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 . . .
