Trigger warning: This article contains very explicit descriptions of abusive and sexual scenarios, reader discretion is heavily advised.
Some know him as The Most Hated Man on the Internet. He calls himself “The King of Revenge Porn” and a “Professional Life-Ruiner.”
One thing is for sure, Hunter Moore, creator of the site “Is Anyone Up?,” could be dubbed the founder of online image-based sexual abuse—commonly known as “revenge porn.”
Moore’s rise to fame, serial exploitation of unsuspecting victims, cult-like following, and eventual demise are described in graphic detail in a new Netflix docuseries.
We broke down the docuseries here in this quick TikTok video, if you want a quick overview.
@fightthenewdrug “The Most Hated Man on the Internet” #StopTheDemand #huntermoore #themosthatedmanontheinternet #netflixseries #netflixtop10 ♬ original sound – Fight the New Drug
If you’ve been a victim of image-based sexual abuse, a.k.a. “revenge porn,” click here. There’s hope, and there’s help.
How online revenge porn came to be
Moore created the site “Is Anyone Up?” back in 2010 at the age of 24 as a ploy to get back at an ex-girlfriend by sharing her nudes nonconsensually. He called it a place “where revengeful exes come for peace of mind.”
“It all started with me hating some dumb b— who broke my heart. Me and my friends would just post a bunch of girls on Is Anyone Up and we just got a bunch of traffic one day and I was like, ‘Yo, I can make money off titties and f—ing people over.’”
There was no limit to who he was willing to exploit on the site—all body types and ages, famous people, individuals who were incapacitated, and eventually, underage minors.
Essentially, Hunter coined the term “revenge porn,” and popularized it.
Alongside the photos was the individual’s full name, address, phone number, links to Facebook and other social media, and sometimes other personal information.
People were allowed to leave comments, and it’s clear that the purpose of the site was to humiliate people as much as possible. Hunter urged the site’s followers to mock and ridicule those featured.
Moore received countless pleas to remove the photos. He either laughed them off, didn’t respond, or in many cases simply responded with “LOL.”
Hunter was loved and praised on the site, and reveled in being internet famous for his “bad-boy” image. He’d frequently comment and Tweet raunchy, degrading insults—and they got worse toward people who criticized him or tried to get their photos taken down.
The victims
The events in the Netflix docuseries took place from about 2010-2012, a period when smartphones had just appeared and sending nudes was very common. These were the “wild west” days of the Internet—when anonymous individuals could unleash vile cruelty on complete strangers without fear of repercussion.
The submission process on Is Anyone Up was very simple and completely anonymous. Moore showed no empathy or responsibility and dehumanized the victims. “The people submitting it should feel bad when they hit the submit button…(the victims) are just characters and avatars and icons on a screen.”
The docuseries features one victim in particular—Kayla Laws. The aspiring actress who was working as a waitress at the time received a call from a coworker who sorrowfully informed her she was featured on page two of Is Anyone Up.
Horrified, Kayla wracked her brain at how someone obtained the nude photos of her, as she’d taken them alone in her bedroom and never shared them with anyone. As soon as the pictures were posted, she started receiving harassing calls and messages from random men.
Kayla’s mother Charlotte immediately made it her personal mission to get Kayla’s photos removed, contact other victims, and lobby authorities until the entire site was taken down.
Kayla said after she took the photos, she ran out of space on her phone and emailed them to herself. Within days she’d been locked out of her email account and had to reset her password. Shortly after, her private photos had been posted to the site.
Charlotte interviewed over 40 other victims whose photos had been posted within the two-week window Kayla’s were, and found that 40% of them had never sent their pictures to anybody. This confirmed her suspicions that Hunter was involved in a hacking scheme.
Another victim, Danielle, shared, “Seeing the photos was pretty horrible, but the comments were devastating. Hunter said, ‘I invite you to mock her.’”
Later, Danielle said that speaking to Charlotte gave her hope. As did many others—especially since they felt like no one heard them or cared, and they didn’t have money for lawyers.
Another victim was a kindergarten teacher whose nonconsensual images were shared with a caption asking viewers if they thought she’d lose her job over it.
In March 2011, another victim named Cara was training to be a nurse when private photos she’d taken but never sent to anyone were uploaded. “I was wondering how the hell it got on the internet. It feels like you’re getting walked in one when you’re doing something private. It’s unnerving.”
She reached out to Hunter multiple times on multiple platforms but never got a response. She says the trauma eventually led her to an eating disorder and a suicide attempt that landed her in a coma in the ICU.
“I don’t think I would have attempted to take my own life had that moment of being posted never occurred,” she said. “That is the catalyst that mentally snapped something in my brain.”
The more it would destroy their life the better, from Hunter’s perspective. When asked in an interview what stopped him from stopping, he replied, “It’s just too much fun.”
Moore’s cult-like following
Obsessive followers called themselves “The Family” and worshiped Hunter—referring to him as “father.”
They not only hounded those on the site, but raged personal harassment and death threats against Laws and others who spoke out against Hunter. They’d also create new content for Moore to post, going to extreme lengths to get his attention and doing whatever he asked.
One of the more well-known examples of this mob mentality was Destiny Benedict.
Destiny Benedict, famous on the site as “Butthole Girl,” started webcamming when she was 19 in an effort to support her two children. On a webcam chat, a friend dared her to put a mousse bottle in her butt. A friend took a screenshot and posted it to Is Anyone Up, featuring a screenshot of her Facebook with her children in the cover photo. Hunter wouldn’t take the image down.
Instead he asked for more extreme content, and had her put a cell phone in her butt then he called it so it would vibrate. He replaced the cover photo as soon as those pictures were posted.
Destiny said she started drinking, and even though she felt Hunter was destroying her life, she still wanted his attention. He invited her to Skype, promising to get her a website where she could get more of her porn out there and make enough money to get her kids back in her life.
On the call, he told her to put her fist inside her. “This is how you get famous, if you want to get your own site. Gotta be Butthole Girl, get that famous butthole out.”
She was drunk, not in a state of mind to consent, and complied with his request, not knowing he was screenrecording the conversation. The video ended up on a different website entirely with the title “Revenge porn king fools fan girl.” It received millions of views.
“It was a representation of me in my most vulnerable state…I never got a dime,” Destiny said. “Never got any money from Hunter Moore ever. But he did offer to give me a tee shirt.”
Hunter Moore’s downfall
By this point, the site was getting around 350,000 unique views per day—which would translate to about 3.5 million in the year 2022.
Hunter believed he was invincible. At one point he was making around $20K per month through selling advertising and merchandise. Taking down images was against his business model.
Early on in her efforts, Charlotte called Hunter’s attorney who didn’t take her seriously and said that according to the law, what Hunter was doing was not illegal.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act basically says that website owners are not responsible for the content on their website if it’s user submitted. Hunter assumed no responsibility, saying all he was doing was providing a forum for people to post the content themselves.
She pursued every avenue possible to get the photos taken down, but it appeared that no one was on the victims’ side. The general attitude was, “Well why would you take a picture like this if you didn’t want it on the Internet?”
Charlotte, who posted her finding to a blog she created which was hacked and taken down within minutes, refused to stay silent.
“If Kayla had taken the photo in her room and put it in a dresser drawer and someone had broken in and stolen it, would you be telling her that she shouldn’t have taken the picture or would you be investigating the theft?”
It seemed hopeless, until Charlotte’s husband (Kayla’s stepfather), an attorney, called Hunter’s attorney and threatened to pursue action against Moore. He said that copyright law is clear, and the photos belonged to Kayla. The lawyer-to-lawyer standpoint seemed to hit Hunter more seriously, and Kayla’s photos were removed from the site within 30 minutes.
There was a wave of relief, but Charlotte knew she had to help the other victims, too.
Taking down the “revenge porn king”
Charlotte presented to the FBI evidence to support photos being hacked and not merely provided by angry exes, which eventually paved the way for them to pursue charges.
By that point, Hunter was controlling the narrative and journalists were lining up to interview him. When asked to go on the Anderson Cooper show in 2011, he saw it as an opportunity to increase visibility—but ultimately he proved to be his own worst enemy in the interview.
Seated next to two victims, he showed no remorse or empathy. “No one put a gun to your head and forced you to take these pictures.” People saw through his grooming. Still, the site blew up and traffic to it increased tenfold.
In January 2012, FBI field office agent Jeff Kirkpatrick who was working in the Cyber Division in LA saw the interview, visited the site, and was appalled—particularly by a section called “Daily Hate” where Moore made fun of people begging to be taken off the website.
Kirkpatrick knew that revenge porn wasn’t illegal, but hacking definitely was. He began his investigation and over the next year, he found that many women had been locked out of their email accounts days before their personal photos were posted to the website. When many of them got back in, a secondary email had been added to the account.
Eventually, they figured out what was happening. A victim would receive a message from the hacker who was using their friend’s Facebook account. The hacker would tell the victim that they’d been locked out of their email and lost their phone so they couldn’t get their own verification code to reset their own email password, and asked if they could have it sent to their phone instead.
The victim would give the hacker the code, then get an email saying their email password had been changed—not knowing the message was to reset the password for their own account.
After stealing photos, the hacker would add a secondary email address to the account, allowing them to reset the password again at any point.
The hacker didn’t take precautions to hide his IP addresses, and the FBI tracked it to Charlie Evens. His photos were on Is Anyone Up, but they believed he’d submitted them himself as a decoy.
Meanwhile, web entrepreneur James McGibney was contacted by Moore, asking if he’d like to advertise on the site.
McGibney, a former marine who ran cybersecurity for 128 embassies throughout the world, had been bullied as a child and abused by his father. He could relate to the women on the site and the helplessness they felt.
He quickly realized Moore was very desperate for money, and decided to advertise with him in an effort to learn every aspect of his business and “study the enemy.”
In April 2012, he started asking Moore about the content on his servers and what he was doing to verify age. “This girl you’re saying is 19 is 15. This is a big risk. It’s just a matter of time before you’re gonna go to jail,” he told Moore.
Hunter started to get scared, and when James offered to buy the site for $12,000, he agreed. James then forwarded Is Anyone Up to an anti-bullying website he’d created, Bullyville.com.
Moore pretended publicly that he’d changed. He lost the respect of his followers, but had a plan to take everything to a new level of extreme.
He started touring big cities as a DJ, getting paid to party with fans as he made plans for Is Anyone Up 2—a new site that was basically the same thing, but would include a map and directions for how to get to the victims’ houses.
But before the site ever went live, the FBI raided Hunter’s home where he was living with his parents. They went through all of his emails and found correspondence between him and Charlie Evens.
In October 2011, Charlie hacked Hunter’s account. Instead of getting upset, Hunter asked Charlie to work for him and get photos from people’s private accounts. There was a pattern—Charlie sent the photos for payment, then soon after he was paid from Hunter’s anonymous PayPal or bank account, the photos would appear on the website.
Charlie and Hunter eventually took a plea deal—one count of unauthorized access to a protected computer system to obtain information and one count of aggravated identity theft. They were sentenced on December 2, 2015—Hunter to just 30 months in prison, Charlie to 25 months. Hunter was also banned from social media by the judge.
Kayla read an impact statement at the sentencing. She said Charlie turned around and apologized, but Hunter showed arrogance and no remorse.
Hunter initially agreed to take part in the series but later declined the invitation.
The future of revenge porn
Revenge porn is, unfortunately, still big business.
Again, if you’ve been a victim of image-based sexual abuse, a.k.a. “revenge porn,” click here. There’s hope, and there’s help.
Although Moore’s site and cult following are basically no more, revenge porn is unfortunately alive and well—rampant, in fact, and glorified on mainstream porn sites.
Image-based abuse, sending nudes, and distribution of nonconsensual images has become the norm within the porn industry, despite what sites’ terms and conditions might say. This is especially concerning because studies show that many victims of revenge porn suffer similar trauma as sexual assault survivors.
So why does something that’s deeply affecting individuals and society often get written off as sexual entertainment?
Hunter Moore has been branded as one of the most hated men on the internet, and understandably so. He may be a buzzword as the latest Netflix series villain, but what about the entire porn industry that profits off of image-based sexual abuse daily?
Consider that many mainstream porn sites host nonconsensual content that is uploaded every single day from site users. Would the public be as outraged about the porn industry if they knew all of the facts?
The porn industry seems to get a free pass when it comes to criticism and accountability for profiting from nonconsensual content. But if image-based abuse isn’t acceptable, doesn’t that mean it should be unacceptable in all its forms?
Click here to learn more about how many porn sites regularly profit from nonconsensual content.
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