Saturday 2 July 2022 10:27 PM Ahead of a highly anticipated Netflix drama, a brave mother reveals battle to ... trends now
It was a phone call every parent dreads. Charlotte Laws heard her daughter’s voice tremble at the end of the line. And it took just four words to send her mind racing: ‘Mum, something horrible happened.’
Was Kayla in hospital? Had there been an accident?
The truth was far more sinister – as well as incomprehensible.
Graphic, topless images of Kayla, then 24, had been stolen from her computer by an anonymous hacker and posted on a sleazy website for the world to see.
The photos had been taken by Kayla in front of her bedroom mirror and were never intended to be shared publicly. They had been stored safely – or so Kayla had thought – on her laptop.
But in what felt like a humiliating assault, as well as an invasion of her privacy, the images had been accessed remotely by a stranger and uploaded to a website with more than 350,000 followers.
For Charlotte, this triggered a two-year battle to bring the man responsible to justice.
She went into what she calls ‘full mum meltdown mode’ and pursued an electronic trail to uncover her daughter’s tormentor, tracking him down to where he worked as a DJ, firing off legal letters and badgering the FBI until they used her 12-inch-thick file of evidence to put him behind bars.
Kayla, she learned, was far from his only victim. Although his website had started with stolen images, it quickly became a hub for so-called ‘revenge porn’ – a place where people, typically men, could share sexually explicit videos or photos of partners or ex-girlfriends without their consent in order to humiliate, shame or embarrass them.
Charlotte’s extraordinary crusade for justice has led to her being dubbed ‘the Erin Brockovich of revenge porn’ after the small-town legal clerk (played by Julia Roberts in the 2000 Oscar-winning film) who single-handedly took on a giant corporation responsible for poisoning the water in a rural American town.
Charlotte’s story, too, has been turned into a gripping Netflix series, The Most Hated Man On The Internet. The three-part drama, from the British production crew behind The Tinder Swindler, is being touted as the must-watch show of the summer and raises uncomfortable questions about safety in the digital age.
Charlotte, 62, who is married to an English barrister and lives in a Los Angeles suburb, says: ‘I did what any mum would do. I defended my child. Young people, mostly girls, are killing themselves over revenge porn.’
Graphic, topless images of Kayla, then 24, had been stolen from her computer by an anonymous hacker and posted for 350,000 to see Pictured: Kayla with mother Charlotte Laws
The number of victims of revenge porn have doubled in the UK over the past few years, exacerbated during lockdown. In April, a London Coroner’s Court heard how a 21-year-old business student plunged 80ft to her death a week after her boyfriend sent a video of her performing a sex act on him to a friend.
Charlotte says: ‘I hope this series sheds light on how revenge porn destroys lives. I also want it to offer hope you can fight back, like I did.’
A one-time Hollywood starlet who dated singer Tom Jones for three years, Charlotte was working as an investigator for an insurance company when her family’s world was turned upside down in 2012.
‘Kayla took the pictures in the privacy of her bedroom because she was trying to break into acting and she wanted some sexy shots,’ Charlotte says. ‘She was practising poses. She uploaded them to her computer and thought no more about it.
‘A few weeks later a friend spotted the topless pictures on a sleazy website. Kayla felt humiliated, shamed and thought her life was over.’
The police showed little interest. At the time there were no laws against the sharing of such images. So Charlotte turned detective.
The pictures, a search revealed, had been posted on IsAnyoneUp.com, run by someone hiding behind aliases on social media, including the name of his cat.
The founder claimed he had started the site ‘purely by chance’ after posting a raunchy photo of a woman he had slept with on a dormant website – only to discover 14,000 people had clicked on it. He realised he had stumbled across a business opportunity.
But while the man was anonymous, the women whose lives he ruined were publicly named, and even their addresses listed. Some photos had been sent in by ex-husbands and boyfriends, and at least two women were sacked from their jobs after the pictures appeared. One even lost custody of her children.
The man boasted online of being a ‘professional life-ruiner’ and compared himself to Charles Manson, the notorious cult leader and serial killer who brainwashed his followers.
Such was the website founder’s bravado that it didn’t take long before Charlotte found his real name – Hunter Moore, a 36-year-old who had set up the website from the basement of
