said were, like, edited
and just pieced together
to make him look worse.
He's like, "The media,
don't trust the media. It's all fake."
Just 'cause there's a lot of people
who are jerks out there
doesn't mean
you have to be one of them too.
And it doesn't mean
that you have to profit off it.
I mean,
but I want to.
Hunter truly believed
all publicity was good publicity.
Going on Anderson Cooper
is one way to test that theory.
And in some ways, he was right.
Because after he went on the show,
the site blew up
and became a global phenomenon.
It's been called "revenge porn."
that he then uploads
to his site IsAnyoneUp.com.
A site that's fueled
by sexting pictures
and Facebook information.
The engagement
and the submissions multiplied,
going from maybe, you know,
10 to 20 submissions a day
to anywhere from 50 to 200.
But the other side of the story
is that once you start telling everybody
what a bad guy you are
and all the bad things you're doing,
you become something
people wanna crusade against.
Going on Anderson Cooper
put a target on Hunter's back.
In January 2012,
I was working in the FBI field office
in Los Angeles, California.
I was working in the Cyber Division.
I quickly learned
that the Internet never forgets.
It's always on. It's always there.
Anything posted there,
it's nearly impossible
to get it taken down.
One of the reasons I joined the FBI
was to help people who were powerless
and helpless and really didn't even know
what to do to fix an issue like this.
I mean
The first time I saw Hunter Moore
was on The Anderson Cooper Show.
Just looking at my website
Personally, I was shocked
by just his lack of empathy
and how he didn't care about
who he was hurting,
how he was hurting them,
or the repercussions for what he was doing
in these people's lives.
One of the sections to the website
was called "Daily Hate."
Um, and this was a section where Hunter
would post responses
from people who were on the website
pleading to be taken off.
He could make fun of them
and get the whole mob
of the website to help with that
and to make the person feel even worse.
I had never seen
anything like this before.
And it was definitely something
I wanted to pursue.
I look into the legality of the site
and discovered there weren't really
any laws in place
that prevented a site like this
from operating.
But then I heard from a colleague,
a woman named Charlotte Laws
had called in about her daughter, Kayla,
being posted to IsAnyoneUp.
Charlotte believed
that Kayla's account had been hacked.
While revenge porn wasn't illegal,
hacking definitely was.
It gave us enough
to start an investigation.
It had been several weeks
since I reported the hacking to the FBI.
And Charles had said they were
just humoring me, but, lo and behold,
three agents showed up one afternoon.
I was extremely impressed
when the FBI came to the house.
I thought it was an achievement in itself.
I certainly did not think
Charlotte would pull it off.
I thought the three agents were very nice.
They were all young guys, energetic guys.
I was very impressed
with Jeff Kirkpatrick.
I definitely got a sense
of desperation from them,
that they had gone to other places
to try to deal with this matter.
It was so relieving to know
that they believed me.
They were on my side.
Part of what we have to do when we
start these types of investigations
is establish
that the hacking actually did take place.
Kayla told me
that the only place those photos existed
was in her email account.
I sent the photos to my email address
because my cell phone ran out of space,
and I put it into a folder
called "My Pics."
So she told me that she had been
locked out of her email account,
and it happened to be
that that lockout was a couple days before
her photos ended up being on the website.
And one big clue we found was that
when Kayla got her email account back,
there was a secondary email
that was added to the account.
The secondary email was
Really aroused my suspicion
and gave credence to the
that the account had been hacked
and the photos taken from that account.
Jeff told me Kayla had been hacked.
I totally felt vindicated.
Everything had been completely worthwhile.
Charles made a joke at that point.
He said, "The FBI should hire Charlotte.
It's her calling."
So everybody laughed at that.
Charlotte is way more invested in this
than anyone I've seen in any of my cases.
She brought out a giant folder of evidence
she had gathered.
And I handed it to Jeff.
And I told him that there were
multiple victims in multiple states.
It was all over the country.
The potential was there
that there may have been dozens
or hundreds
or even a thousand victims in this case.
I thought if Hunter Moore was responsible
or played a part in this,
then he would definitely
be looking at prison time.
But Jeff said
it would take at least a year
to complete the investigation.
Probably more.
I didn't want them doing
their own investigation
alongside ours
and potentially interfering with it.
I agreed, but it was
a difficult position to be in
because there's all these victims
with their pictures on the website
who need the pictures down immediately.
I mean, they can't wait a year.
That's very risky for them
because those pictures
continue to populate to other websites.
Those victims needed help now.
Okay.
Public humiliation.
Yeah, it is.
And you are fine with blasting it out
and basically ruining,
in some cases, other people.
I mean, to me, I don't know these people,
and it's kind of anonymous to me.
I think, uh, the people submitting it are
the ones who should be, uh, feeling bad
when they click that "submit" button.
He's trying to avoid guilt.
He can't take responsibility for it.
So you have no empathy.
No, they're just p They're characters
and avatars and icons on a screen.
I don't feel like an avatar.
I'm fully human.
I guess that's typical for a sociopath
to dehumanize somebody.
I was 21.
And I was living in LA.
I felt like I was kind of at the source
of this underground scene
that was booming all over the world.
So I was having a ton of fun.
And, you know,
it came to a sudden end for me.
A very abrupt ending.
I met my ex at a party.
We were together,
I don't know, maybe six months
before I found out that I was pregnant.
As much as we wanted to work it out,
it just it just didn't.
During that time,
I sent him some intimate images
in an effort to just rekindle
some kind of, you know, romance
between us both.
But obviously that didn't work.
So I left Hollywood.
I got on a plane.
I went home.
You know, Star City has always been
a place I could come home to
and find support.
It's a really, really small farm town.
There's, like, one stoplight,
maybe, like, 50 churches.
Everyone knew each other.
If you told one person something,
you know, the entire community
would find out about it,
so it would make its rounds for sure.
My son was two.
And I moved on.
And we were having dinner.
And all of a sudden,
my boyfriend at the time,
his phone started
dinging with text messages
over and over
from different people.
They were just saying,
"Oh my God, have you seen this website?"
"Danielle is on it."
I remember him saying,
"Do you know what this is?
Do you Are you aware of this?"
And
it was an absolute shock to me.
The profile they had created of me
had a screenshot
of my Facebook account
and some intimate photos.
Seeing the photos was pretty horrible.
But the comments were devastating.
It was something to the extent of,
"Look at this
stupid
girl."
"I invite you to mock her."
And so there were comments and comments
and comments and comments
of people just mocking me.
I think the moment that broke me
was when I got a call from my brother
my little brother.
And he was just like, "I'm so sorry."
"I'm so sad for you."
"You know, my friends
are pulling this up."
"Everybody can see it."
You know, I just thought
that there was no way
I'd ever escape the humiliation of that.
I knew that I had only sent those images
to my ex in LA and no one else.
Immediately, I called him.
And I was just like,
"How could you do this to me?"
But he assured me that he did not.
And he said that he knew Hunter
from the MySpace scene crowd.
So I reached out to Hunter,
and I pleaded with him.
I told him that I had a little boy
and to please remove these images
because it was humiliating
to me and my family.
And the response that I got was
"LOL."
You know, it was just like
Hunter laughing in my face.
Hunter Moore,
he had an idea to get famous
and no one mattered.
All that mattered
was to create a name for himself.
It was going to take a lot to stop him.
I'm James McGibney.
I'm a United States Marine.
I take down Internet bullies.
I joined the marines when I was 18.
And it wasn't long before
I was responsible for the cybersecurity
of 128 embassies throughout the world.
By the time it was 2012,
I had left the marines,
and I was running multiple websites.
And I'm making lots of money.
One day, out of the blue,
I get a call from Hunter Moore.
And he was curious
if I was interested in advertising
one of my sites on his website IsAnyoneUp.
I had never heard of IsAnyoneUp.
I was very curious about it.
It had a catchy name.
So I went to the website
and was appalled by what I saw.
I immediately see a bunch of naked women
with some very derogatory comments
below it,
such as "She's a whore. She's a slut,"
with their home address in some instances,
where she went to school,
where her parents worked.
If you look at those posts, those really
are the ultimate form of bullying.
And it it pissed me off.
I hate bullies
because I was bullied
so severely as a child.
My earliest and first interaction
with a bully was actually my father.
I remember watching him beat the shit
out of my mother with a frying pan.
My brother and I
were taken out of the house
by the New York City Police Department,
and I never saw either my mother,
my father, or my brother ever again.
So when I saw IsAnyoneUp,
I had those same emotions
of when I was a child.
And I could relate to the women
who were posted on that site,
the helplessness that you feel.
I heard about Charlotte Laws
helping these women.
But I figured I could also help
in my own unique way.
I know I'm smarter than this guy.
I know
that I can intellectually outwit him
and get this site taken down
and protect these women.
I didn't know exactly how yet,
but from that point on,
I had one goal,
which was to totally
and utterly destroy Hunter Moore's life.
For the FBI,
this was considered an active threat,
which made us prioritize
this investigation.
And what that means is that there were
still victims showing up on the website.
There were still potentially
accounts being hacked.
So we need to act quicker
so that we can make that activity stop.
To have an FBI investigation,
we also have to have
the US Attorney's Office
decide if we have a legitimate case
to move forward.
My next step was to call
the US Attorney's Office,
where I spoke to Wendy Wu.
My role as the lead prosecutor
was to assess the evidence
and determine whether
that was sufficient to prove the charges
and what additional evidence we needed
for the prosecution.
For many of the victims,
their lives were changed permanently.
These photos did not end up
on this website naturally,
so I felt very strongly
that these women deserve justice.
I personally went out
and interviewed almost all of the victims.
As I talked to more of them, the method
the hacker was using became apparent.
So, um, one of my friends on Facebook
actually got her Facebook hacked,
and, um, the person
who hacked her Facebook
was messaging people on her friends list
saying like, "Hey, how are you?
Do you think you can do me a favor?"
The victim would receive
a message from the hacker,
who was using their friend's account.
The hacker would tell the victim
that they'd been locked out of their email
and lost their phone,
so they could not get
the verification code
to reset their own email password.
They would then ask the victim
if they could have the verification code
sent to the victim's cellphone
and for the victim
to provide that code to them.
Typically, friends
are gonna agree to help,
so they all of a sudden
get a text message of a password reset.
They would provide the hacker
with the details of the password
reset code from the text message.
And then all of a sudden, like,
two seconds later, I got an email saying,
"Okay, you've changed your password."
And I messaged her back.
I was like, "Okay, what's going on? My"
"I just got an email saying
that I changed my password."
"I didn't do that."
What they didn't know was that message
was to reset the password
of their own account.
So almost immediately
they would lose access to their email.
The hacker would then have access
to all of the messages,
all of the attachments, any photos
that were attached to any email messages.
After the hacker had stolen
the victim's photos,
he would infiltrate
their social media accounts
to impersonate that person online.
The hacker's method
was simple but effective.
He was using
the victim's social network against them.
Just like with Kayla Laws' account,
most of the victims reported
a secondary email being added.
It allows the hacker to reset the password
at any point in the future
to regain access to the account.
Yeah, everyone that I talked to,
like, we were all hacked by Gary Jones.
But who was Gary Jones?
Was it Hunter Moore or someone else?
The next step in the investigation
is to identify
where that account's being used
and who's the person behind it.
Throughout the investigation, I spoke
to Charlotte and Kayla pretty frequently.
He couldn't, like,
come out and tell me stuff,
but he would say things and I could
kind of read around what he was saying,
and I kind of knew what was going on.
We'd tried to let them know,
"We're making progress."
"I know it doesn't look like it
from your side."
"But it's not something
that can happen in days or weeks."
I know that's how they work.
I mean, law enforcement can be very slow.
And the wheel turns in a very slow way.
In the meantime,
I continued to push forward
and to reach out to victims.
You know, I wanted to try to do
what I could to help the victims.
I absolutely
hid from the world.
I didn't wanna be seen in public.
You know, it was
as if I was wearing a scarlet letter.
I could just sense it in people,
the way that they looked at me,
as if I'd asked for this,
as if I had done something wrong.
I did nothing wrong.
I called off work
because we were trying
to do damage control,
to reach out to people and say,
"Please don't share this with anyone."
'Cause I just felt the longer it was up,
the more a wildfire was spreading.
I spoke to Danielle,
and she was from a small town,
which is particularly difficult.
And she just didn't know
where to turn or what to do.
It was great knowing someone was fighting
for everybody who had experienced that,
that someone was finally stepping up
and fighting back.
I wanted Danielle to know
she wasn't alone,
that there are other victims
in the same situation.
I felt like that was
an important role I was playing
is being someone they could lean on
and somebody who was out there
trying to get that site down,
trying to get those photos down.
It absolutely helped me.
It absolutely helped me.
It gave me light. It gave me hope.
Because of the simple method,
and, uh, I would call it the sloppiness
of leaving a secondary email
behind for evidence,
I didn't get the feeling I was dealing
with a mastermind when it came to hacking.
People make claims all the time.
"You're photoshopping or you're hacking."
If I did know how to hack, um,
my site would be
a lot more successful than it is.
I mean, I get 150 submissions a day.
I don't need to hack.
And they didn't take any effort
to hide the IP address
that they were logging in
to their accounts from.
The closest thing to explaining
an IP address is your home address.
It is a group of numbers that's provided
by your Internet service provider,
who can tell you exactly
where that IP address was assigned
and who it belongs to.
So to further the investigation,
we wanna look at IP addresses
that are coming from victims' accounts,
that are coming
from the Gary Jones account,
and try to put all those together
into a picture.
I look through the IP addresses
and two started to stick out.
One of them we find is a apartment
in Studio City, California.
The other IP address
is a business not far away.
Further investigation leads to
Charlie Evens.
We start to investigate
who Charlie Evens is.
Really nothing stood out.
Seems like a regular guy
living in Studio City,
working nearby,
living a daily life, having girlfriends.
So we're still guessing.
Is it him? Is it a roommate?
Does he share his Wi-Fi with a neighbor?
But then we discovered his nude photos
had been posted on IsAnyoneUp.
And we believe that
he had submitted those himself.
At this point in the investigation,
I strongly believed
that Charlie is Gary Jones
and the one hacking these accounts.
It was a major breakthrough in the case.
But unless we were able to connect him
to Hunter Moore,
Hunter would be in the clear.
The best way to establish
the connection between these two
would be to see
if there are any emails between them.
If we could do that,
then Hunter would be facing
serious consequences,
including prison time.
So we had to work as quickly
as we could to build a good case
and stop Hunter Moore
from ruining people's lives.
What's up, Hunter Moore?
Nothing, dude.
Just chopping a line and packing a bowl
right now, to be honest with you.
I love money and vagina
- And doing lines.
- Yeah.
- And dropping molly.
- Yeah, and
Oh my God,
I was so mollied out last night.
Hunter cared about three things.
Sex, drugs, and money.
Well, I couldn't provide the first two.
But I most certainly had the wherewithal
to be able to provide him with some money.
Hunter was portraying to the media that
he was making at least $20,000 a month.
But the more I spoke to Hunter,
I quickly realized
he was very desperate for money.
So I decided to advertise with him.
Now, my skin crawled a bit.
I'm handing this pornographer money,
which is helping him
keep the site up and running.
But I wanted to put my emotions aside
and keep feeding him money
so I could learn
every aspect of his business.
Just like the marines,
you have to study your opponent.
You have to study your prey.
And I got to know
more about Hunter's environment
than Hunter knew about his environment.
I knew where every server was.
I knew every IP address.
I knew how many visitors were there.
And it wasn't long before I discovered
what I was looking for.
After Hunter's appearance
on Anderson Cooper,
he was getting ten times
the amount of traffic.
He was now on a national platform.
Dude,
I did The Anderson Cooper Show,
and it went from,
you know, our creepy little community
to, like, literally
the world coming to my site.
But subsequently,
more weirdos were submitting to the site.
So it was just, like,
people having sex with animals
and, like, chopping dogs' heads off.
Turned into, like, horrible stuff.
You know, and also,
all the underage stuff and all that.
I had a whole team
dealing with age verifying, you know.
That's five kids in my downstairs kitchen
all just age verifying all fucking day.
Everything has a digital footprint
that's on the Internet.
And that was the vulnerability
that I knew I could exploit.
Sometimes you have to be a bully
to beat a bully.
But I'm not gonna bully him physically.
I'm going to intellectually mind fuck him.
We started talking about the content
that was on his servers.
I asked him, "How are you verifying
the age of some of these girls?"
"Because I'm telling you right now,
I verified some of them."
"I pulled the EXIF data
out of some of your photos, Hunter."
"I don't know what method you're using,
but it's clearly wrong."
"Because this girl right here
who you're saying is 19
is 15."
I told Hunter, "Look, this is really bad."
"It's a big risk."
"And it's just a matter of time
before you're gonna go to jail."
Hunter started getting scared.
He did realize
what was happening around him
was extremely serious,
because there were multiple people
coming at him.
I just wanted it
to go away.
During the FBI investigation,
I talked to Camille a lot.
Charlotte told me
she had gotten the FBI involved.
So, you know, I called Hunter.
I said, "I've been told
that the FBI is investigating you
for hacking."
And at first, he made a joke of it.
But the more and more we talked,
he got increasingly angrier.
He was very defensive.
He said, "That's a serious allegation."
He went ballistic, saying that
he would get a gun and kill the person
who started the FBI investigation,
which, of course, is me.
But I thought that
that meant he was scared
and he didn't wanna get arrested.
Finally,
we were getting to him.
Seeing how worried Hunter
was about law enforcement,
I felt at that point that
that was the most vulnerable
I was gonna get him.
That's when I decided
we have to strike,
and we have to strike now.
I told Hunter,
"Look, your life
is gonna be utterly destroyed
if you don't allow me
to interject right now."
"I'm going to give you
this one and only chance, Hunter,
where I can bail you out
of this completely."
"I'll buy the site.
I'll take on all of it."
"Just give it to me, because if you don't,
you're gonna be in a world of hurt."
I made the offer for less than $12,000.
I told him I did not want the content
for obvious reasons.
I don't want pedophilia images
coming into our servers,
I just wanted the domain
and to get the site down.
And he thought it through.
As far as Hunter,
what he wanted to do,
I mean, he loved his fans so much
and really was willing to do anything
to keep that following there.
But also, he was terrified,
and he didn't want to go to prison.
I heard from Hunter the next day, and
he said that he was willing
to sell the site.
Okay.
One of the conditions
that I had with Hunter, uh,
for buying the site
was I wanted him to write an open letter,
and I wanted him to apologize
to all of his victims.
Early in 2012, I had launched
an anti-bullying website
that was called BullyVille.com.
I wanted to talk to you about
another one of your websites, BullyVille.
Tell me about that.
Thanks.
Yeah, BullyVille's an anti-bullying site.
So, kids come to our site, and they can
read stories that celebrities have posted
about how they were bullied
and how they got through it.
I told Hunter, "Listen."
"I'm gonna forward IsAnyoneUp
to BullyVille.com."
"Your letter is gonna be on BullyVille."
I pushed the button.
And at that very instant,
Hunter and my life dramatically changed.
Hunter Moore's IsAnyoneUp
was no more.
The site was voluntarily shut down
this week and in a bizarre twist
the site now directs you
to an anti-bullying network.
I couldn't believe it.
I'd been fighting
to get Hunter's website down for months,
and then all of a sudden,
he took it down.
Everybody was amazed.
His followers were amazed.
The victims were amazed.
That was a huge move.
It was a victory.
It was like, "We did it."
And I was so proud of my mom.
All the victims were elated.
I was getting phone call after phone call.
You know, it felt like finally
they could maybe live their life again.
The terrorizing had come to an end
at least for that site.
It was traumatic to experience.
Just because someone posted
some photos of me on a website,
do I have to live the rest of my life
and let that identify me? No.
No.
Hunter, when you say the site
wasn't supposed to be what it became,
does that mean
the whole time you were doing it,
you felt that there was something wrong
with what you were doing?
Of course. I mean, I'm human.
I don't wanna hurt people
or, you know, make people cry
or make them want to hurt themselves.
You know, I'm 26 now.
Um, I started the site when I was 24.
I've obviously matured.
When the site came down,
I felt, like, relief,
but also, you know, sad.
Sad because I was
such a huge part of the site.
And it was a huge community
and a huge part of my life.
Some people were genuinely upset,
genuinely dismayed
that this thing had been removed.
People thought nothing was wrong with it.
People must have thought he was sold out.
Some of the diehard fans
would've seen that he was now
helping to fight cyberbullying,
whereas a lot of people found
their personality in cyberbullying.
And they'd just lost their patron saint.
And they felt incredibly dejected
and abandoned by him.
There were a lot of angry people.
Thousands and thousands of his followers
were upset
and wondering, you know,
why did he just turn over so quickly?
Was he sold out by the money?
I saw that word "sellout,"
# sellout, #huntermoore thousands of times.
It was actually trending at one point.
When you ridicule them,
are you then becoming a bully?
Are you a cyberbully then?
Yeah, that was another factor
in helping me shut down the site. Um
Yeah. I was totally a bully,
a really big bully.
Hunter was pretending publicly
that he had changed.
That he felt bad for hurting people,
quote, unquote.
And he didn't wanna do
this revenge porn anymore.
There just wasn't any way
that Hunter was reformed.
I mean, you know,
after you've read his postings
day after day,
hour after hour for long enough,
you see what the core of this guy is.
And he's a guy who's filled with hate.
He's a guy who hates women.
He thinks all females are sluts.
You know, it was very clear
who Hunter Moore was.
That was super clear.
This guy is the Internet's most hated man.
He shut down his revenge porn site.
He sold the domain
to an anti-bullying group
called BullyVille.com.
That's right. Hunter, are you with us?
Yes. I'm here, Dr. Drew.
A few days after we purchased the site,
I found out that Hunter
was gonna be appearing on Dr. Drew
to talk about IsAnyoneUp.
Dr. Drew had a popular show
that had millions of viewers every night,
so Hunter was gonna be
on a national stage.
So tell me why
you decided to take it down.
As far as, uh,
getting to the point where, we uh
I wanted to take it down was
after my appearance on Anderson Cooper
The upside was he's gonna mention
BullyVille, which is great.
The downside is
what scared the shit out of me
because Hunter's a loaded cannon.
You just don't know
what you're gonna get with him.
And, uh, you know, with all the attention,
we had more weirdos and more weirdos
every day submitting to the site.
I don't like looking at little kids naked,
and I had to do it every single day.
And, you know,
that's what I got myself into.
He's talking about the weirdos
submitting to the site.
So far, I think he's doing okay.
We're taking calls tonight,
and I've got someone on the phone
who wants to talk to you.
Her daughter was one of the young women
that, uh, ended up on Hunter's web page.
And then Charlotte Laws pops up.
Charlotte, there you are.
Tell me what happened.
I really felt
it was necessary to confront Hunter
and to get the truth out there.
But everybody was concerned that
I was going public with my face like this,
because then Hunter would definitely know
that I was the one
who was coming after him.
My daughter ended up
on the site in January,
and we promptly, um, asked Mr. Moore
to remove her photograph.
Now, she had taken the pictures of herself
with her cell phone in her room.
She never intended to show them to anyone.
She had never sent them to anyone.
All of a sudden, she's hacked.
And these photos
immediately appear on the website.
We sent notice to Mr. Moore
to ask him to remove them.
He basically laughed.
It's not even just my daughter.
I spoke to 40 victims.
I contacted victims from that site,
and I found out that 40% of those people
had been hacked.
It took a tremendous amount of guts
to go head-to-head with Hunter Moore.
But Charlotte Laws was tenacious.
And she had the oar
that she was gonna smack him on the head
until he drowned.
And that's exactly what happened.
I'm just amazed that he's pretending to be
this good guy and this changed guy.
He liked being a life ruiner.
He created great emotional distress.
And basically, this is cyber-rape.
That's all it is.
I think he was very upset
that a woman was standing up to him.
And she was representing all women,
all of the victims on his site.
Your daughter said
she was hacked, correct?
You know, usually people
that are embarrassed, who made mistakes,
try to fall back on something else.
I'm sure she sent the pictures
to a million different guys and ended up
on my site just like everybody else.
You know, I'm sorry, uh,
that your daughter was "cyber-raped," um,
but, I mean,
now she's, uh, educated on technology.
Typical Hunter Moore. What can I say?
Hunter, are you ashamed?
Um, yeah, I mean,
I'm not ashamed of the parts
that I actually did on the site.
You know, it was me submitting girls
I am ashamed. Sorry, let me rephrase that.
He's not even sure what he's ashamed of,
because the truth is
he's not ashamed of any of it.
He's constantly contradicting himself
in this interview.
It's kind of funny, actually.
If it's not so sad and depressing,
it's kind of funny.
But, um, I can't take accountability
for what other people have done.
I mean, I created a platform for people
I gotta go to break.
It's been an interesting conversation.
I tried to call Hunter
for the rest of that day,
and he wasn't picking up his phone.
It was going straight to voicemail.
I ended up talking to him
the following morning.
And he told me to go fuck myself,
and he hung up the phone on me.
Guest in the chatroom wants to know,
"What's up with that BullyVille article?"
Come on, BullyVille?
What the fuck? Come on.
Dude, I'll be completely fucking honest.
I'm gonna buy a ticket to Vegas,
probably tonight,
find that fool's fucking wife,
and make his kids watch me fuck his wife.
Like, I fucking hate that fucking guy.
We didn't really think this was the end.
You know, he wasn't a changed man,
and he was still someone to be afraid of.
So IsAnyoneUp takes over the world,
you gave it to an anti-bullying website.
No, fuck that!
When Hunter lost the site,
he lost the respect of his followers.
Obviously, he felt the need
to keep his followers on his side.
Little girl playing on her own ♪
He had to take everything
to the extreme after that.
Cut off the ♪
I thought selling it
to an anti-bullying site
was the biggest troll move
I could ever make.
Like, tongue in cheek!
Yeah, like, "Has Hunter changed?"
Like, all this shit?
Has he found Jesus?
Has he found Jesus?
Yeah.
Obviously, it just came down to money.
I mean
Dude, without bullying
I don't know what I'd do.
I don't know who I'd be.
He was going to come back
with something ten times bigger,
ten times better
and
would do whatever it takes.
Cut off the ♪
Cut off the ♪
Cut off the head of the snake ♪
Cut off the ♪
Cut off the ♪
Cut off the head of the snake ♪
Cut off the ♪
Cut off the ♪
Cut off the head of the snake ♪
Cut off the ♪
Cut off the ♪
Cut off the head of the snake ♪
Previous EpisodeNext Episode