If only Hunter Moore were more famous, he would be the most reviled man on the Internet. He is fine with this.
Moore, the 28-year-old proprietor of the gleefully malicious revenge porn site IsAnyoneUp, made headlines for the first time in months last week when he announced plans to launch a new website, HunterMoore.tv, which he described as a sort of deluxe version of his last — that is, a repository of user contributed nude images, often submitted without their subjects' consent, alongside identifying information, like a Facebook account. Imagine a sort of consent-free, extra-malign Girls Gone Wild for the Tumblr set.
The new twist, he claimed, was the the site would include the subjects' addresses too.
He quickly walked this back in interviews, on Twitter, and on the phone with BuzzFeed FWD. "I don't want people to get hurt or raped or anything like that," he said, though he couldn't resist defending the concept. "It's just taking it one step further," he said, "I've had people posting my fucking address every day."
"I want to fuck with you and make you feel stupid," he explained, "so people will know where you fucking live and shut your fucking mouth."
Judging by interviews he's given in the past, these types of statements come easily — almost unstoppably — to Moore, who says he's relaunching not out of any particular commitment to principle, but because he's "just fuckin' bored, dude." And, he says, due to popular demand.
"People have just been begging for it to come back," he bragged. "I'm going make it what I always wanted IsAnyoneUp to be."
IsAnyoneUp was shuttered earlier this year, shortly after a flood of negative attention, including a painful-to-watch interview with Anderson Cooper, an FBI raid, and the purchase of the domain by anti-bullying website BullyVille. ("I think bullying is bullshit," said Moore, who has since been accused by the BullyVille founder of threatening to "rape my wife while my kids watched.")
Why would he want to return to the Internet that had so violently rejected him? Moore didn't hesitate. "I like boobs, and I like girls. Especially girls that I can, uhh," then he trailed off.
He blamed his last site's troubles on the national attention it had received, and says that illegal content — that is, underage — wasn't a serious problem "until Anderson Cooper."
"I just wanted a fresh start and a bunch of money," said Moore, "and to do a bunch of drugs and party." He continued: "I like boobs. Boobs motivate me."
Moore's favorite self-appointed role is that of privacy crusader: "I'm making the social networking scary, and making people realize they're putting too much info online. Everything is public and everything is online, I'm just going to exploit it."
He says it never bothered him when people would call or approach him at a party, desperately asking for photos to be removed. "You gotta understand I'm not doing anything, so in the first 24 hours, you're fuckin pissed and you want to kill me, then you're like, Who did I send these pictures to?, then you forget about Hunter Moore.
"I've fucked like so many of these girls I've posted on the site who were pissed off about it," he said, cheerfully. Last year, Moore was stabbed by someone who had been posted on his site. (I completely deserved that," he told me, "because I did a horrible thing to that fuckin' girl.")
The one thing that does seem to get to Moore is his imitators. One in particular, IsAnyoneDown, was accused of blackmailing people whose photos had been posted with a bogus legal scam.
"I've got $10,000 on that fool's head, because he's gonna get fucked up," Moore said as soon as I mentioned the site. (Its owner agreed to an interview, then stopped responding.)
Moore said, in an conversation that was clearly on record, that he has thousands of dollars "posted" for people to "just get their asses beat just for being faggots, and trying to knock off my shit."
His formal defense for the basic concept of what HunterMoore.tv will do — the moral high ground from which he feels able to attack IsAnyoneDown — is built on a conflation of what's legal and what's right. "No one can do shit to me," he said, "it's all user submitted content, so I'm not liable for anything."
"I don't have to age verify, but I do," he explained. "I could literally post 9-year-olds with fuckin' dicks in their mouths because it's user submitted content." FWD's resident law columnist, Michael Phillips, responds: "No, he couldn't post it — then he's the publisher — and the problem. And his site would need a mechanism to remove illegal stuff. The problem is Moore's entire site is an invitation for illegal stuff — a novel legal gray area."
Moore says he wishes people would recognize what he sees as his contributions to society. "No one gives me credit for putting people in jail, and helping schools block my site. I mean I go out of my way, I hired a team to age verify."
I asked Moore if he feels like a hero. "The thing is is that I am. Dude, the FBI raided me, and [now] I have such an amazing relationship with the FBI for turning in and handing over all this content, underage content or animal abuse or death pictures, or whatever the fuck else."
He repeated his lament: "But nobody seems to want to focus on that."