Charlotte Laws takes a seat in Birmingham High School’s Sally Field Performing Arts Center. Outside the theater, it’s a bright and warm California spring morning. Inside, a small gathering of mostly senior citizens slowly drifts from the snack table into their seats for the town hall meeting. California Congressman Brad Sherman takes his place at the podium.
Sherman’s aides call Laws' name first. She steps out of her aisle seat and walks to the microphone facing Sherman’s podium. He shoots her a wide smile. Laws, a petite woman in her early fifties, launches into her well-rehearsed speech.
“My daughter was a victim of revenge porn,” Laws says, her voice carrying through the drowsy auditorium. "There are thousands of victims around the country; most of them are women. Revenge porn is when a nude or topless picture is posted on the internet without consent, along with the victim's name, city, workplace, social media link, and other identifying information. The goal is to humiliate a woman, ruining her life, and driving her to suicide.”
She’s not squeamish about the details, explaining that a handful of states already have revenge porn bills on the books, and another 22 states are currently working on them. “Will you be bold and take a stand on this issue?" she asks Sherman. "Can we count on you to introduce a law?”
Photograph by Todd Weaver for BuzzFeed
California’s first anti-revenge porn bill — a bill that Laws actually helped draft — was heavily criticized for not going far enough when it was passed last year. It made nonconsensually distributing explicit photographs a misdemeanor, but it didn’t apply to selfies. “With today's technology, people take as many pictures of themselves as they take of anyone else,” Sherman says pensively to the mostly gray-haired audience lounging placidly in the crowd. “It ought to be illegal nationwide, and it ought to apply to distributing that which should remain private, for the sole purpose of hurting somebody.”
After the meeting, Laws tries to grab the congressman’s attention. The crowd of people around him swells and all he’s able to do is shake Laws' hand and pose for a photo.
Laws and Sherman might never have had occasion to be in the same room together if not for Hunter Moore, the man whose website posted photos of Laws' daughter. Often called the King of Revenge Porn, Moore has been arrested following an FBI investigation. As he awaits his court date, those going after individuals who steal and share intimate photos are facing an increasingly unwinnable game of whack-a-mole; revenge porn is becoming less centralized, more common, and harder to trace.
After this week’s massive leak of nude photos, many of which appear to have been taken from over a dozen celebrities’ iCloud accounts, people are again asking: If this can happen to the likes of Jennifer Lawrence or Kate Upton, how are average women expected to track down — and take down — nude photos tweeted by an angry ex-boyfriend or posted to 4chan by an anonymous stranger? Can revenge porn be stopped?
Photograph by Todd Weaver for BuzzFeed
Larry Flynt Publications
Perhaps the precursor to modern revenge porn happened in the pages of a Hustler spin-off called Beaver Hunt in the '80s. Readers, many of whom now owned point-and-shoot cameras, provided Hustler with nude photos of a nonprofessional “model" — with her face visible — along with said woman's name, age, hobbies, and sexual fantasies. It didn’t take long for Hustler’s mostly male audience to realize they could submit stolen photos and Beaver Hunt would publish them. Several women who ended up in Beaver Hunt without their consent sued the magazine. In 1990, Sabrina Gallon, a woman from New York who ended up in Beaver Hunt without her consent, was awarded $30,000 in damages.
As the web has grown, the idea of covertly sharing other people’s naked photos has evolved right along with it. In the early days of dial-up, people began posting on Usenet, one of the first social networks, and, once again, began anonymously submitting intimate photos of women they knew. Users on the anonymous imageboard 4chan have taken the idea a lot further and turned it into a game, unearthing nude photos of random girls and matching them up with Facebook data, then passing them around on social media for fun. For girls they can’t find nude photos of, users who are good at Photoshop take requests and “X-ray” images, making fake ones.
In 2010, then-24-year-old high school dropout Hunter Moore started a website called Is Anyone Up. Moore, who was working odd jobs in the sex industry, decided to upload real and photoshopped nude photos and videos of men and women, connecting them to their Facebook pages and adding fake bios detailing his victim’s sex lives. Moore’s first victims were Myspace celebrities, Warped Tour-affiliated bands, and their fans. He would organize the pages so users could browse by city and state.
IsAnyoneUp.com in August of 2011
At the height of its popularity, Is Anyone Up was reportedly getting around 30 million views a month. Moore shut the site down in 2012, blaming server costs, women trying to attack him in public, and a lack of support from Facebook and PayPal. Moore’s revenge porn as a display of power philosophy had earned him legions of fans and thousands of copycats.
But by that point revenge porn no longer needed a hub. Moore moved with it, taking his whole online presence to Facebook and Twitter, and instead of posting stolen nudes, he started just retweeting the ones his fans would send him. Getting nudes sent straight to your phone became easier than ever.
According to The Pew Research Center, 20% of cell phone owners in 2014 reported receiving a sext from someone they knew, up 5% since 2012. A 2014 study from security software firm McAfee found that 50% of those surveyed had used their mobile device to share intimate content and 16% of those surveyed had sent sexual content to a complete stranger. The Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality has put that number as high as 70% for college students. Revenge porn thrives on open access — mobile messaging apps like Kik, Snapchat, and Instagram are only making the harassment more ubiquitous. There are teenagers using the web right now that have never known a version of high school without the looming threat of their most personal photographs going viral.
Photograph by Steven Kowalski
Charlotte Laws settles into a big chair in her living room. A tiny white dog named Sammy plays at her feet until he jumps up onto her lap. Her daughter Kayla putters in the kitchen. Her charming ranch-style home is at the top of a long, winding hill that overlooks the outer suburbs of Los Angeles. In the back is the office where she does most of her work and has the clutter to prove it.
“Women are really not that welcome on the internet,” Laws says with a sad chuckle. “I'm kind of amazed.”
It’s not an exaggeration to call Laws a leading expert on how much the internet hates women. She’s a women’s rights activist, former talk show host, and columnist, and she has a Ph.D. in social ethics. She’s also regularly contacted by women from all over the country about what to do when their intimate pictures end up online. She’s the revenge porn fixer, the Erin Brockovich of leaked nudes.
Photograph by Macey J. Foronda for BuzzFeed
The most common stories you hear about revenge porn are ones of jilted men who leak their ex-girlfriend’s naked photos. In reality, she says, it’s not always so personal. “One girl lost her cell phone and some guy from South America got it and posted her pictures off her phone onto the internet,” Laws says. “I got a call from a teacher who actually had to quit her job because of this whole thing. Some of the people are hacked, some of the people are photoshopped.”
On Jan. 10, 2011, Laws' then-24-year-old daughter Kayla, who at the time was pursuing an acting career, was at the restaurant where she waitressed when she got a phone call. It was a panicked friend who told her that her name, the city she lived in, and her Twitter handle were on Is Anyone Up. Next to her personal information was a topless photograph she took of herself and a slew of other intimate snapshots. She was confused and scared. She hadn’t sent the nude photos to anyone.
Kayla walked back into the restaurant and finished her shift, still crying. She soon discovered that her Is Anyone Up page was emailed to everyone in her workplace. Her boss threatened to fire her over it. She called her mom, distraught. Laws figured the pictures wouldn’t be too difficult to yank down — Kayla took them; she owned them. But Hunter Moore wasn’t paying any attention to takedown notices.
Over the next year, Laws gathered every piece of information she could find on Moore. She watched his Twitter feed closely. She got him kicked off Facebook. She had his PayPal account shut down. She even went so far as to call his mom’s workplace.
“I used to be a private investigator in the 1980s and I basically just started contacting anybody and everybody associated with him,” Laws says. “He was always aware of what I was doing, but he didn't know it was me." She laughs, noting that the irony of the situation is not lost on her.
Laws finally came face-to-face with her nemesis and his fans when she went undercover at one of his club nights at a hotel in Long Beach. “I had on white, pasty junk all over my face, a black wig, a beatnik cap, a velvet jacket,” she says, cringing. “I get out of my car, and guess who the first person I run into when I get out of my car is? Hunter Moore!”
Moore didn’t recognize her. She followed him and his friends into the run-down hotel. The place was packed, Laws says, except for the room Hunter was DJing in. “I couldn't believe how empty it was,” she says.
At the time, Laws says everyone was terrified of Moore and what he could do. There was an aura of unpredictability around him. It was rumored that he was a master hacker who could fill anyone’s computer with viruses. When Laws saw him in person, however, the reality was a lot different.
“So he starts out the gig and he has his cup of beer and he throws it into the air and messes up his laptop,” she says, laughing. “The whole evening he had trouble getting the music to play. It kept sputtering and it would stop.”
Laws’ one-woman investigation took its toll on Kayla, though. She became withdrawn. She abandoned acting. Now she’s hoping to start over working in real estate.
“She believes in the cause and she likes the fact that we've been able to help victims,” Laws says. “But on the other hand she doesn't like the fact that she's linked with this issue because she's worried that it could negatively impact her career in the future.”
Photography by Macey J. Foronda for BuzzFeed
One of the first revenge porn victims Laws was able to reach out to was a Houston-based yoga instructor named Melissa Riedel. On a Friday afternoon in 2011, the then-25-year-old was checking her Facebook when she noticed hundreds of friend requests rather than her usual one or two, many from guys in bands.
A day or so later, a producer for Anderson Cooper’s Anderson Live called her and told her she was featured on Is Anyone Up and that they were hoping she’d come on the show and talk about it. She checked out the site and discovered Moore had posted a topless photo of her along with a fake bio saying that she had slept with hundreds of rock musicians. “I had to deal with these random people from around the world sending me degrading, disrespectful messages and saying things that weren't true,” she says.
Anderson Live / Telepictures Productions
Cooper had Riedel and another Is Anyone Up victim, Daveeda Smith, confront Hunter Moore on the show. The women tried to explain to him how it felt to discover they were on his website. Moore didn’t back down.
“No one put a gun to your head and made you take these pictures. It's 2011, everything's on the internet,” Moore told them in between cuts to angry-looking members of the studio audience.
After the episode aired, Riedel received a Facebook message from Laws telling her about her investigation into Moore’s site. Moore claimed that all of the photos on Is Anyone Up were given to him in some capacity, which confused Riedel because she couldn’t remember giving anyone the topless photo Moore posted.
“Charlotte reached out to me and said that there's a possibility this guy was hacking into people's computers to retrieve their photos,” Riedel says. Sure enough, she had received messages from Yahoo saying that someone had tried to reset her password, right around the time her photo went up on Moore’s site.
Riedel was disillusioned. She says she appreciated Anderson Cooper’s desire to go after Hunter Moore, but after watching the episode, she believed it had been edited to give Moore the most screen time. “I kind of felt like my efforts were pointless,” she says. “I just went on there to expose myself for nothing.”
Laws was the only person who really seemed to have a plan about what to do. With the knowledge that she might have been hacked, Laws asked Riedel if she’d be comfortable putting her name on the FBI investigation. Riedel agreed.
“She is such an amazing and inspiring woman,” Riedel says of Laws. “She kind of took on this motherly role with me, and I felt very supported by her through all of this.”
By spring 2012, Facebook was blocking all links to Is Anyone Up and had disabled the "like" button on the page. Hunter Moore finally took the site down on April 19, 2012. A few days after that, Moore and Laws finally officially met for the first time during a heated interview on The Dr. Drew Show.
"Basically this is cyber rape; that's all it is," Laws said.
"I mean, cyber rape, that's way worse than real rape," Hunter shot back sarcastically. "I'm sorry your daughter was 'cyber raped,' but now she's educated on technology."
By the time Laws had left Dr. Drew, there were 20 viruses waiting for her in her email. She also started receiving death threats. When Is Anyone Up finally went down, Hunter Moore had amassed a pretty substantial fanbase who followed Moore’s tweets with a cultlike fervor. They call themselves “The Family," stylized on Twitter as #TheFamily, and after Dr. Drew they knew who Charlotte Laws was. Moore and his brand of revenge porn were not only cool, but a serious lifestyle choice. Laws and her one-woman crusade gained the same boost, though.
Holly Jacobs
Courtesy of Holly Jacobs
