‘The Most Hated Man on the Internet’: How an Angry Mother Took Down the King of Revenge Porn

Netflix’s true crime documentaries sometimes have you wondering if what is depicted on screen is reality or make-believe fiction to attract the attention of audiences. Some actions taken by the centre of these documentaries also have you questioning if earth is a real place and not an asylum full of looney tunes.

The internet is filled with unlikeable characters and unattractive personalities, but to be dubbed The Most Hated Man on the Internet you must be a special breed of unliked and unattractive. So, who is The Most Hated Man on the Internet?

It is none other than Hunter Moore. Back in the days when social media wasn’t heavily regulated and anyone could do and post whatever they felt like on the internet without repercussions, Moore thought it funny to create a website that was the bootleg version of PornHub – IsAnyoneUp.com. On this website, people would anonymously submit semi-nude and nude pictures of themselves and others while patrons of the website had the liberty to body-shame the owners of these pictures. Sometimes, pictures weren’t submitted. However, they were stolen by a hacker whom Hunter had hired to do his dirty work.

What was Hunter’s reason for creating such a monstrosity? Revenge porn! For more context, it is distributing sexually explicit images of another with the intent of punishing them. His ex-girlfriend broke up with him and his fragile ego couldn’t take it, so he proceeded to upload the intimate pictures she had sent to him in confidentiality to the world wide web. The pictures got a lot of views and that spurred him to build his own revenge porn empire, whilst ruining lives in the process.

Judging from the picture painted of the King of Revenge Porn, Hunter got a thrill out of making people miserable. The pain and suffering of others made him more euphoric than the Ecstasy and Methamphetamine that he indulged in regularly. He declined the pleas of several of his victims to take their pictures down.

One of the women interviewed in the documentary, Cara, relates how Hunter’s refusal nearly took her life when she attempted suicide in a bid to rid herself of the shame and humiliation that plagued her. Imagine waking up one morning and seeing your nude pictures spread all over the internet. Imagine that it isn’t just your nude pictures, it’s your social media profiles, home address, work address, and phone number uploaded as well. The mind-boggling thing about IsAnyoneUp.com is that your pictures get linked to all the above so not only do random strangers get to comment about how small your breasts are, but they also get to see how small they are in person because of the privacy violations on the site.

Hunter is depicted as the villain in the interviewed victims’ stories. His main target? Women! That hardly comes as a surprise because a woman did break his heart. While people were miserable because of his actions and inactions, he was busy being a fame whore. Once word began to spread about his vulgar website, he became a superstar overnight and he used his 15 minutes to the fullest.

He entertained interviews by reporters (The Village Voice made him their cover star), articles were written about him (The Rolling Stone gave him the eponymous name), he got invited to talk shows, radio shows, and podcasts and he was sitting on a pile full of cash. According to All Famous Birthdays, Hunter’s net worth is around $1.5 million. The bulk of his cash is from the website which amassed about $100k back in 2010. When he sold the website to a tech guru and anti-bullying activist, James McGibney, he was about $15,000 richer. That’s a lot of money for a man whose sole purpose in life is to make others have low self-esteem.

IsAnyoneUp.com’s reign of terror carried on for two years (2010-2012) till it was nipped in the bud by a tenacious mother whose bite was much worse than her bark. Revenge porn activist and politician, Charlotte Laws took Hunter Moore down and she deserves more than a Netflix documentary to tell her story and that of her daughter who was one of Hunter’s victims.

Laws’ daughter, Kayla, had her phone hacked by Hunter’s hacker, Charlie Evans. He was paid $200 a week to scout for nude pictures to be uploaded on the website. Kayla relates how she had taken topless pictures of herself without the intent to send them to anyone. Because of her lack of storage space, she had sent the pictures to her email and Charlie stole them from there using petty internet tricks.

Of course, Kayla, like many other victims, was humiliated and ridiculed by Hunter’s fandom who thought public nudity was all fun and games. It wasn’t funny and after her daughter had confided in her, Charlotte Laws took it upon herself to not only take down her daughter’s pictures but to make sure that Hunter smelled the four walls of a prison cell.

It was explained at the end of the series that “Hunter Moore initially agreed to take part in this series but later declined our invitation. We decided to use his image anyway.”  Thus, much of the series centered around Laws and her holy grail mission. She did a lot of remarkable things: she reported her daughter’s incident to the police, collated evidence of Hunter’s wrongdoings, got the FBI to conduct a full-blown investigation of IsAnyoneUp.com, and spoke to other victims (40 of them) who had similar experiences with that of Kayla.

She also went head-to-head with Hunter on The Anderson Cooper Show, got the support of the illegal hacking group Anonymous and became instrumental in 48 American states passing laws against intimate image abuse.

Laws became a hero in the eyes of Hunter’s victims. She gave them a voice that they thought they had lost and through her, they were able to get the strength to speak out against the injustice they had faced. Kayla’s pictures were eventually taken down, but Laws didn’t stop her pursuit because she knew that a lot of people were looking up to her. Even when she was threatened by a branch of Hunter’s sick fandom called the “The Family” she didn’t cower in fear. Her tenacity and rigidity reaped benefits because Hunter was eventually sentenced to 30 months in prison on the 2nd of December, 2015.

Laws and Kayla aside, what this documentary does well is how beautifully it highlights the experiences of Hunter’s victims. Everyone is given an opportunity to (tearfully) recount their stories. One memorable account is from Destiny, also known as “Butthole Girl.” She wanted to start a career as an adult film actress and thought that the best way to do that was to seek fame on the hottest site at the time-IsAnyoneUp.com.

What started out as a career move to earn easy money quickly turned into an endless cycle of threats and manipulations by Hunter and “The Family.” She recounts how she was used by Hunter for a good laugh and got nothing in return. “I never got any money from Hunter. But he did offer me a T-shirt.” Her internet fame led to family problems. The fathers of her children, after seeing her viral pictures and videos, decided that “it would be in the best interest to keep me out of the children’s lives.”

Though, in absentia, Hunter relates his story through archival footage. He’s the bad boy and he loves being the bad boy. His neurotic tweets, insensitive takes on national television, and absurd behavior are good indicators of these. In one tweet to his followers, he says. “If someone killed themselves over being on IsAnyoneUp, do you know how much I’d make?”

He constantly gloated over his achievements and never truly owned up to his actions. Like the female officer who asked Kayla at the police station, “Why would you take a picture like that if you didn’t want it on the internet?”, Hunter blamed his victims for their pictures being on his site. It was always their fault never his and that mentality was his undoing.

The only downside of this documentary is not hearing Hunter’s direct perspective and that’s mostly his fault because he dropped out at the last minute. It would’ve been nice to know what his thought process was beyond what was said by his victims, journalists, and the FBI. What thrill did he get out of being a “professional life ruiner?” Why did he allow his website to cause people pain and suffering? Did prison time change him?

A psychological analysis of Hunter by a professional would’ve also been nice. Is he a sociopath or a psychopath? Were there any events from his childhood that turned him into a misogynist? Did his drug intake and party lifestyle play a part in him being screwed in the head? If these questions were answered, this documentary would’ve been iron clad.

Hunter was an internet sensation in his heydays and his impact is still a topic of discussion seeing as no federal law has been passed against intimate image abuse. Maybe this documentary is an open letter to the United States legislature to fill that lacuna.

Release Date: July 27, 2022

Episode List: 3

Streaming Network: Netflix

Genre: True Crime Documentary

Director: Rob Miller