Hunter Moore is what my Jewish grandmother would ironically refer to as a real haimisheh mensch, or down-to-earth, stand-up guy: he's a twenty-six-year old dude who makes his living posting people's personal naked photos to his website Is Anyone Up (NSFW!), usually sent by scorned exes without the subjects' consent. The relentlessly self-promoting Moore, who looks sort of like the product of a sexual encounter between Adam Lambert and Joe Francis in a Quizno's men's room, is now the subject of an in-depth profile in the Village Voice, in which Moore opens up to writer Camille Dodero about his likes (alcohol, vaginas), his dislikes (lawsuits, smelly vaginas), and oh yeah, profiting financially from the mental anguish of those who unwittingly find their vaginas, smelly or otherwise, displayed on his site:
"I do not want anybody to ever be hurt by my site — physically," he says. "I don't give a fuck about emotionally. Deal with it. Obviously, I'd get a ton of heat for it. But — I'm gonna sound like the most evil motherfucker — let's be real for a second: If somebody killed themselves over that? Do you know how much money I'd make? At the end of the day, I do not want anybody to hurt themselves. But if they do? Thank you for the money."
I ask him to clarify. He adds that he'd remove the content or "do whatever I could to help the situation." By money, does he mean by traffic or because he'd be famous and then, no matter what happened, cash in on that fame? It's all very short-sighted. "The more traffic I'd have that day, I'm going to get paid for. So if someone fucking killed themselves? Do you know how much hate I'd get? All the Googling, all the redirects, all, like, the press"—here he sounds like he's stifling a yawn; it is morning—"I'd get paid for, for that day. And whatever."
Granted, there's a strong current of bravado that runs throughout Dodero's piece; at one point, he brags that he responds "LOL" to the 50 DCMA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) takedown requests he receives a day (Moore isn't legally responsible for the user-submitted content on his site, so what he's doing is technically kosher). Telling a reporter that he'd flash a "W" sign to the grief-stricken parents of a young woman who took her own life over photos on his website may just be Moore's way of building that devil-may-care, camera-ready, Tucker Max-esque swagger that gets him on the cover of fancy New York magazines in the first place. Either way, though, it's a shockingly vile thing for an already pretty vile person to say, so let's just hope that the moment that someone successfully sues this dude for all he's worth, they'll turn to him in court and sweetly thank him for his money.
