Innocent topless photo changed my life

The woman on the other end of the phone regretfully informed the then-24-year-old aspiring actress that her topless photo had been plastered all over a website called IsAnyoneUp.com.“She says, ‘Hey, I’m really sorry. But you’re on this website [that’s] basically a website of nude photos,” recalls Laws in the Netflix documentary The Most Hated Man on the Internet, out on Wednesday. The three-part series from Alex Marengo, producer of docos Bad Sport and Killer Ratings, recounts “king of revenge porn” Hunter Moore’s staggering rise to and shameful fall from digital eminence after launching IsAnyoneUp, or IAU, in the early 2010s, the New York Post reports. “I was racking my brain. Like, how could I be on this website?” continues a woeful Laws, now 35 and living in Los Angeles. She adds, however, that in the days prior to the leak, her private email account had been hacked. “It was embarrassing. I never intended to show anyone the pictures.” Want a streaming service dedicated to news? Flash lets you stream 25+ news channels in 1 place. New to Flash? Try 1 month free. Offer ends October 31, 2022 >Little did the blond belle know that she was just one of countless pawns in Moore’s twisted internet games, which included an email-hacking scheme and mass photo piracy. In a clip featured in the documentary, the now-36-year-old describes his website as a place “where revengeful exes come for a peace of mind”.From 2010 to 2012, IAU quickly trended as a major non-consensual pornographic platform. Scorned lovers were encouraged to publicly share nude snapshots of their exes, no permission needed. “It all started with me hating some dumb b**ch who broke my heart,” Moore, who founded the site at 26, laughs in audio featured in the series. (He did not participate in the documentary or respond to the Post’s request for comment.) “Me and my friends would just post a bunch of girls on IsAnyoneUp, and we just got a bunch of traffic one day. “And I was like, ‘Yo, I can make money off of t**ties and f***ing people over.’”His ex-girlfriend Kirra Hughes, however, expresses deep contrition for failing to put an end to the “king’s” filth-fuelled reign of terror when she had the chance. “I just thought it was bizarre. I just never fully grasped what was going on,” says Hughes, now 31, of the man she began dating at the tender age of 18.“I feel ashamed and upset. I just wish I had known better at the time,” she sobs on-camera. She tearfully remembers discovering a hidden folder of private Facebook messages from forlorn men and women begging her to convince her then-powerful paramour to delete their explicit snaps. “One of my biggest regrets is not speaking up when I had a voice,” she weeps. Mum-of-two Destiny Benedict, 29, also rues getting too close to Moore. In early 2012, when she was just 19, Benedict skyrocketed to internet infamy after promising to supply IAU with a series of graphic photos if Moore agreed to remove a screenshot of her Facebook profile, which featured an image of her small children, from his raunchy site. As a trademark of his brand, Moore made a habit of adding a picture of his revenge porn victims’ social media pages alongside their uncensored photos. “You can post pictures of random boobs and penises all day,” he quips. “But adding that social network to it just brings it to a whole other level.”Benedict was in the minority of Moore’s victims: Despite feeling under duress, she actually agreed to have stills of her naked body made public on IAU. Laws, on the other hand, was “absolutely disgusted” when her intimate shots made their unauthorised debut. And her mother, Charlotte, hearing the anguish in her only child’s voice, made it her mission to not only take down the offending images, but Moore’s larger smut empire too. “My daughter felt violated and shamed,” Charlotte, 62, also from Los Angeles, told the Post. “She was emotionally battered.”In the film, Kayla claims she’d snapped the risqué frame on her mobile phone in the privacy of her bedroom and had never sent it to anyone but herself via email. Immediately, the mum-and-daughter duo sent Moore an abject plea via email, insisting the shirtless snap be erased. But the petition fell on deaf ears, and the photo remained on the site. Charlotte, a former private investigator who was then working in real estate, went to war on behalf of her daughter.She presented the issue to the LAPD, explaining the hack and the subsequent IAU posting to a female detective. However, according to Charlotte, the officer victim-blamed Kayla for taking the lusty pin-up rather than helping.The warrior mum then contacted the FBI, but agents weren’t in a rush to help at the time. As days passed without a resolution or law enforcement intervention, Kayla was inundated with crude messages from men who had seen her picture. Charlotte told the Post that disgraced porn star Ron Jeremy, 69 – who, in August 2021, was indicted on 34 counts of sexual assault – even contacted her daughter hoping to “talk business”. (Representatives for Jeremy did not respond to the Post’s request for comment.) Desperate to bring Moore to his knees, Charlotte enlisted the litigious prowess of her husband and Kayla’s stepfather, Charles, a California lawyer. Kayla had initially been too embarrassed to involve him. Charles levelled a stern ultimatum at Moore, via the web master’s former lawyer Reza Sina, and Kayla’s likeness was removed from IAU. “Finally, it’s removed and I feel this big wave of relief over me,” she says in the film. But a still-fuming Charlotte was unwilling to abandon her fight against Moore until he removed every victim’s undressed photo from his site. “There was definitely a hacking scheme going on here, and I had to get to the bottom of it,” Charlotte told the Post, adding that one of Kayla’s friends had also been hacked and was involuntary featured on IAU. “It was so painful for so many victims,” she said. The tenacious mother had contacted over 40 of Moore’s victims – 40 per cent of whom were robbed of their intimate pics by a then-unknown email phisher. “And these victims weren’t all gorgeous 20-year-olds,” Charlotte said. “There were some women over 60, there were people who weighed over 250 pounds, and there was even a blind paraplegic.”“And those unflattering pictures were destroying their lives,” she added. “It could have drove people to commit suicide.”But Moore, who’d amassed a ferociously devout social media cult known as “The Family,” apathetically continued blasting the ill-gotten nudes and arrogantly flaunting the growing success of his brand. According to the film, at the peak of his boom, Moore bragged of raking in over $US13,000 ($A18,770) a month for victimising his tormented targets. “If someone killed themselves over my site would you hate me or love me more?,” he asked The Family via Twitter, per a screenshot in the doco. Members of the loyal following referred to Moore as Father and revered him a god. In response to his dark tweet, a zealot wrote: “Let them kill themselves!!!”The brazen bully often threatened folks who opposed his mischievousness with physical harm – and the digital abuse was celebrated by his faithful followers. “If you try to sue me I’ll make f***ing fun of you,” Moore vows in audio included in the film. “If you come to my house and try to serve me, I’ll put your f***ing address out there [online], and my audience loves that sh*t.”But Charlotte was undeterred. “I was literally obsessed with getting this website down,” she told the Post. “I was neglecting work. I wasn’t doing anything except this.”And after Moore made an ill-fated appearance on Anderson Cooper’s talk show – during which he blamed women for posing in sexy pictures and refused responsibility for the trauma they endured after being exposed on his site – the FBI joined her mission to end his IAU dominion. In March 2012, Agent Jeff Kirkpatrick helmed what would be a two-year investigation into Moore’s hacking scheme. “While revenge porn wasn’t illegal, hacking definitely was, and it gave us enough to start an investigation,” says Kirkpatrick in the documentary. Amid the FBI’s probe, Moore sold the domain to Marine-turned-web whiz James McGibney for less than $US12,000 ($A17,330). McGibney says the fire sale occurred because Moore feared he’d face jail time for posting illicit shots of underage girls as young as 15.McGibney masterfully transformed the filth hub into an anti-bullying website called Bullyville. He also forced Moore to pen a public apology to those he victimised. For her part, Charlotte provided the FBI with the names of the victims who’d claimed their nudes were shared on IAU shortly after their emails had been breeched. Meanwhile, she was arming herself with metal rods and securing the entrances of her house with padlocks from Home Depot, fearing Moore’s minions might make good on their digital vows to rape and kill her and Kayla for going against their cyber saviour. She even confronted a curly haired male “stalker” who repeatedly cased her house on their private cul-de-sac amid her beef with Moore. In a dangerous attempt to signify to Moore that she wasn’t afraid of him or his lemmings, Charlotte tweeted the porn purveyor’s home address to her thousands of followers.Through research, Kirkpatrick unearthed the hacker’s email address and traced it back to a man named Charlie Evans, then 26. The FBI determined that Moore had hired Evans, from Studio City, California, to break into email accounts in search of sexy snapshots for $200 a week. On January 24, 2014, both men were arrested. Moore ultimately took a plea deal, copping to one count of unauthorised access to a computer system to obtain information and one count of aggregated identity theft. He was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. Evans pleaded guilty to the same counts and was handed 25 months. And while justice was served, Charlotte doesn’t feel Moore’s punishment fit his crimes. “It was sort of like arresting Jack the Ripper and giving him community service. It was a little bit pathetic,” she said, adding that the judge also banned him from social media.Moore was released from the Federal Correctional Institution Beaumont, in Texas, in May 2017, and currently has an active Twitter account.In 2018, he self-published a personal tell-all entitled Is Anyone Up?!: The Story of Revenge Porn, in which he shares his version of the events. He’s otherwise remained quiet about his notorious past.However, on July 15, Moore retweeted the trailer of the Netflix documentary, in which his victims detail their humiliation. Attached to the tweet Moore wrote “LOL,” and emphasised his indifference with the shrugging-man emoji. “He has the same mind that he had pre-prison,” said Charlotte, who’s since facilitated the passing of laws against intimate-image abuse in 48 states.“[Moore] believes that tearing other people down will build him up, and it’s very sad,” the fearless activist said. “He’s going to be a shell of a person if he keeps that mindset.”This article originally appeared in the New York Post and was reproduced with permission

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July 28, 2022 at 12:25AM
The woman on the other end of the phone regretfully informed the then-24-year-old aspiring actress that her topless photo had been plastered all over a website called IsAnyoneUp.com.“She says, ‘Hey, I’m really sorry. But you’re on this website [that’s] basically a website of nude photos,” recalls Laws in the Netflix documentary The Most Hated Man on the Internet, out on Wednesday. The three-part series from Alex Marengo, producer of docos Bad Sport and Killer Ratings, recounts “king of revenge porn” Hunter Moore’s staggering rise to and shameful fall from digital eminence after launching IsAnyoneUp, or IAU, in the early 2010s, the New York Post reports. “I was racking my brain. Like, how could I be on this website?” continues a woeful Laws, now 35 and living in Los Angeles. She adds, however, that in the days prior to the leak, her private email account had been hacked. “It was embarrassing. I never intended to show anyone the pictures.” Want a streaming service dedicated to news? Flash lets you stream 25+ news channels in 1 place. New to Flash? Try 1 month free. Offer ends October 31, 2022 >Little did the blond belle know that she was just one of countless pawns in Moore’s twisted internet games, which included an email-hacking scheme and mass photo piracy. In a clip featured in the documentary, the now-36-year-old describes his website as a place “where revengeful exes come for a peace of mind”.From 2010 to 2012, IAU quickly trended as a major non-consensual pornographic platform. Scorned lovers were encouraged to publicly share nude snapshots of their exes, no permission needed. “It all started with me hating some dumb b**ch who broke my heart,” Moore, who founded the site at 26, laughs in audio featured in the series. (He did not participate in the documentary or respond to the Post’s request for comment.) “Me and my friends would just post a bunch of girls on IsAnyoneUp, and we just got a bunch of traffic one day. “And I was like, ‘Yo, I can make money off of t**ties and f***ing people over.’”His ex-girlfriend Kirra Hughes, however, expresses deep contrition for failing to put an end to the “king’s” filth-fuelled reign of terror when she had the chance. “I just thought it was bizarre. I just never fully grasped what was going on,” says Hughes, now 31, of the man she began dating at the tender age of 18.“I feel ashamed and upset. I just wish I had known better at the time,” she sobs on-camera. She tearfully remembers discovering a hidden folder of private Facebook messages from forlorn men and women begging her to convince her then-powerful paramour to delete their explicit snaps. “One of my biggest regrets is not speaking up when I had a voice,” she weeps. Mum-of-two Destiny Benedict, 29, also rues getting too close to Moore. In early 2012, when she was just 19, Benedict skyrocketed to internet infamy after promising to supply IAU with a series of graphic photos if Moore agreed to remove a screenshot of her Facebook profile, which featured an image of her small children, from his raunchy site. As a trademark of his brand, Moore made a habit of adding a picture of his revenge porn victims’ social media pages alongside their uncensored photos. “You can post pictures of random boobs and penises all day,” he quips. “But adding that social network to it just brings it to a whole other level.”Benedict was in the minority of Moore’s victims: Despite feeling under duress, she actually agreed to have stills of her naked body made public on IAU. Laws, on the other hand, was “absolutely disgusted” when her intimate shots made their unauthorised debut. And her mother, Charlotte, hearing the anguish in her only child’s voice, made it her mission to not only take down the offending images, but Moore’s larger smut empire too. “My daughter felt violated and shamed,” Charlotte, 62, also from Los Angeles, told the Post. “She was emotionally battered.”In the film, Kayla claims she’d snapped the risqué frame on her mobile phone in the privacy of her bedroom and had never sent it to anyone but herself via email. Immediately, the mum-and-daughter duo sent Moore an abject plea via email, insisting the shirtless snap be erased. But the petition fell on deaf ears, and the photo remained on the site. Charlotte, a former private investigator who was then working in real estate, went to war on behalf of her daughter.She presented the issue to the LAPD, explaining the hack and the subsequent IAU posting to a female detective. However, according to Charlotte, the officer victim-blamed Kayla for taking the lusty pin-up rather than helping.The warrior mum then contacted the FBI, but agents weren’t in a rush to help at the time. As days passed without a resolution or law enforcement intervention, Kayla was inundated with crude messages from men who had seen her picture. Charlotte told the Post that disgraced porn star Ron Jeremy, 69 – who, in August 2021, was indicted on 34 counts of sexual assault – even contacted her daughter hoping to “talk business”. (Representatives for Jeremy did not respond to the Post’s request for comment.) Desperate to bring Moore to his knees, Charlotte enlisted the litigious prowess of her husband and Kayla’s stepfather, Charles, a California lawyer. Kayla had initially been too embarrassed to involve him. Charles levelled a stern ultimatum at Moore, via the web master’s former lawyer Reza Sina, and Kayla’s likeness was removed from IAU. “Finally, it’s removed and I feel this big wave of relief over me,” she says in the film. But a still-fuming Charlotte was unwilling to abandon her fight against Moore until he removed every victim’s undressed photo from his site. “There was definitely a hacking scheme going on here, and I had to get to the bottom of it,” Charlotte told the Post, adding that one of Kayla’s friends had also been hacked and was involuntary featured on IAU. “It was so painful for so many victims,” she said. The tenacious mother had contacted over 40 of Moore’s victims – 40 per cent of whom were robbed of their intimate pics by a then-unknown email phisher. “And these victims weren’t all gorgeous 20-year-olds,” Charlotte said. “There were some women over 60, there were people who weighed over 250 pounds, and there was even a blind paraplegic.”“And those unflattering pictures were destroying their lives,” she added. “It could have drove people to commit suicide.”But Moore, who’d amassed a ferociously devout social media cult known as “The Family,” apathetically continued blasting the ill-gotten nudes and arrogantly flaunting the growing success of his brand. According to the film, at the peak of his boom, Moore bragged of raking in over $US13,000 ($A18,770) a month for victimising his tormented targets. “If someone killed themselves over my site would you hate me or love me more?,” he asked The Family via Twitter, per a screenshot in the doco. Members of the loyal following referred to Moore as Father and revered him a god. In response to his dark tweet, a zealot wrote: “Let them kill themselves!!!”The brazen bully often threatened folks who opposed his mischievousness with physical harm – and the digital abuse was celebrated by his faithful followers. “If you try to sue me I’ll make f***ing fun of you,” Moore vows in audio included in the film. “If you come to my house and try to serve me, I’ll put your f***ing address out there [online], and my audience loves that sh*t.”But Charlotte was undeterred. “I was literally obsessed with getting this website down,” she told the Post. “I was neglecting work. I wasn’t doing anything except this.”And after Moore made an ill-fated appearance on Anderson Cooper’s talk show – during which he blamed women for posing in sexy pictures and refused responsibility for the trauma they endured after being exposed on his site – the FBI joined her mission to end his IAU dominion. In March 2012, Agent Jeff Kirkpatrick helmed what would be a two-year investigation into Moore’s hacking scheme. “While revenge porn wasn’t illegal, hacking definitely was, and it gave us enough to start an investigation,” says Kirkpatrick in the documentary. Amid the FBI’s probe, Moore sold the domain to Marine-turned-web whiz James McGibney for less than $US12,000 ($A17,330). McGibney says the fire sale occurred because Moore feared he’d face jail time for posting illicit shots of underage girls as young as 15.McGibney masterfully transformed the filth hub into an anti-bullying website called Bullyville. He also forced Moore to pen a public apology to those he victimised. For her part, Charlotte provided the FBI with the names of the victims who’d claimed their nudes were shared on IAU shortly after their emails had been breeched. Meanwhile, she was arming herself with metal rods and securing the entrances of her house with padlocks from Home Depot, fearing Moore’s minions might make good on their digital vows to rape and kill her and Kayla for going against their cyber saviour. She even confronted a curly haired male “stalker” who repeatedly cased her house on their private cul-de-sac amid her beef with Moore. In a dangerous attempt to signify to Moore that she wasn’t afraid of him or his lemmings, Charlotte tweeted the porn purveyor’s home address to her thousands of followers.Through research, Kirkpatrick unearthed the hacker’s email address and traced it back to a man named Charlie Evans, then 26. The FBI determined that Moore had hired Evans, from Studio City, California, to break into email accounts in search of sexy snapshots for $200 a week. On January 24, 2014, both men were arrested. Moore ultimately took a plea deal, copping to one count of unauthorised access to a computer system to obtain information and one count of aggregated identity theft. He was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. Evans pleaded guilty to the same counts and was handed 25 months. And while justice was served, Charlotte doesn’t feel Moore’s punishment fit his crimes. “It was sort of like arresting Jack the Ripper and giving him community service. It was a little bit pathetic,” she said, adding that the judge also banned him from social media.Moore was released from the Federal Correctional Institution Beaumont, in Texas, in May 2017, and currently has an active Twitter account.In 2018, he self-published a personal tell-all entitled Is Anyone Up?!: The Story of Revenge Porn, in which he shares his version of the events. He’s otherwise remained quiet about his notorious past.However, on July 15, Moore retweeted the trailer of the Netflix documentary, in which his victims detail their humiliation. Attached to the tweet Moore wrote “LOL,” and emphasised his indifference with the shrugging-man emoji. “He has the same mind that he had pre-prison,” said Charlotte, who’s since facilitated the passing of laws against intimate-image abuse in 48 states.“[Moore] believes that tearing other people down will build him up, and it’s very sad,” the fearless activist said. “He’s going to be a shell of a person if he keeps that mindset.”This article originally appeared in the New York Post and was reproduced with permission