Revenge porn extortionist Kevin Christopher Bollaert was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Friday for posting naked pictures of women online and demanding money to take them down.
Eight women told Superior Court Judge David Gill how they were victimized by having the pictures appear on the website.
One woman said she received 400 messages on social media after the pictures were shown. She said she was forced to quit college and seek help in a mental hospital.
Cue the shouts of “special snowflake!” and “get over yourself!” and “free speech!” and “get off the internet if you can’t handle criticism!” and “shut the fuck up, cunt!”
Prosecutors said that Bollaert created a website that allowed the anonymous posting of nude and sexually explicit photos. The website required that a person posting a picture to include the subject’s name, location, age and Facebook profile.
Prosecutors said more than 10,000 images from California and other states were posted between Dec. 2, 2012, and Sept. 17, 2013.
Court documents include emails to Bollaert’s website from women demanding that pictures of them be removed. In the emails, the women say that posting of the pictures left them angry, scared and feeling violated.
Which was the whole point of sending them to Bollaert, wasn’t it.
I’ll bet you a million dollars he spends his time in jail trying to figure out how to do the same shit again without getting arrested.
He’ll probably be out in a year or two, having obtained pictures of the parole board engaging in a naked orgy.
I’m assuming that this is the first time these ladies have used the internet, if they didn’t see any contradiction between “anonymous posting” and “giving your name, age, location and facebook profile “
@enkidu
It wasn’t the ladies posting their own pictures. It was their ex-boyfriends doing it, to get back at them. That’s what “revenge porn” means.
Yeah OK. Looks like I misread the post. Apologies and retractions all round.
It was in the news here in Germany, too.
One thought that crossed my mind – and I’m not at all certain how comparable the laws are over there – is that it ought to be possible to get people like that (in addition to any other options) for copyright violations, unless he can show some sort of model release for each and every one of them (and it seems doubtful he’d have any at all). Over here, that’s usually called “Recht am eigenen Bild” – approximately, rights to your picture. Which becomes – as I understand it (IANAL) – relevant as soon as you publish that picture. Which seems to pretty exactly match the situation here. There are exceptions for public persons, but that seems inapplicable.
In other words, while it’s certainly true that he did serious damage to these people, and that is certainly a reason to give him a more severe sentence, maybe it would already be possible to stop him even without them needing to bare their souls in public.
Plus, of course, the extortion, which is also obvious without possibly further traumatizing the victims.
Of course, maybe they picked among the long list of victims a few that didn’t have a problem with this … I guess it’s possible.
Or there might be some other reason none of this makes sense that I’m just not seeing from my position of privilege – that’s always possible. The whole point of these is you don’t know where your blind spots are.
Where I read about the sentence, a picture of Bollaert accompanied it. You could see his face was red from crying…no doubt only concern for himself and what he’s going to endure in prison. His only remorse is for getting caught.
The MRAs (male rapist apologists) are already out in force. One clown on youtube described the conviction as a “lynching”. I’d wager he was a regular visitor to the site.
It was like that on a football forum a few years ago. Slimebags kept posting links to the sexual assault on Erin Andrews, the illicit photos taken by an ESPN employee. The posters’ attitude was, “Hey, I didn’t take those photos, I’m just posting links….” Fortunately, the forum monitors did crack down on it (after far too long) and reported to the police anyone distributing links.