They are the words no mother wants to hear her child say: “Something horrible happened, Mom.”
“Of course, as a mom, the first thing you think of is ‘car accident,’ ” says Charlotte Laws, 55, of that January 2012 call from daughter Kayla. “That’s the worst thing to hear as a mother. I wasn’t expecting to hear about revenge porn, because I didn’t know what that was. So I had to educate myself, quickly.”
Kayla told her a topless selfie she had taken in her bedroom three months earlier was on IsAnyoneUp.com — a notorious website where nude photos of unsuspecting women were published online without their consent.
Some of the pictures were sent in by disgruntled ex-boyfriends, though many — like Kayla’s — were stolen from computers and e-mail accounts.
Hunter Moore, now 29, had founded the website and was dubbed the “most hated man on the Internet.”
Most felt helpless, or too embarrassed, to do anything about him. But Laws wasn’t going to let him get away with it. It would take three years, but Charlotte Laws would help take down IsAnyoneUp.
‘He’ll never take it down’
“I never blamed her,” Laws says about learning that her daughter — then a 25-year-old aspiring actress — had taken semi-nude photos of herself in the privacy of her Southern California home.
“In October 2011, she took selfies in the mirror with her cell phone — over 100 photos and one of them was topless.
“She sent them through her e-mail to her computer to save them.
“But she had no intention of showing the topless picture to anyone. Three months later, on Jan. 1, 2012, she was hacked.
“Nine days after that, the topless picture was featured on Hunter Moore’s website along with her name, her city and her Twitter link.”
Laws’ first concern was the damage the photos would do to Kayla’s reputation. She says: “I was definitely very upset to see the picture on there because I felt it could negatively impact her life.
“I knew that a picture is forever online and that it can proliferate very quickly and that her reputation or career opportunities could quickly be damaged.
“So, I knew it was imperative to remove that photo as quickly as possible.”
That is exactly what Laws set out to do that evening, with a dogged determination that has earned her the title “the Erin Brockovich of revenge porn,” in a nod to the famed environmental activist.
“I started trying to get that picture down, which was extremely tough because, as I learned about Hunter Moore, I also learned that he never removed pictures,” she says.
Over the next few days Laws — who recounts her story in her memoir, “Rebel In High Heels” (Stroud House Publishing) — became an expert on this seedy world.
“I spoke to nine attorneys, and I was trying to get as much information about what revenge porn was and what I could do,” she says.
“I learned very quickly that nobody really had any information about it. It was a completely new thing.
“Hunter Moore hadn’t invented it per se, but he definitely made it popular. He was definitely the kingpin of revenge porn. He was all over the media.
“He was calling himself a professional ‘life-ruiner.’ He was calling his site pure evil. He was loving harassing, humiliating and embarrassing these [people] — mostly women, because 90% of the victims were female.”
Ignored by the law
Laws says she spent hours sitting at home “from 6 a.m. to midnight” desperately trying to get Moore to remove Kayla’s photo.
They both sent him e-mails pleading with him to pull them.
Laws also contacted Moore’s then lawyer, Reza Sina. She says: “He said, ‘I have sympathy for the victims . . . I just can’t get Hunter to do it, but I’m trying.’ ”
At the same time, she contacted Jeffrey Lyon, the president of Black Lotus Communications — the Internet security company that handled Moore’s website.
“He was extremely receptive to helping,” Laws says. “He was able to block the page that had Kayla’s nude picture. But Hunter went around Jeffrey’s efforts and created a new page for Kayla.”
The police, Laws claims, were not receptive when she sought their help.
“We talked to a female, middle-aged detective, who was not very sympathetic and blamed Kayla for the fact her photo was out there because she had taken it in the first place,” she says.
“Although she agreed to take the case, I could tell she was not enthusiastic about it.”
Neither was the FBI, at first.
“They initially told me to file a report online which I was sure they would not look at,” Laws says.
“So I said, sarcastically, ‘Oh I see, you help Scarlett Johansson when her picture gets hacked, but you don’t help the average person.’ And that’s when the guy goes [sigh], ‘All right, just a minute, let me transfer you to a detective.’
“The detective said three agents would be coming to my house later in the month.”
In the end Kayla’s photo was removed, nine days after going up, after Laws’ husband — retired attorney Charles Parselle — got so fed up that he told Moore’s lawyer: “I’m walking into court in 20 minutes if you don’t have this picture down.”
Kayla’s photo disappeared from the site within minutes. But her mother’s fight against revenge porn was far from over.
‘I call it cyber rape’
Over those nine days Laws had contacted — and offered support to — some of Moore’s other victims.
A self-proclaimed champion of the underdog, she felt an obligation to continue the fight to get IsAnyoneUp.com removed.
“They were still stranded on there,” Laws says of the other victims, whose names and cases she had compiled into a huge file.
“They didn’t have anybody to help them. A lot of them couldn’t tell their family or friends.
“I was the only person they were talking to because it was embarrassing for them and they didn’t want anybody to know.”
The first step in her campaign was to educate people about the true nature of “revenge porn,” which she says is a misnomer.
“It’s really more like non-consensual pornography or I prefer to call it cyber rape because I think victims act like traditional rape victims and it’s a sex crime.”
She adds: “The press at that point were saying that revenge porn was all about disgruntled exes. I knew that wasn’t true.
“I knew it was a hacking scheme because my daughter was hacked and then she found out her friend had been hacked by the same person.
“I wanted to find out exactly how many pictures on Hunter Moore’s site were hacked and how many weren’t.”
Moore had 600,000 Twitter followers and some of the photos he posted were self-submitted. So Laws had to be careful when she contacted people to ask if they had been hacked.
“I had to do this in a very furtive way where he [Moore] wouldn’t find out,” she says. “When I contacted these victims, I had to do it by phone.
“Then I couldn’t tell them upfront who I was, because what if they were a friend of Hunter Moore? So I said, ‘I’m a reporter. I’m writing an article about this. I’d like to know how you got on the site.’ ”
If the person on the end of the line said, ‘Oh my God, I was hacked,’ Laws would reveal her true identity and give them advice on how to get their photo removed.
Trolling Facebook
Most of the time she discovered that — like her daughter — many of the victims had been randomly hacked by someone using the same e-mail, a shadowy character called “Gary Jones.”
It was dangerous work, and Laws claims she was sent computer viruses and received anonymous death threats.
She even spotted a stranger in a parked car watching her house when she started speaking out against Moore in the media.
“Hunter was getting all this press, really glorifying him,” she says. “I was annoyed with that, and that’s why I called a couple of reporters and said, ‘Do you want the other side?’ Because no one was willing to speak out at that point. I was the only one.”
The FBI met with Laws and the other victims she tracked down; she handed them a 12-inch stack of her research. She was overjoyed when they raided Moore at the Sacramento, Calif., house he shared with his parents.
Shortly beforehand, in April 2012, Moore abruptly sold his domain name to James McGibney, founder of the anti-bullying website, BullyVille.com. Moore explained his decision, telling The Village Voice: “I’m sick of f – – king people calling me a ‘f – – – – t’ and telling me to kill myself.”
Laws had to wait until January 2014 for the Internet bad boy to get his comeuppance, when both he and “Gary Jones,” the alleged hacker who helped him, were arrested.
That’s when she was shocked to learn that Jones was actually Charlie Evens, then 23 — a Studio City, Calif., resident who lived nearby.
“He went to high school about a block away from our house, in Sherman Oaks, which is super weird,” Laws says.
“I must have walked past the school a million times.”
Evens would get pictures primarily by using the “lost password” function for the Gmail or Yahoo account tied to a person’s Facebook page. He would then get, then change, the person’s password so they couldn’t have access and go through their email for nude pictures to sell to Moore. (Gmail and Yahoo have since fixed this loophole, though hackers have found other ways to compromise accounts).
She claims Evens would allegedly “get to one Facebook friend and then he would use that person to try to get into their e-mail, and he would use that person to branch out to their friends, then their friends, then their friends. It was random. He would hack any place he could succeed.”
Her daughter Kayla wasn’t specifically targeted. She was simply a victim of circumstance.
Moore and Evens were charged with 15 felonies, including seven counts of aggravated identity theft and seven counts of unauthorized computer access.
Fight back
In February, Moore accepted a plea deal. He will be sentenced on June 24 in Los Angeles and faces up to seven years in prison. Evens, who pled not guilty, faces up to 42 years behind bars.
In the meantime, Laws’ work as a victims’ advocate continues. She sits on the board of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a nonprofit seeking to end revenge porn.
There are IsAnyoneUp imitators out there, and it’s hard to police the many discussion boards and forums where people post hacked nudes.
Laws is adamant that victims need to fight back. She has helped legislators to pass laws making non-consensual online pornography illegal, testifying before the California state Senate in support of anti-revenge porn bills in 2013 and 2014. In New York, a law passed last year that makes broadcasting or posting a pornographic picture of someone without their consent a felony.
“I feel like we’ve been victorious,” Laws says. “This movement has made huge strides in the last three years.
“When I started out nobody knew what it was. People were blaming victims. Nobody thought it was a sex crime.
“Now it’s an issue that’s taken seriously and victims are seen as victims as opposed to, ‘Oh, you brought it on yourself.’ ”