Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Most Hated Man On The Internet’ On Netflix, A Docuseries About A Mom’s Battle To Take Down The King Of Revenge Porn

The Most Hated Man On The Internet is a 3-part docuseries, directed by Rob Miller, that examines how Charlotte Laws almost singlehandedly took down Hunter Moore, who ran IsAnyoneUp.com and declared himself a “professional life ruiner” and “The king of revenge porn.” Moore ran that site in 2011 and 12, and felt he was protected by the same laws that protected social media sites like Facebook — until Laws proved that he was paying people to hack e-mail accounts to get nude photos for the site.

THE MOST HATED MAN ON THE INTERNET: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A Windows login screen for Charlotte Laws. Then we see a browser, where she types “isanyoneup.com”.

The Gist: In the first episode, we meet Charlotte and her daughter Kayla; in January 2012 Kayla found out that a topless photo of her that she thought she only had access to was uploaded to IsAnyoneUp. Her pictures, as all of the pictures on the site, were posted along with the person’s full name and social media links. As Kayla, understandably feeling violated, tried to avoid the social media reactions and phone calls the post generated.

Charlotte, on the other hand, started investigating. She found out that Kayla sent the pics to her email, and that email was hacked the week before the post. Then she started looking into other women whose photos were posted to the site. What she found out was that, while Moore ran the site and unabashedly posted videos where he talked about messing with women and posting nude photos of people, he can hide behind the fact that every photo was reader-submitted.

It wasn’t until Charlotte finally got Kayla’s lawyer stepfather involved, nine days later, that the photos came down. But Charlotte, after speaking to women that were violated by Moore — including a woman who he manipulated into posting videos of her sticking large objects up her butt, i.e. “Butthole Girl” — kept on fighting.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The story of Hunter Moore and his followers, dubbed “The Family” combines all the douche-tastic vibes of Fyre Fraud with the creepiness of cult docuseries like The Vow.

Our Take: One of the things we really concentrated hard on while watching The Most Hated Man On The Internet was suppressing the impulse to turn our gaze on Hunter Moore’s victims and pick out their culpability in what happened. While Miller and executive producer Alex Marengo do their best to position Moore’s victims as just that, they also don’t do themselves any favors as they talk about how Moore was able to exploit their weak points.

Suffice to say, people such as Destiny Benedict, aka “Butthole Girl”, don’t present themselves as people who have made good life choices before they crossed paths with Moore. At the very least, hearing someone like Kayla Laws be surprised that her web-based e-mail could be hacked makes you scratch your head.

This kind of victim-blaming is just the kind of mindset that someone like Moore thrived on, which is why we had to make that effort to be in the shoes of the victims — including Butthole Girl — and think of how Moore exploited and/or manipulated them.

Miller certainly doesn’t put Moore in any sort of favorable light; he’s painted as the sociopath that he is. What intrigues us about the show is that we know that Charlotte Laws was able to get the FBI’s attention after being dismissed by his lawyer and by local law enforcement. Once she figured out that Kayla wasn’t the only woman whose email was hacked, she knew she had Moore once she got proof. Her efforts helped bring the site down in April of 2012 and send Moore to prison for two years, starting in 2015.

Sex and Skin: Given the nature of IsAnyoneUp, it’s inevitable that we see blurred-out nude shots and some that aren’t quite blurred out.

Parting Shot: “I was going to war with Hunter Moore, and I needed some allies to bring him down,” says Charlotte Laws.

Sleeper Star: Kayla Laws’ stepfather Charles displays so much British “stiff upper lip” nonchalance in his interview it’s amazing. He didn’t even seemed to be floored that a topless photo of Kayla was out on the public internet, and he thought that her and Charlotte’s reactions were overblown. So, he’s shown to be old, out of touch, and a bit sexist. Nice.

Most Pilot-y Line: One of Moore’s acolytes said “It was like the Wild West” on the internet in the days Moore was posting his revenge porn. No, it wasn’t 1998; it was 2011-12. That whole “Wild West” simile has been used to describe every internet era from 1994 to, well, now, and it’s all bullshit.

Our Call: STREAM IT. When you watch the first episode of The Most Hated Man On The Internet, all you want is to see Hunter Moore get his comeuppance. Thanks to this relatively brief docuseries and its speedy pace, you’ll get that wish pretty quickly.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.