If you thought the internet was a cesspool before, James McGibney just pulled back the curtain to show us the actual monsters living in the drain.
James McGibney isn’t new to this game. He’s been running Bullyville.com for years, as a resource for anyone getting wrecked by online abuse. He’s got the tech chops to back it up and uses those skills to hunt down people who ruin lives for fun. His new show on A&E, Bully Hunter, just premiered, and it hits like a sledgehammer to the face of the “anonymous” internet.
Bully Hunter
We helped research some of these cases, and what we found was stomach-turning. One case on the show involved a teacher whose career was almost ruined because of modeling photos from twenty years ago.
Here’s some of what we observed during the research:
- The Photographer would do all-day shoots with the model and then dump hundreds of photos online with the model’s full name.
- Creeps on the internet treated these women’s photos like baseball cards, trying to “collect the set” by finding every single photo from a shoot.
- The comment sections were a digital dark age where guys discussed these women in ways that’d make a prison guard blush.
- The most sadistic comments came from the photographer and a guy named Dominic. They seemed more interested in the humiliation than the photos.
Dominic actually had the nerve to show up on the show to apologize. It takes a specific kind of ego to be that cruel and then go on camera to say sorry. We’ve got to hand it to the women who stood up to these losers. They finally got those pictures taken down.
The James McGibney Methodology: Brains Over Bullies
McGibney has several decades worth of experience in cybersecurity and holds a doctorate from Pepperdine where he studied the “human element” of cybersecurity. He knows most leaks happen because of human ego or error. He calls it #BRAINSOVERBULLIES.
Taking the Trash Out
The highlight of the premiere was seeing the victims get their lives back. McGibney managed to scrub those 20 year old images from search results. He helped these women find peace. This isn’t just true crime reality TV, it’s a public service for a world where law enforcement often ignores digital crime.
