LOS ANGELES—According to an excellent article in the Village Voice that adds yet a few more nails to the Hunter Moore coffin, the FBI has for several months been investigating the disturbing goings on at IsAnyoneUp.com, the so-called revenge porn website founded by creepmeister Moore, who apparently kept the site stocked with content with the help of people he paid for content who got that content by hacking into the devices and accounts of unsuspecting people.
Now, after reading the piece, the decision by Moore to close the site looks more like a last-ditch attempt to avoid any responsibility for his own actions than because he was "fucking sick of looking at little kids naked." But even in the aftermath of the closure of the site and the visits by the FBI, which should have at least tempered the out-of-control urges of the 20-something poster child for ADHD, Moore flew into a rage with Camille Dodero, the author of the Village Voice piece, at the thought of her writing about the FBI.
"Honestly," he told her, "I will be fucking furious, and I will burn down fucking The Village Voice headquarters if you fucking write anything saying I have an FBI investigation." Needless to say, she added the quote to the story.
Dodero, who has conducted periodic interviews with Moore before, during and after the closure of the site, writes that he was insistent that interest from law enforcement had nothing to do with why he decided to hand the domain over to Bullyville.com.
"Fuck no," said Moore. "I would fucking literally murder somebody right now if I had a fucking gun and [that person] wanted to make those allegations."
But Moore, in addition to his tendency to threaten violence, should be concerned about the FBI, as should the anonymous hacker who goes by the name "Gary Jones." If even a fraction of the specific allegations made in the article are true, Moore and his hacking cohorts are directly responsible for literally terrorizing people.
That Moore actually went on the Dr. Drew show and ridiculed the mother of one of his victims, who had claimed to be hacked, gives the story a surreal bent, and elevates Moore from creep to criminal creep. In calling the mom's daughter a liar, when he may have known that she was in fact not, he also may have sealed his fate with law enforcement, which will hopefully continue to investigate this case wherever it leads, despite the closure of the site.
Again, Dodero's determination to get to the bottom of whether the daughter of the Dr. Drew mom, who is referred to by the pseudonym Kristen, was actually hacked or, as Moore alleged, "sent the pictures to a million different guys and just ended up on my site, just like everybody else," all but buries Moore by describing in excruciating detail the fraudulent tactics used by IsAnyoneUp.com hackers to gain access to her private photos. Google accounts also come into question for the astonishing ease with which someone can hack a Gmail account. Indeed, in the aftermath of the article, it is impossible to imagine that Google will not work to plug the vulnerabilities.
But Moore never denied that some of the content on the site may have come from hackers. "I'm sure there have been times that people have been hacked and ended up on the site," he told The Daily Beast at one point. "But as far as Hunter Moore doing the hacking, that hasn't happened."
But even as he was shuttering the site, the story changed. "By April 19," wrote Dodero, " the same day isanyoneup.com morphed into a bullyville.com ad, Moore was more definitive about the connection. 'I've had tons of hackers give me shit,' he told me over the phone, insisting that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, the same federal law that has shielded his site from prosecution all along, absolves him of legal responsibility."
As readers of AVN well know, Section 230 declares, "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."
Amazingly, however, Moore insisted with equal vehemence that 230 applies even if he paid for the hacked content. "If I paid for content, it wouldn't matter because they submitted it," he told Dodero. "It wouldn't matter. It would be like me leaving a fucking $100 bill on the sidewalk and somebody coming and picking that up and fucking throwing a picture on my lawn—it would be the same exact thing. It still comes back on that person who walked by my driveway."
Really.
In the aftermath of this article, even if the FBI investigation never amounts to anything, it's hard to see that Moore will not still be subjected to any number of civil lawsuits brought by the people whose content was hacked by the people he paid for content. And there seem to be enough breadcrumbs available to track down the thus-far anonymous "Gary Jones," who actually confessed to one of his victims, albeit anonymously.
Still, Moore, as AVN has noted, believes that he is the one who has been victimized by his own success, and apparently still feels that way, even after visits from the FBI.
Kids these days...
