Who is Charlotte Laws? Inside mom's two-year fight against Hunter Moore aka 'Most hated man on Internet'
Trigger Warning: This article contains references to revenge porn that could be traumatic to some readers. Discretion is advised.
The enraged mother of the woman, whose naked photos were stolen from her email and posted without her consent on the infamous "revenge porn" website, has revealed how she finally took down "the most hated man on the internet", after he left her daughter feeling "emotionally battered" and "violated".
Kayla Lewis, now 35, of Los Angeles, California, was devastated when a coworker told her in January 2012 that she had discovered topless pictures of her on a website called IsAnyoneUp.com. “She says, ‘Hey, I’m really sorry. But you’re on this website [that’s] basically a website of nude photos,” recalls Lewis' mother Charlotte Laws in the Netflix documentary titled 'The Most Hated Man on the Internet', which was released on Wednesday, July 27, 2022.
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The three-part documentary series by Alex Marengo, producer of 'Bad Sport' and 'Killer Ratings', chronicles "king of revenge porn" Hunter Moore's sudden rise to and humiliating fall from digital eminence after launching IsAnyoneUp, or IAU, in the early 2010s. "I was scratching my head. "Like, how did I end up on this website?" said Lewis, who is now 35 and living in Los Angeles, and continues to be depressed. However, she adds that her private email account had been hacked in the days preceding the leak. "It was humiliating. I had no intention of showing the photos to anyone," she said.
IAU quickly became a major non-consensual pornographic platform between 2010 and 2012. Scorned lovers were encouraged to publicly share naked photos of their ex-partners, with no permission required. “It all started with me hating some dumb b***h who broke my heart,” Moore, who founded the site at 26, laughs in audio featured in the series. (He did not participate in the documentary or respond to The Post’s request for comment.) “Me and my friends would just post a bunch of girls on IsAnyoneUp, and we just got a bunch of traffic one day. And I was like, ‘Yo, I can make money off of t—ies and f**king people over.’”
Who is Charlotte Laws?
Kayla Lewis was just 24 years old when her photo went viral on the website. Her photo was taken from her email which was hacked by an anonymous hacker. For which, she felt “absolutely disgusted”. Her mother, Charlotte Laws, made it her mission to remove not only the offending images but also Moore's larger smut empire. “My daughter felt violated and shamed,” Laws, 62, also from Los Angeles, told The NY Post. “She was emotionally battered.”
Lewis claimed that she took the picture on her cellphone in the privacy of her bedroom and never sent it to anyone other than herself via email. After the picture was posted on the website, the mother-daughter immediately sent Moore an email, pleading for the shirtless photo to be removed. However, the request was ignored, and the photo remained on the site. Laws, a former private investigator who was working in real estate at the time, went to war on her daughter's behalf.
Laws reported the incident to the Los Angeles Police Department, explaining the hack and subsequent IAU posts to a female detective. According to Laws, the officer blamed Lewis for taking the picture rather than assisting her. The mother then contacted the FBI, but agents were not eager to assist at the time. Lewis was flooded with crude messages from men who had seen her picture as the days passed without a resolution or law enforcement intervention. Laws told The Post that disgraced porn star Ron Jeremy, 69, who was indicted on 34 counts of sexual assault in August 2021, even contacted her daughter, hoping to "talk business."
Laws sought the help of her husband and Lewis' stepfather Charles, a California lawyer, in her desperate effort to bring Moore to his knees. Lewis had been too miffed to involve him at first. Her picture was removed from IAU after Charles issued a stern ultimatum to Moore via his former attorney Reza Sina. “Finally, it’s removed and I feel this big wave of relief over me,” she recalled.
However, Laws refused to give up her fight against Moore until he removed every victim's naked photo from his website. "There was definitely a hacking scheme going on here," she told The Post, adding that one of Kayla's friends had also been hacked and was unintentionally featured on IAU. "It was excruciatingly painful for so many victims," she said.
Laws stated that 40 per cent of the women were robbed of their intimate pictures by email hackers. “And those unflattering pictures were destroying their lives,” she said. “It could have driven people to commit suicide". On the other hand, Moore, who'd acquired a fervent social media cult known as "The Family," continued putting pictures on his website.
According to the documentary, at the height of his success, Moore boasted of earning more than $13,000 per month by victimizing his tormented targets. “If someone killed themselves over my site would you hate me or love me more?” he asked the Family via Twitter, according to a screenshot shown in the documentary. Loyal members referred to Moore as "Father" and revered him as a god. In response to his dark tweet, a zealot wrote, “Let them kill themselves!!!”
Moore also threatened his victims if they reported. “If you try to sue me I’ll make f**ing fun of you,” Moore vowed in audio included in the documentary. “If you come to my house and try to serve me, I’ll put your f**king address out there [online], and my audience loves that s**t.”
But Laws was unstoppable. “I was literally obsessed with getting this website down,” she told The Post. “I was neglecting work. I wasn’t doing anything except this,” she added.
In March 2012, Agent Jeff Kirkpatrick helmed what would be a two-year investigation into Moore’s hacking scheme. “While revenge porn wasn’t illegal, hacking definitely was, and it gave us enough to start an investigation,” Kirkpatrick said in the documentary.
During the FBI investigation, Moore sold the domain to Marine-turned-webmaster James McGibney for less than $12,000. According to McGibney, Moore held the fire sale because he was afraid of going to jail for posting illicit photos of underage girls as young as 15.
McGibney expertly transformed the filth hub into Bullyville, an anti-bullying website. He also made Moore write a public apology to those he wronged.
Laws provided the FBI with the names of the victims who’d claimed their nudes were shared on IAU. Kirkpatrick discovered the hacker's email address and traced it back to a man named Charlie Evans, who was 26 at the time. Moore had hired Evans, of Studio City, California, to break into email accounts in search of sexy photos for $200 per week, according to the FBI. On Jan 24, 2014, both men were arrested.
While justice was served, Laws believes Moore's punishment was insufficient for his crimes. "It was akin to arresting Jack the Ripper and assigning him community service. It was pathetic," she said.
Moore was released from the Federal Correctional Institution Beaumont, in Texas, in May 2017. In 2018, Moore self-published 'Is Anyone Up?!: The Story of Revenge Porn', a personal tell-all in which he shares his version of events. He has otherwise remained silent about his infamous past.