The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Michael Brutsch, Troll Behind Reddit’s ‘Jailbait’ and ‘Creepshots’ Sections

Posted on | October 13, 2012 | 16 Comments

A couple of quick points up front:

  • I’ve never used Reddit, and had no idea that it rivaled Twitter and Facebook in terms of viral online distribution.
  • Adrian Chen and Gawker are vile scum.

Nevertheless, there is a car-wreck-on-the-highway factor in Chen’s article about Michael “Violentacrez” Brutsch that makes you stare with ghastly fascination at this seamy underside of the Web. Perhaps the grimmest part is when Brutsch begs for mercy:

When I called Brutsch that Wednesday afternoon and told him I knew who he was . . . he pleaded with me in an affectless monotone not to reveal his name.
“My wife is disabled. I got a home and a mortgage, and if this hits the fan, I believe this will affect negatively on my employment,” he said. “I do my job, go home watch TV, and go on the internet. I just like riling people up in my spare time.” . . .
The problem was, he explained, that if his identity got out, his many enemies would start attaching lies to his name because they simply don’t like his views. They would say he was a child pornographer, when all he had done was spearhead the distribution of thousands of legal photos of underage girls. . . .They would Google-bomb his name and the word “pedophile” along with his publicly-traded company’s name. . . .
He needed to keep his anonymity to protect his ability to express things many people think but hardly anyone says. With Violentacrez, “I got the freedom to talk about my personal life, my personal feelings… I’m sure there’s more than one person in this building who’s a pervert,” he said, referring his office building.
He asked a number of times if there was anything he could do to keep me from outing him.

This is the stage of Kübler-Ross called “bargaining.” And as Dr. Phil might say, “How’s that workin’ out for ya, Mike?”

Of course, Chen had made up his mind to “dox” Brutsch, a 49-year-old resident of Arlington, Texas, before he ever contacted him, and you’d have to be a sadist to enjoy reading Brutsch’s desperate attempt to avoid the consequences of his exposure, despite the fact that Brutsch is a vile sociopathic monster undeserving of sympathy.

What do I mean by “vile sociopathic monster”? Brutsch created (and was a sort of online cheerleader for) some of the worst possible stuff on Reddit, most especially the “Jailbait” section:

His speciality is distributing images of scantily-clad underage girls . . .
Violentacrez decided to create a safe space for people sexually attracted to underage girls to share their photo stashes. . . .
Jailbait was the online equivalent of systematized street harassment. Users posted snapshots of tween and teenage girls, often in bikinis and skirts. Many of these were lifted from their Facebook accounts and thrown in front of Jailbait’s 20,000 horny subscribers.
Violentacrez and his fellow moderators worked hard to make sure every girl on jailbait was underage, diligently deleting any photos whose subjects seemed older than 16 or 17. Violentacrez himself posted hundreds of photos. Jailbait became one of Reddit’s most popular subreddits, generating millions of pageviews a month. “Jailbait” was for a time the second biggest search term bringing traffic to Reddit . . .

Yeeeesshh. “Millions of pageviews a month.”

His name is Michael Brutsch — that’s B-R-U-T-S-C-H — and he lives in Arlington, Texas, and if he should suffer brutal violence at the hands of a mob of enraged parents who descend on his home, brandishing baseball bats and tire irons, well, that would probably be illegal.

Far be it from me to condone reckless vigilantism.

In his defense, perhaps, some might protest that this was all just harmless online fun, and that IRL (in real life), Brutsch is an honest, decent, responsible, law-abiding citizen. However . . .

In 2010, Violentacrez hosted a legendary “Ask Me Anything” thread” . . . He was asked what was the creepiest thing he’d done “IRL” . . . . “That’d be a tough call,” Violentacrez wrote, “Perhaps oral sex with my 19-year-old stepdaughter.” It was completely consensual, he claimed in the post, and went on to brag about how awesome it had been in graphic detail.
This happened over ten years ago, Violentacrez claimed. When his then-wife, the girl’s mother, found out, she “got mad, then got over it,” Violentacrez wrote.

OK, either (a) he was lying, or else (b) he’s a complete monster. And even if he was lying, what kind of monster would tell such a lie?

Chen says he was tipped to to Brutsch’s identity by “a former online friend . . . [who] had become disgusted with his obsession with underage girls.” Brutsch was responsible for a lot of other offensive content at Reddit, but “Jailbait . . . apparently sprung from a sincere interest.”

An “obsession with underage girls”? A “sincere interest”? And Brutsch – again, that’s B-R-U-T-S-C-H, of Arlington, Texas — boasted “in graphic detail” about the ”awesome” sex he had with his stepdaughter?

Probably nothing to it. Just harmless Internet shenanigans.

On the other hand, lots of folks in Texas have guns. Maybe some of those gun-toting Texans will notice the part of Chen’s article excerpted by Britton Peele of the Dallas Morning News:

The Gawker story contains quotes from both Brutsch and others who have interacted with him, including one user who once visited him while on business in Arlington. ”He’s a really a good guy,” she said. “He has the manners of a Southern gentleman. A bunch of neighborhood kids were over playing at his house.”

Reckon he has a “sincere interest” in those ”neighborhood kids”?

B-R-U-T-S-C-H . . .

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Comments

  • http://evilbloggerlady.blogspot.com/ Evi L. Bloggerlady

    I am guessing he is a Democrat.

  • JeffS

    “…the manners of a Southern gentleman”? What, he have never heard of the word “facade”, as applied to people?

    Oi.

  • http://alanye.com/ Dai Alanye

    Stepdaughter? Has he started making droll/kooky movies yet?

  • SDN

    you’d have to be a sadist to enjoy reading Brutsch’s desperate attempt to avoid the consequences of his exposure,

    Sadist? Not really. Someone who thinks we’d have a WHOLE lot less of this shit if people knew they would pay the full consequences of their vileness? Abso-frigging-lutely.

  • Matthew W

    I read the Chen article and now I need a truckload of soap to wash the slime off.
    I have a nine year old daughter and if I ever found out a creep like that was posting photos of my daughter, being “outed” would be the least of his concerns.

  • Matthew W

    He’s disgusting enough to be at least 6 liberals

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    I wouldn’t out him, I’d inside-out him.

  • Matthew W

    I second that !!!

  • herpderp123

    Actually, he’s a Libertarian.

  • Finrod Felagund

    This is why you teach your daughters to not post pictures of themselves in skimpy outfits. Unless I’m reading it wrong, he didn’t take any of the pictures himself, he just took them from the profiles of people who had posted them, usually of themselves.

  • Wombat_socho

    There’s a joke about that kind of libertarian, but in this context it’s not funny.

  • Grampa.Grumpus

    On my Droid, clicking on the “agree” clicker is decrementing it!

    After that, just to test, I clicked on both a few times. I kept the number of clicks even so the overall relative score remained the same… or so I thought it should!

    Unfortunately, clicking on “agree” btn decrements the “agreement counter”. Clicking on the “disagree” btn increments the “disagree” counter!

    I’m using Dolphin browser on a DInc, but all the browsers for the Droid are just overlays of the system’s browser so it will (probably) make no difference switching. I’ll just keep my “agreement” or “disagreement” to myself…

    I just wanted to let you know what happened and apologize for possibly skewing the numbers…

  • http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

    All Ideologues are ultimately cut from the same cloth.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Justice-Redefined/100003938471950 Justice Redefined

    Why would you call Adrian Chen and Gawker vile scum for exposing a predator? The internet is part of the real world. He encouraged men to stalk women and teenagers worldwide. Why should he be able to hide? No Finrod, you are reading it wrong. One of the men posting to his vile thread was a high school teacher taking shots of his students. A pervert who met him said he had neighborhood children at his house.

  • Baxter

    You are. He also presided over the “Creepshots” sub-reddit, which took content from charming contributors such as this: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/27/creepshots-georgia-teacher-fired-photos-student-reddit-video_n_1919732.html

  • Yes

    2mad

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