Over the past few years, revenge porn has become endemic. Keep an eye on the news and you’ll see it’s peppered with stories about people (mainly men) who have been caught posting naked pictures of their exes on the internet. Last week a paramedic was struck off for posting pictures of his ex-girlfriend. A week before that, two women went to court after filming their friend having sex and posting it on Facebook. West Midlands police just announced that it has investigated a 10-year-old on suspicion of posting revenge porn. It’s one of the least edifying aspects of the internet, and it seems to be unstoppable.
All of which makes Netflix’s new series The Most Hated Man on the Internet one of the most upsettingly timely documentaries in recent memory. Essentially a history lesson, it tells the story of IsAnyoneUp.com, a site that for two years revelled in posting intimate pictures of women, almost always submitted without their consent by spurned ex-lovers. The site quickly grew a large and entitled following, and its founder became its messianic ringleader, developing a cult of personality that only expanded its notoriety.
That leader was Hunter Moore, who – as you’d expect – is the titular Most Hated Man. The show’s name comes from a 2012 Rolling Stone profile on Moore that is indicative of the culture of the time. The piece was indistinguishable from any fawning profile given to an up-and-coming rockstar, with the countless lives he ruined shrugged off by his interviewer as nothing more than “mischief”. It’s a startling artefact to read today; Moore was the antihero celebrity, his victims mere afterthoughts.
As such, The Most Hated Man on the Internet operates as a corrective. “The way it was covered at the time, Hunter was really front and centre, and the victims were kind of shamed into silence,” says the programme’s director, Rob Miller. “We saw this as an opportunity to address that wrong and put the victims’ voices right at the heart, and allow them to tell their stories. We’re very fortunate that some very brave victims stepped forward.”
Miller describes the show as “kind of David and Goliath”, with the latter being “this quite charismatic, but entirely immoral, villain who lacks all compassion, plus the validation and celebration of what he was doing by his supporters.” It’s an apt metaphor. Anyone who has ever run into trouble online will know the paralysing fear you get when confronted with the giant unresponsive cliff face of the internet. But what made IsAnyoneUp even harder to deal with was that its figurehead was a smirking berk who knew complaints would only bolster his infamy.
And he was gratuitously cruel, too. The site didn’t just post naked pictures of its victims. It posted them alongside their real names, professions and social media handles, so its community could actively seek them out. One particularly harrowing segment revolves around a woman whose nude photos were accompanied by a Facebook profile photo of her children. According to the documentary, she asked Moore to take it down; he said he would if she anally penetrated herself on camera and, desperate to make things better, she complied.
As apt as his biblical metaphor was, Miller quickly walks it back during our chat. “Actually, no, it’s Charlotte and Goliath,” he explains. He is talking about Charlotte Laws, an undeniable force of nature who quickly emerges as the hero of the piece. Readers of a certain age might know Laws better by her pen name, Missy; her 1988 book Meet the Stars (a handbook on how to crash celebrity parties) saw her briefly reach saturation-level ubiquity on the US talkshow circuit. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. She has made headlines by opposing anti-LGBTQ+ policy proposals in California; she has given lectures to the FBI about animal rights; she has written about a friend of hers who claimed that Bill Cosby had drugged and raped her. (He has always denied all allegations of assault.) All that and she dated Tom Jones for three years. In short, Charlotte Laws is the last person you want to run up against.
Unluckily for Moore, IsAnyoneUp posted nude photos of Charlotte’s daughter, Kayla. This is what eventually helped bring the site down. Laws went on the warpath, contacting the FBI and doxing Moore in retaliation. Not for nothing has she come to be known as “the Erin Brockovich of revenge porn”.
“She’s an amazing woman,” says Miller. “If you tell Charlotte she can’t do something, she’ll just want to do it even more. She obviously cares about justice and accountability, and believes people who do bad things should be punished for those bad things. Sometimes you can have an important story, but if you don’t have the contributors, then you don’t really have a series. We were very fortunate with all our contributors.”
Making The Most Hated Man on the Internet came with its own unique set of challenges. Not only was it made during the pandemic, largely over Zoom (although you would never know), but the subject matter is so sensitive it had to be dealt with in an incredibly thoughtful way. This, after all, is a series about a site that posted explicit images of young women without their consent.
Reposting those images was out of the question, says Miller. “What we couldn’t do was make a series about someone who had their consent violated, then violate their consent ourselves. We were never going to use the images from the original website. Even if we blurred them, someone can recognise themselves and you can re-traumatise people.”
Instead, the production found a website containing consensually uploaded, self-shot sex-positive imagery, and went about contacting the subjects for permission. “Every person that appears, even though their faces are blurred, fully consented, and it was informed consent,” says Miller. “It wasn’t just, ‘Can we use this?’ It was, ‘We’re going to use this in the context of this website, and there are going to be these comments underneath, which are about somebody else.’ There were lots of discussions about degrees of blurring. We wouldn’t show someone’s face, but at the same time you don’t want to lose their humanity. And it’s really important that they were seen as humans.”
Nevertheless, the show is called The Most Hated Man on the Internet, so you might expect Moore himself to participate. Sadly, that isn’t the case. “He did initially agree to participate,” says Miller. “But then over Christmas, he changed his mind and decided he didn’t want to take part.”
The change of heart could have been down to a number of factors. IsAnyoneUp crashed and burned a decade ago, and Moore has subsequently served a prison sentence for aggravated identity theft and aiding and abetting in the unauthorised access of a computer. But in their discussions, did Miller sense Moore was sorry for what he put his victims through?
“It’s difficult for me to say,” says Miller. “He’s obviously a bit older, but he’s kind of refused to apologise. So that says a lot. Maybe the opportunity to participate was also an opportunity to say, ‘Look, I did this thing, and it was wrong, and I feel sorry about the people I hurt.’ But that wasn’t an invitation he took up.”
Perhaps it’s fitting that we don’t hear from Moore, though. He has had his time in the spotlight, and now it’s time for his victims to speak up. If The Most Hated Man on the Internet lands as hard as it should, their testimonies might help to effect real change. A card at the end of the series reveals that, despite Laws’ hard work, revenge porn is still not a federal offence in the US.
“The last card is a call to arms,” says Miller. “If it can get it across the line, then brilliant. If the series can achieve that, fantastic. It’s a bit naive maybe, a bit idealistic. But there is a power of hearing someone’s story, where they’ve come out the other side and not allowed it to define them. If other people who have been in that situation see this and it helps to remove some of the shame they might feel, that would be great.”
• The Most Hated Man on the Internet is on Netflix on 27 July.
• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com
