Who is Kirra Hughes? Hunter Moore's ex-girlfriend regrets failing to stop the 'king of revenge porn'
Trigger Warning: This article contains references to sexual abuse and revenge porn; viewers discretion is advised
In the Netflix documentary ‘Most Hated Man On The Internet’, Hunter Moore’s ex-girlfriend Kirra Hughes says she regrets not being able to stop her former beau from launching revenge porn website IsAnyoneUp. Moore, also known as the ‘king of revenge porn’ or a ‘professional life-ruiner’, started his website in 2010 when he moved from Sydney to his parents’ home in California.
Moore wanted to enjoy the same social nightlife that he had in Sydney. In order to do that, he launched isanyoneup.com, initially posting pictures of "a b***h who broke his friend’s heart". The friend started posting pictures back on the website, and soon many people were hooked on to it, posting pictures and videos of their exes, along with information about them. The site helped Moore gain a lot of money in ad revenue.
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Who is Kirra Hughes?
Kirra Hughes was a young fashion student in 2010, the time when she became Moore's girlfriend. She later revealed that while she did learn about the website in its early days, she didn't understand what it meant to 'real people'.
In the now wildly popular Netflix docuseries 'The Most Hated Man On The Internet', Hughes says, "I feel ashamed and upset, I just wish I had known better at the time. One of my biggest regrets is not speaking up when I had a voice."
Hughes is now a scenic prop director and model based out of Brooklyn, New York. The docuseries first aired on Netflix on July 27, 2022. Moore doesn't feature personally in the film except in archived footage.
What were the charges against Hunter Moore?
Moore became a public figure in 2012 after he declared himself as the owner of the website. Meanwhile, there were no active laws governing the gray area of revenge porn. According to the Communications Decency Act of 1996, website owners cannot be held legally for what’s posted by their users (it's the same law that protects Twitter and Facebook from defamation lawsuits).
However, the trend became even more sinister when some women claimed that they had never sent anyone the nudes that were being posted on the website. This meant that some of these photos were extracted through hacking methods or worse, could be doctored.
When the website was handed over to the police in 2012, Moore sold it to an anti-bullying company around the same time. In 2015, upon pleading guilty, he was handed a jail term of two-and-a-half years along with a fine of $2000. In May 2017, Moore was released from jail after taking part in a rehabilitation program to reduce his sentence.
Why exactly did Hunter Moore launch IsAnyoneUp?
In 2018, the ‘professional life-ruiner’ self-published a memoir called “Is Anyone Up? A Story Of Revenge Porn”, where he joked that he “felt like Harry Potter” and shared scars from an incident where a dad and his daughter came to his house and stabbed him with a ballpoint pen for refusing to take her pictures down from the website. He described it as a “brush with death.”
Photos on the website were easily Google-able, which meant employers or family members could look for pictures posted on image search and track down the people involved, making the whole fiasco worse.
In a 2012 interview with Rolling Stones, Moore said “ruining people’s lives with naked pictures wasn’t the ideal job” but that he “gets off on making money.”