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'Revenge Porn' Operator Gets 18 Years In Prison
Frosty Piss writes Kevin Christopher Bollaert, who operated a 'revenge porn' web site, was been found guilty in February of six counts of extortion and 21 counts of identity theft. He faced a maximum of 23 years in prison. On Friday, April 3rd, he was sentenced to 18 years in prison. The extortion charges stem from a second web site he ran that solicited payments of $250 to $350 from people who wanted to have the photographs deleted. Bollaert made about $30,000 on that site.
Autoplaying video should be banned from the interwebs
And yet people who sexually abuse children get less time than that.
18 years... wow. Yes, that he did was morally reprehensible... but he got a sentence longer than many rapists. Obviously the $30K he supposedly pulled in didn't afford good legal assistance.
The sentence seems excessive. You can kill someone DUI and only get 3 to 5.
You just know someone's going to twist their torso and take selfies of this boy in prison, tossing the photographer's salad. Maybe if he pays some cigarettes, he can get them taken down?
Putting unauthorized porn of unwilling people on the internet, and then charging them money to remove it? What a scumbag. They're going to have a lot of fun with him in jail.
he dindu nuffin mean ppl just hate men wah wah wah wah.
I realize that it is difficult to achieve a balance in fairness in sentencing but here we have an example of a court getting whacked out. Try and find a single case in which a drunk driver or hit and run driver who has killed someone gets 18 years in jail. Now it is obvious that no one likes to get a couple of hundred bucks ripped out of their wallets such a crime does not come close to killing someone and fleeing the scene. And i know that some people will say it involved more than one victim. But then again big tobacco and big coal kill a lot more than one person every single day and the law allows them to keep right on doing it. Worse yet as tobacco sales fell in the US our tobacco companies exported more and more tobacco to nations in which the population remains completely uneducated and allows children to smoke. The long and short of it is that both our civil and criminal justice systems need a rework from the ground up.
Wow, Senator Al Franken doesn't waste his time, does he!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
High level drug dealer and money launderer.
15 month sentence, didn't even serve all of it.
Male privilege indeed.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap:0:...
Please help metamoderate.
I wonder if he will request to have his mugshot removed from any of the many online mugshot websites.
...Seen putting on his best diaper to celebrate.
California is busy emptying its prisons of "non-violent" offenders under federal court order, and this sounds like a crime that would fall into that category. The state has been transferring them to local jails to supposedly serve out their terms, and since the jails have no room either, they are promptly releasing them.
Sounds like he blackmailed the wrong people [politicians] and those who paid also had the wrong sort of influence on his business.
I don't willingly breathe coal combustion products, and I don't willingly breathe cigarette smoke. The same is true for many other people.
It is long past time we went nuclear, solar, etc. for power. Burning stuff that continuously pollutes the atmosphere is not the best choice available. It's just what the politicians working on behalf of petroleum profiteers work to keep SOP (congress: 14% approval rate, 94% re-election rate -- sigh.)
As for cigarettes, they should be smoked only where those that consent to cigarette smoke in their air hang out. Unlike most other forms of personal consumption, smoking has well documented pernicious third-party effects.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yay for male rape as a form of officially-sanctioned torture! LOL
If he didn't want to be put into that situation, he shouldn't have committed extortion, identity theft and been such a huge douchebag.
Punishment fits the crime.
One of the worst "revenge porn" dudes out there is one David "Lefty" Schlesinger aka "stonemirror" aka "zanzibar mcfate" aka "the most wretched troll and harassment goblin the internet has ever seen"
Details Here:
http://theralphretort.com/stonemirror-another-shady-sjw-abuse-allegations-exposed-3021015/
Dude harasses women, and is under investigation for driving two women from their home by actual ARSON. He has also extensively harassed none other than noted individuals Richard M. Stallman and Bruce Perens.
He is still doing revenge porn as of last month, March 2015, he doesn't seem to care that he could well be arrested. Does his wife Reverend Pastor Anne L. Schlesinger of United Methodist Church, St Paul's Fresno even _know_ about any of this ?
"So we've got a 61-year-old wierdo, who presents a "social justice" face, married to a female Methodist pastor and spouting feminist and SJW claptrap, while having an affair with and obsessively white-knighting for a transhumanist "hard right" atheist who writes for Attack the System (http://attackthesystem.com/aut....
You just can't make this stuff up. Btw, I found and archived the Facebook thread you mentioned above in which one of his friends admits to having come up with the idea of "smoking out" some guy he hates by "circulating flyers around the neighborhood": http://archive.today/c0aks
From what I've been able to gather from looking at these various threads, I take it that the guy in question is your husband, and also the same man that Lefty bought private nude photos of from an ex-wife and has been posting online, that the "flyers" were those very same pictures, and that one of his friend's goons went so far as to stuff a bunch of those flyers in your mailbox personally.
Also, all this stuff happened about the same time that your car was torched to cinders and fire was set to your house - something which I see other commenters say Lefty has threatened to do to people before. Hmm.
Btw, I think it's interesting that in that very Facebook thread, Lefty is white-knighting for this Rachel "Haywire" character."
http://rachelhaywireisanarsonist.tumblr.com/
Extortion is bad. It should be illegal. Rebroadcasting/republishing videos or images is a civil matter. It shouldn't a crime because hoohas and peepees are involved. Keep in mind that this all happened before legislatures rushed to push through possibly unconstitutional "revenge porn' laws.
"Sitting behind a computer, committing what is essentially a cowardly and criminal act will not shield predators from the law or jail." Harris said. "We will continue to be vigilant and investigate and prosecute those who commit these deplorable acts." He's coming after the AC's next!
how ironic!
no one has a Constitutional right to extortion, stalking and harassment not to mention theft. Dude should be given a Death Sentence, that would send the right message. I would kill him myself if I could get my hands on him.
She was convicted when caught. You think that was the only time, given her girlfriend was directly working for a druglord?
Also, what about her money laundering charges? Hmm?
Please help metamoderate.
has been dealt.
In a sense, I sort of agree with you.
It should be half the sentence at best. No more than 10 years for such abusive cases.
Don't forget this person is aiding the destruction of peoples reputations as well. That is a rather serious matter on many levels. Even if you are rich. (even more so if you are rich and own any higher exec position, you usually end up getting terminated to save face)
Of course, I say that, American prisons are truly awful places.
There is no real push for reformation of a person, more punishment of a person.
Worse, putting completely different groups of prisoners together, such as people that have caused very physical injury or even death to others, and putting them with people that did something like this.
It truly does need a reworking.
His problem was extorting such a small sum. Minor criminals always receive harsh punishments. On the other hand if you steal billions and nearly crash the entire economy you get off scott free. Next time think bigger.
He could see this as an opportunity to set up a revenge porn site for the inmates. I imagine it's an untapped market, but I'm afraid to Google it because I really don't want to know. ;-)
I'm really trying to provide some empathy for that guy.
People suicide over revenge porn. That some jerk thinks extortion is in any way justifiable, especially as a means to earn money and spread their hate and anger in the process, is just baffling.
Sorry I failed..
So he was asking for it?
By breaking the law, stealing multiple identities and extorting multiple people for years, yes.
I wasn't aware that this case involved identity theft. scary.
It almost certainly caused physical harm.
I wonder how many of these SJW manginas here cheering this bullshit were also cheering when Hulk Hogan had secret video of him having sex taken without his permission and, again without his permission or consent, had it splattered all over the web? Or right these kinds of laws only apply to women, I forgot.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
It's both. Neither one is an excuse for the other.
Nor is comparing punishment times useful, because that assumes one side of the comparison is correct. That has to be demonstrated first, and no one has managed that (nor, under the current legal system, have I any confidence that it could even be managed.)
Harm was done. Society is not innocent in the matter. While the individual who took the act needs reform, so does society. Work towards and/or call for both. Don't ignore the one presuming the other is irrelevant.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
As the person you responded to pointed out, we have an extreme imbalance in US courts dishing out sentencing. Politicians convicted of pretty much any charge get no jail time, where the laymen receive up to life in prison for identical charges. I am of course referring to retired General Petraeus who provided classified information to his girlfriend, while Bradley Manning is spending LIFE in prison for doing the same thing. The difference was in the people, not the crime..
Face the facts here, the courts wanted to make an "example" of this guy. That is called retribution, it is not called Justice.
Yeah, I agree that the guy did some slimy crap just to make a few bucks. That said, this sentence ensures the he will never be rehabilitated, ever. This is a demonstration of a failed system of justice, nothing more.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
How so?
Speak for yourself. They are not my elected representatives. There isn't anyone in congressional office I voted for. My opinion, input, and concerns are not represented directly or indirectly, fractionally or otherwise, by any currently sitting politician. The relationship to me of the legislature's work product in these particular matters is purely coercive.
Sure. But that's not really what's at issue here, as it assumes that good choices will be made and bad choices will not, the nature of those choices being based upon the majority's indirect selection of quality representatives.
Sounds good. But the reality is that the majority of the voting public have made extremely poor choices in selecting legislators, who in turn have made (many) extremely poor choices in their name. This is precisely why the massively polluting carbon-based energy infrastructure -- coal, petroleum -- remains largely still in place.
What would demonstrate the kind of system where your observation would be on point is a situation where the majority of the voting public made good choices, and the representatives then made good choices for them.
As it stands now, we have legislators making decisions for the nation based on principles toxic to the nation, and a largely uninformed and complacent voting public that keeps those legislators in place doing so. There's no need for "haters" to make poor choices; congress already has that well in hand.
Yep, sure do.
You think nuclear power is "evil." It isn't. You've been a victim of pro-petroleum propaganda, directly or otherwise. Nuclear power is extremely low risk, extremely low-pollution, and efficient. Fun fact: Coal plants produce more radioactive pollutants than do nuclear power plants by a factor of about one hundred. 'Nuther fun fact: Nuclear power plants produce far more energy than do coal or petroleum technology plants. Cool, eh?
You think solar panels kill birds. They don't. Well, unless you picked up a solar panel and somehow managed to hit the bird with it. Perhaps you're thinking of windmills. Or cats. Or human hunters.
You think solar panels "ruin desert habitat." They don't. The habitat is still right there underneath and around the panels. As well as newly provided shade.
You have also expressed more concern about scenery in your post than you have about people's actual health and welfare.
It appears you've made your position clear. Would you care to clarify and/or further expound on your statements?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
My electricity is strictly hydro.
Second-hand smoke.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Also found in civilized countries: people who read enough of article or are otherwise familiar enough with the case to realize that this wasn't about one single case of extortion.
Yes, it was exactly 1 case of extortion. It happened to involve multiple people, but it was a single web site and single person doing the work. When a drug dealer is busted, why don't they charge him with 99 counts of selling drugs? Because the crime is selling drugs, and low and behold there are multiple victims. Another fine analogy, why is a bank robber charged once instead of once for every customer of the bank? Because that would be something other than justice.
You sir, or madam, have been duped into believing bullshit that people want you to think without ever evaluating the theory of justice (or perhaps you forgot).
When it comes to physical harm surely we have individual counts filed, but these are not crimes of the same nature. In fact the peanuts this guy stole compared to, oh... I don't know.. pick a bank CEO that embezzled billions of dollars and never even saw a charge means that the charges are frivolous to the point of lunacy.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
18 years is extreme considering this is a case of media Distribution Rights over what should be termed "Regret Porn". Media companies do this all the time. They will buy the rights to purposefully limit distribution(Citizen Kane, Idiocracy, etc). While it's a heavy handed tactic, it's a practice that is fully utilized legally. None of these images were acquired illegally and this entire argument should be over copyright only. If anything was filmed surreptitiously, that would be illegal and covered by law, which isn't the case with these types of home movies...
Yes, facts like Manning was not sentenced to LIFE in prison, but for 35 years. And facts like Manning leaked far more documents than Petraeus did. And facts like her name is Chelsea Manning.
Yes, Petraeus's sentence was a joke. But when you're going to be harping on "facts", you kinda need to get yours correct.
As for this fine gentleman who just got sentenced, he's going to serve about 15 hours per victim (unless he gets paroled or other early release). Less than a day per crime doesn't seem unreasonable. If anything, it's rather light for extortion.
There are killers that gets away with less
- Did any of his victims (or customers) remedy their "social inconvenience" via suicide? - What is a "killer", do spiders count?
Using the phrase "social inconvenience" to describe extortion via sexual humiliation shows that you don't even recognise sexual abuse when it's right under your nose, let alone begin to understand it. Educate yourself on the human mind, you have one of your own, right? I suggest starting with some of the talks from Ruby Wax on YT
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Face the facts here, the courts wanted to make an "example" of this guy. That is called retribution, it is not called Justice.
The fact that there is no justice in the justice system doesn't mean that this case of thousands of extortions was improperly sentenced.
Yeah, I agree that the guy did some slimy crap just to make a few bucks. That said, this sentence ensures the he will never be rehabilitated, ever. This is a demonstration of a failed system of justice, nothing more.
Yeah, some guy that does slimy stuff for a few bucks. I could see someone who kidnaps 8 year olds and sells them into slavery having the same thing said about them. Just because you don't find it a problem doesn't mean that others share your opinion.
Learn to love Alaska
We call them Correctional facilities.. but really we should call them "YOU DID BAD AND WE WANT OUR VENGEANCE!" centers. Because if you're in favor of punishments for -any- crime that eat the majority of a person's life, you're not about rehabilitating and correcting the behaviour so they can be productive members of society. You're about revenge. Not that I expect the majority of people to actually get that concept (If you don't agree, you don't get it.). Oh, and if you're about all that revengey-crap.. could you foot the bill for their imprisonment at the least? I'd prefer to see if they can be made part of society again, not pay for you or society to get your revenge.
Yeah, some guy that does slimy stuff for a few bucks. I could see someone who kidnaps 8 year olds and sells them into slavery having the same thing said about them. Just because you don't find it a problem doesn't mean that others share your opinion.
You have the opinion that petty embezzlement (250 bucks is petty) is the same thing as kidnapping ans slavery? I think it more likely that the only way to justify your opinion is to invent irrational analogies, which you just did.
Seriously, you don't believe it better for this guy to repay everyone he took money from illegally and work community service after? Okay, maybe he can't pay back 30-35K, but that's 1-2 years in prison normally. Add in another 2-3 years of community service and the world is going to be a better place. 18 years does not make the world a better place, it creates a tax burden because people like you are more concerned with revenge than justice.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Bradley Manning provided classified information to his girlfriend? WTF are you on about?
You have the opinion that petty embezzlement (250 bucks is petty) is the same thing as kidnapping ans slavery?
Who did embezzlement? This guy did 10,000+ separate blackmails, doxing (with intent to harm), and 10,000 copyright violations. That the prosecutors went for the easy convictions and thought 18 years was enough, so the provable convictions were only for the ones where the people harmed were ones willing to testify doesn't diminish what he did.
Seriously, you don't believe it better for this guy to repay everyone he took money from illegally and work community service after?
Yeah, and if you rape a woman and steal her purse, your punishment is to pay back the contents of the purse.
Do you think the blackmail profits are the only harm from this crime,?
Learn to love Alaska
Had it been a woman, it'd have been 18 months.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
My understanding is that the justice system in the US is not (and never has been) about rehabilitation but about old testament style revenge. Eye for an eye, that sort of thing.
No, the guy set up 1 web site where customers submitted content that he hosted on 1 server. How many victims went to the site is not relevant to this type of crime. A guy who robs 1 bank is not brought up on charges for every customer of that bank, he did 1 very wrong act and should pay for that one act. A guy arrested selling crack on the street does not get 1 count for every person who bought the drug, he gets 1 charge.
I don't like what he did any more than you, but the punishment is completely out of whack. The only way you are able to rationalize the punishment is to invent fairy tales about rape and slavery, which this guy was not arrested for doing. In fact most of the content of the site was submitted by other people who faced zero charges themselves because their acquisition and distribution of the content was done perfectly legally.
To answer your last question, as far as this guy and his web site go "yes" that is the extent of the crime. Any other fabricated "damages" were done by the parties submitting content to him. These were not the panty shots which I do take moral objection to, these were videos that couples made where both parties can do legally what they want with the content. If you are worried about naked videos of you getting out, don't give your partner consent to video or make your own. It's called being responsible for your own actions... not that people know what that really details any longer.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
A guy who robs 1 bank is not brought up on charges for every customer of that bank, he did 1 very wrong act and should pay for that one act.
A guy who robs one bank and shoots 6 people in it will be brought up on the 6 shooting charges, as well as the robbery. Your argument is that you get the one (presumably worst) act at any moment, and can't count the others. I find it fatally flawed.
Learn to love Alaska
Once again you have to invent things that never happened and make comparisons to the abstract and extreme. This is called delusion, or perhaps psychopathy. Either way, there is no way to debate someone who can't separate fantasy from reality. Not the first time I have said that to you now is it? Nope. All done with this conversation, because psychopaths are never wrong in their minds.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
That's not how the law works.
All done with this conversation, because psychopaths are never wrong in their minds.
You are living proof of that.
Learn to love Alaska