Be aware that Hunter Moore has a good night’s sleep! His deep, profound slumber allows him to have beautiful dreams in which, for example, he wakes up with great wealth in his hands. To paraphrase: “I’ll discover a hidden treasure chest and discover that I am the proud owner of an enormous amount of wealth!
As he drives down Interstate 90 in the back of a powder-blue Toyota Matrix with the window down, wind in his hair, the sun glaring, music blasting and his head lilting forward in innocent slumber, with his occasional touring partner, DJ Android Rights, at the wheel hurtling him toward Poughkeepsie, New York, and, less specific but more cosmically, toward his future destiny that Moore sees as wide open and baffling
When it comes to individuals who only use the Internet as a means of getting work done and have no idea who Moore is (and that group is shrinking daily if he is involved), the innocent slumber may not signify much. Even if you’re not familiar with the 26-year-old founder of IsAnyoneUp.com, a site where jilted lovers could send their ex’s compromising photos to Moore, who would verify that the subject was at least 18 before posting the photos online for the amusement and mockery of the roughly 350,000 unique visitors he says he had on a typical day at IsAnyoneUp.com. That’s it!
Nevertheless, the retaliation was minimal and not limited to Moore’s website. As a result, the ex’s mother, boss, and coworkers would soon be able to view him or her online, sans skivvies, thanks to Moore’s inclusion of the ex’s complete name, occupation, social media profile, and city of residence in the accompanying photos.
Many others, including an American Idol finalist, the daughter of a major GOP donor, the co-founder of Dream Water (“Obviously didn’t make Smart Water,” Moore has said), Passion Pit bassist Kreayshawn, one Real Housewife, various real housewives, mothers, school teachers, midgets, and a woman in a wheelchair met their demise on the website during its 16-month lifespan – between 15 and 30 per day. Moore was dubbed “the Net’s most despised man” by the BBC.
When Facebook realized they were being conned, they also banned his 40-pound cat, Alan, from the site for good (Moore responded with a photo of his penis). He was denied access to PayPal. He was hacked by Anonymous. In the wake of her genitals being on IAU, one woman visited Moore’s home with her father and stabbed him in the shoulder with a ballpoint pen, leaving a nasty scar that necessitated a trip to the hospital. In his mind, “Oh my god, this is going to be the best post ever.” Death threats were made against him. When he started changing his phone number monthly, he became accustomed to it. Fearing he would be murdered in his sleep, he moved to live with his grandmother for some time.
Then things took a turn. Anderson Cooper’s interview with two women whose boobs he had posted on IAU brought out the genuine weirdos who submitted truly hardcore stuff—child porn, animal porn—which, at the absolute least, someone at IAU had to sift through daily, if not more frequently. Also, Dr. Drew invited Moore to appear on his show for some major finger-wagging from an unimpressed mother (Moore’s response: “I’m sorry that your kid was ‘cyber-raped,’ but, I mean, now she’s educated on technology.”) Dr. Some IAU victims discovered that a particular
[email protected] had been tampering with their computer files immediately before their images appeared on the site, leading to accusations of hacking. Moore argues that the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which shields websites from liability for user-submitted content, protects IAU. In some cases, Moore responded to cease-and-desist letters with a simple “LOL” with the consent of his lawyer, whom he met while partying at the W Hotel in San Francisco. The FBI, on the other hand, showed up at his house in May, sat him down on his couch, and presented him with a search warrant to look for proof of hacking. “Fucking frightened shitless.”
Not to mention that IsAnyoneUp was making Moore famous, thanks to a devoted following of heavily tattooed “scene” youths, free-speakers, and especially nubile young ladies who hoped to get on Moore’s site and into his pants, certainly not in that order. “If you have HIV/AIDS, I would still fissure you just to claim I have HIV/AIDS and that I got HIV from you,” he tweeted in response to one of his critics.) (On Twitter, he prompts unending debate: others want him to “head-butt a knife.
Instead of continuing the site, he shut down the business, sold the domain to Bullyville.com, and tried to reposition himself as an advocate for oppressed people on television, saying things like: “I don’t feel it is sleazy at all” and “I don’t know how you can point a finger at me; you took the picture.”
This guy was a mystery, to say the least. It’s hard to imagine a motive for this kind of depravity. Did anything approximating human souls exist on the other side of this screen?
The Internet’s most despised individual resides in a bland beige house in a sleepy leafy town north of Sacramento, on a street flanked by other bland beige houses. Moore sleeps with his huge head on the rumpled blue blankets of his childhood bedroom at night, or rather at dawn. Moore’s first professional venture is a framed T-shirt that hangs above his bed, which has a desktop computer with two monitors and is covered in skating stickers. As you can see, Moore is something of a businessman. After being expelled from a private Christian school, he founded a T-shirt firm in the eighth grade. It seems like he was just having one of his many arguments. “When I was a youngster, I was a grumpy one.” He had also formed an online Diablo II community and a local party promotion firm before dropping out of high school a few years later, which made him feel like being in class was a waste of his time. After turning 18, he claims, “I started doing some real shit.”
The real stuff” included working as a hairstylist for a pornographic site on the side, winning a six-figure settlement in sexual harassment litigation against a tacky mall retailer, and traveling the world on the money to places like Europe and Japan before finally settling in Australia for a year because “they party super hard there,” only to return home after contracting the parasite that causes scabies. That led him to launch his firm that provided sex-party services, selling it when he felt “worried because it was nearly prostitution,” and then looking for a new way to exploit the social media-sex synergy.
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IsAnyoneUp was the result of a happy fluke. “I was having sex with this lady who was engaged to this kind of semi-famous band guy, and all my buddies wanted to see her naked because she was so cute,” Moore recalls. After struggling to find a way to make the photos she supplied him visible to his pals, he decided to publish them on the domain he had purchased for possible party advertising while he worked through the technical challenges.
His buddies began to add their photos to the album over time. Almost a week after that, he checked the site’s analytics and found that it had received 14,000 unique visitors. He was shocked! So, “Holy sh*t, I could make money doing this,” was my first thought after that. Which he did, often to the tune of up to $30,000 a month, on average.
As he tells me this, we’re sitting in the living room. Among the family, portraits are deer heads that Moore (who was named Hunter after his father’s favorite hobby) has hung on the wall, and he sits at the dining table sifting through submissions for the IAU Tumblr site, which now focuses on self-submitted nudes instead of revenge porn. The majority of his time is spent doing this, he claims. This beautifully clean, aggressively suburban house with soft-focus California sunshine flowing in through the sliding doors has been his home since his parents retired and went to an Idaho property near a hunting preserve.
My expectations were not met with Moore. Despite his tattoos, pierced nape, and all-black attire, the man greets visitors with a smile and a welcoming attitude. Is there anything I can get to drink? What do you think? Should he adjust the temperature? How about some images of his nieces and nephews? Look away from that groin area! It’s horrible to see. On the kitchen counter, there are cupcakes.
To add to the confusion, I subsequently call Moore’s mother, Jeanette, who seems both shockingly rational and unsurprisingly perplexed by her son’s career path. Were it not for that freak hailstorm that occurred on Moore’s first birthday, there is no way he would have survived. Jeanette muses that this might help to explain the situation. That Moore’s older sister was a missionary, and that “we’re normal people” is what she wants me to know. He grew up in a typical family, with a solid education, a lot of friends, and a lot of time spent hunting with his father.
Moore, on the other hand, was never a typical person. He was invincible to your intimidation. The only way to get him to wear trousers was to tell him he had to. Even if you ban him, he’ll get a tattoo of your face on his arm nonetheless. While on the other hand, he could be so kind, amusing, and charismatic. In Jeanette’s words, “Unless you had a child like this, you couldn’t comprehend.” This “crazy” life is now all she hopes for, she says.
And, if we’re being completely honest, so does Moore. P. Diddy would be proud of him: “He’d love to just control the globe like white P. Diddy.” There is an issue, though, because “this is real life,” and the Internet can give a realistic employment alternative for those without an education. People desire “to hurt one another,” as well as “to avenge those who have hurt them,” according to Moore, who also believes that they like to witness other people doing “stupid crap.”
It helps that he only knows “what they are: an avatar on the Internet” of the people he posts. It also helps that he has the impression that he is portraying a fictional character. I mean, I have elements of my personality where I am a Fucking Dick, but when it’s to the point where I’m 100 percent playing a character, I probably won’t want to do it anymore,” he says. When it comes to posting images of his penis “with a bunch of cats Photoshopped behind it,” though, he’ll be more than happy to do so: “Are you out of your fucking mind??” “Why would I do that?”
Before going to bed at night, Moore thinks about fun things to do the next day, including asking people to put salami on their phallus, stick objects up their genitals, or poop spiders out of their nostrils (Google it). Afterward, people will eagerly send him images of themselves doing these things so that they can obtain a free T-shirt and/or gain more Twitter followers from that point forward.” Some of the females on IAU have landed lucrative pornography jobs as a result of their presence on the site. Some of these people have even met their future wives. What will the IAU brand look like now that the website is gone for good? What happened to Hunter Moore? You know, I was effectively bought out to shut him down.”
The problem with this is that Hunter Moore, who believes that he can brand Hunter Moore, feels that he can ride the wave of Internet mayhem to greatness. He’s been approached to write a book about his exploits (“If Snooki can have a book, anyone can”); he’s pitching a reality show; he’s working on revenge porn, as well as a social networking site “for networking, like, really fast, so people can have sex way faster than normal”); and he tours the country hosting parties called “IsAnyoneUp,” at which he nominally DJs (“I taught”)”; all this
To prove to me that he can arrange a great party, Moore is eager to show me. However, he must first go to San Francisco to meet up with his lover for dinner. He has a girlfriend, by the way. It may be hard to believe that a young woman would give her heart to a man to whom so many others have given their genitals. I was prepared for this claimed girlfriend to never quite materialize. However, I was incorrect. We went to a real house to pick her up. We ate at a real restaurant for the first time. Sushi was served. Kirra is her name. Kirra and Moore looked to have a real boyfriend/girlfriend vibe going on between them. Each other’s nickname is “babe.” “I love you” is something Moore says to her frequently, but he does so in a way that is both busy and instinctual. Since they’ve had so much time to think about it,
they haven’t consummated their love for each other. Having sex with strangers and with Kirra shouldn’t be a requirement of Moore’s profession, but he can’t help but feel that it is. If Moore doesn’t have to tell Kirra about what he’s doing, Kirra lets him. “I think it’s not your average relationship,” she says.
Let’s just say things got off to a good start in Poughkeepsie. On the other hand, the night before in Rochester, New York, was one of those nights that gives Moore hope for the future. At the Dub Land Underground, he was throwing a party and setting up a date with a Buffalo girl who’d just turned 18 and whom he’d been admiring. After dishing out shots to another Internet enthusiast who had appeared in person that night — the first person to ever receive an IAU tattoo, to speak of flesh – Moore excitedly exclaimed, “I’m going to have sex with her and take a bunch of pictures.” He was able to accomplish this in less than 20 minutes.
A little black-haired thing in an even tinier hot pink outfit not only consented to condomless intercourse with him but even allowed him to lick vodka out of her vagina. You couldn’t help but fall for her. Just to make sure no one else would get a chance, he chose to ignore the other two girls who were standing outside the greenroom, just in case. However, he rarely gets out of Pink Dress these days; it was the one drawback. He views his “desensitization” as a work-related risk. For him, “even being in the mood” requires him to be on something.
It wasn’t always like that. He was ecstatic when, in seventh grade, a ninth-grader made him lose his virginity during lunch. When he initially masturbated two years earlier, he thought he had damaged his penis, but he kept breaking it over and over. But what about this moment? It’s all for the sake of creating new content for my website, therefore I do shit.”
But he had to get on stage soon enough. As he took to the stage with DJ Android Rights, aka Ryan, and a very gracious go-go dancer named Kat, he announced that “I just fucked the shit out of a girl in your greenroom,” and then offered free shots of vodka, which Kat began administering from the stage with the patience of a nurse doling out some gentle tonic. It was Tuesday. More than one hundred sixty-five people had arrived at the door, including the man who later told Moore that “it’s a shame about the site since that was my daily news feed.” We had a great experience.
It was even better back in the green room, which an hour later became a pot-smoking hotbox. This time, Moore had access to cocaine and it worked its magic: “Holy crap, I can’t feel my lips!” he screamed after taking a hit. And then Pink Dress reappeared, this time with a less gorgeous, but equally more messed up, a girl who had a small garment that kept riding up over her underpants. While Pink Dress sat on the sofa, Moore bounced Panties on his knee.
At one point, he questioned Panties, “Are you going to show me your butt?” I can’t believe how hot you are. What can I say but, “You’re fucking hot.”
No, she screamed.
Pink Dress yawned, “Just show him your butt.”
To which Panties muttered: “I’ll be down if you all show him your butt at the same time.” “It has to be both ways.”
Pink rolled her eyes, but she nevertheless climbed out off the couch. They both showed off their butts.
We’d love to have sex with you, dude. After Panties had regained her composure, Moore enquired of her.
Another jerk showed there, suggesting they leave because it was going to be a long ride back to Buffalo and the friend’s baby was at home. On top of that, Moore and Panties both wanted more cocaine, so they didn’t want to have sex with each other. She outdid herself. Back in his hotel room, she consented to do her line off his erect penis for him to photograph and post on Tumblr later that night.
However, he refused to have a sexual relationship with her. She wasn’t all that sexy. This guy is so picky about who he sleeps with that he won’t sleep with just anyone. In the early morning hours, he gave her a wave and sent her off.
Now we’ve finished our tour of Rochester. When Moore gets inside the Loft in Poughkeepsie, the audience isn’t quite as cool as it usually is, and he’s had to deal with many more “fratty” people in the past. In the end, he gets five girls on stage with their shirts off and dancing so hard that their mascara is smeared all over their faces. He seemed to be having a good time.
As a result, it’s impossible to describe what follows. Moore and Ryan have just finished their show and have retired to the dimly lit theatre behind the club, where Ryan is smoking a joint while Moore adds that he may begin working with the same booking agency that handles Daft Punk’s tour dates and, as a result, may join the band on tour. In Moore’s words, “I was bullshitting.” In response to this, Ryan is either surprised or utterly shocked, at which time Moore punches him in the face.
There is blood running out of Ryan’s nose and down the T-shirt when he shows up at the merch stand, and someone phones the cops, who show up with sirens blasting to conduct a pretty cursory clubhouse search and announce that Moore is missing. Ryan inquires about the process for filing charges.
As I return to the Days Inn from the hospital to determine whether Ryan’s nose is broken, I receive a text from Moore asking if I’m still at my hotel and if I’d want to talk. He answers when I dial his number.
Do I sound alright? He wants to know whether I’m okay. His apologies are numerous and heartfelt. Ryan, the assailant, has a family to support, including his parents and granny, in addition to himself. “I’d like to meet you in the hotel lobby for a few minutes,” he responds. I turn down his offer and retire to bed.
Moore’s last appearance will be in New York City. He’s disappointed. A male stripper dressed as a cowboy was excitedly waiting to go on for his big number at the Trash! party at Webster Hall the night before, which he’d DJ’d. An exchange of words had a place. As a result of Moore’s use of a coke key, Cowboy and Moore got into a fight. The next thing Moore knew, he was handcuffed and being thrown into the back of a police cruiser while being patted on the head.
His rock star-style bash in the Hotel Chantelle’s basement was a no-go. He spent many hours in jail watching scene girls pose for photos with a somewhat amused policeman outside the station while they wore pleather corsets, torn stockings, and high-heeled stripper heels. Jazmin and a slim blonde girl were there to comfort him when he returned to the Hudson Hotel after his release from prison. Like, ‘God, can I sleep now?’ because guys would kill for a three-piece.”
He ended up missing a studio session with “Chicken Noodle Soup” rapper Young B. the following day because of a hangover. Upon waking, he discovered that he had been Googled. He’ll probably only have to pay a fine. Nonetheless, Having generated so much commotion, why should he have to spend the night in jail for something so trivial?
Walking through the West Village after dark, Moore muses on the reality that he’s in some kind of pickle. The truth is, I know I should calm down, but I just can’t. As he puts it, “It is my business.” “What shall I do next?” “Is this a crazy sober living situation?” Seeing Mark Zuckerberg at Knockout in San Francisco and thinking, “This may be the smartest business choice even if
I simply hit this person in the face right now because that would make me so popular.” For example, “what else is there unless I raped Steve Jobs?” If the security officers hadn’t intervened, he might have done the same. As weird as it seems, it’s how he has to think now: in terms of uniqueness, analytics, and herding the Internet mob in his direction. He knows it. The day he was stabbed was one of the busiest of his life.
We eat burgers at a squalid eatery. Club soda is what Moore wants. While he hasn’t heard from the FBI in months, it’s not like they make a phone call only to let him know that he’s cleared. Even yet, he’s not very concerned about it all. Even though he’s certain that some of IAU’s nudes were obtained through hacking, the man insists he’s never actually hacked someone and wouldn’t even know where to begin if he had to start today. Ryan hasn’t contacted him since. What would be the point?” There is no point in bothering with this individual.
Then he goes kind of deep: For him, “ruining people’s lives with sexual images was not, you know, the perfect employment,” so he sold the site. As he admits, he’s gone to a lot of therapists, and he’d like to see more of them because he enjoys the fact that they genuinely listen.
He claims to have done things for money that even he finds hard to believe, including the following examples: It’s not shit that I’m proud of, but there are things I won’t talk about because I don’t want to offend anyone. He claims that generating money is the only thing that makes him happy.
Then again, he’s going to have to leave now. Moore has ceased his introspection and exploration of the human psyche. You know, there’s this stripper from New Orleans who’s supposed to be waiting for him back at the hotel. He’ll engage in sexual activity with her, possibly capture the experience on film, and then attempt to get a good night’s sleep. And if he’s sleeping, he’s likely to keep having dreams. This is an excerpt from Rolling Stone’s October 11, 2012, issue.
