Sex, Lies and the Dirty (31 page)

There’s no small talk during the next break.

A production assistant is getting my wife and my lawyer into their respective seats. Dr. Phil is going over his note cards. The model is silently fuming.

I’m slowly learning that even though Dr. Phil and I are in the same venue of entertainment, the methods are vastly different. It’s not just that he’s a TV guy and I’m an Internet guy. Dr. Phil is a surgeon. He’s crafty. He can carve a conversation into whatever he wants, change the mood of the audience with one comment and turn your own words around. Whereas I’m more blunt with my comments, Dr. Phil always manages to ask just the right questions to make you look bad.

He does this with Shayne and me.

Dr. Phil asks Shayne how long we’ve been married.

She says six months, so we’re still considered newlyweds.

Dr. Phil asks if Shayne knew about the site when she married me.

She says no, so now the audience thinks she’s an idiot. You can practically hear them thinking it:
What kind of woman marries a man not knowing what he does?

Shayne tries to explain
why
she didn’t know about the site, but Dr. Phil cuts her off and drills her with the next question.

“How long did y’all know each other when you got married?” he asks.

It’s just like
TMZ
. He already knows the answer; he just wants everyone to hear her say it.

“Twenty-four hours,” Shayne tells him, and the audience scoffs.

The audience judges our marriage. Like a reflex.

Dr. Phil asks, “Where did you meet?”

Shayne says, “We met in Vegas.”

Now the audience is laughing, openly laughing at us and our joke of a marriage: because it’s not long enough, we barely knew each other, we did it too quick and met in the wrong place. That’s what they think
about us, and they’re laughing and judging and doing the thing I’m being crucified for on national TV. All people judge. It’s just a matter of showing them something they disagree with. This is why we’ll never settle on one religion or one brand of politics, because it’s human nature to dismiss the thing we don’t automatically agree with.

Right now, the audience is dismissing us. Shayne and I.

“I married my husband, who you all
don’t
know…and I do,” Shayne says, motioning to the audience. “And we married and it’s been amazing.”

This is Shayne’s eloquent way of saying:
Sitting in a studio audience doesn’t mean you know anything about us.

Eventually, Dr. Phil gets to the part where he throws what my site does in my wife’s face. He flips through his note cards and says, “You grew up in an entertainment family, then you got into the entertainment world, and they’ve written about you in the tabloids.”

Shayne nods. “Yes,” she says.

“I wrote some of those down,” Dr. Phil says. “Reality TV star, Shayne Lamas, shows off big new boobs…Reality star, Shayne Lamas, busted for DUI…Lorenzo Lamas’ ex, Shauna Sand, had an affair with his son… Shayne Lamas caught cheating on bachelor, Matt Grant. So they take shots at you,” he says.

“And those don’t feel good,” Shayne says. “Absolutely…but I know who I am and I know the truth.”

Then, like the class act that Shayne is, she tells this model not to let me or anybody else stop her from pursuing her career. She tells her to be confident, to own her image. Shayne tells her she’s beautiful, and she says this genuinely and with the utmost sincerity.

It’s true what they say: for every man there’s a better woman standing behind him.

Next segment: My lawyer, David, finally gets to speak.

The interaction literally lasts less than three minutes, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s a matter of control. In a conversation which has mostly been dominated by Dr. Phil, David is the one guy that could turn the tide. That’s what lawyers do. They’re fixers. They take an issue and present it in a simple and convincing way that an audience or jury can understand, and now he’s going to do that with
The Dirty.

He explains that there’s a difference between what the law is and
what’s right. David admits that some of the comments made against the model fell into the “not right” category, and he offers his own personal apology for that. It’s sincere. He means it. David is the guy that’s always told to me to be nicer, to have a heart.

David explains, “The law allows Nik to do what he does because he’s not the one writing those nasty comments.”

Dr. Phil counters with, “What do you think of the fact that he just said he took responsibility for it by the fact that he evaluates and edits all the comments before they go up on the site?”

“Legally,” David starts, “I know that doesn’t make any sense, but that is irrelevant. If I—”

“—It’s not irrelevant,” Dr. Phil cuts in.

“It is absolutely.”

Dr. Phil points at David like he’s talking to one of his kids, telling him, “It’s not irrelevant and you know it.”

Never mind the fact that Dr. Phil isn’t a lawyer and is, at most, making a wild guess how the law on this works. Because he’s saying it with conviction, the audience begins to clap. David waits for the storm to pass. He breaks this down so any idiot could understand it, explaining that if he went onto Dr. Phil’s website and made a comment—doesn’t matter if the comment was offensive—the subject can’t sue the owner (in this case, Dr. Phil) because it came from a third party. Just because a comment is allowed on Dr. Phil’s website doesn’t mean that Dr. Phil made the comment himself. Same thing applies to
The Dirty
.

When a user comments on a picture claiming that the subject is a nasty cunt that needs to stop going out in public, no one is liable for that but the user. If the law viewed this otherwise, there would be no YouTube. No Facebook or Google. Anything with third-party content would be extinct.

“And it does not matter if he edits it,” David says. “The law actually encourages him to do that kind of editing.”

Dr. Phil concedes that although he’d like to see more editing on my part, he’s glad I at least do some.

David goes on to explain, “You have to keep in mind the law draws a distinction between the user’s comments and the website’s comments. They’re not legally the same. And in this case, most of the nasty comments that you quoted about this woman here are user-generated comments. Nik is not legally responsible for those, even if he can edit them, even if he doesn’t edit them. They’re not legally his responsibility.”

It’s just like David said: what is legal is not always what is right.

And now the world knows the difference.

In the next segment, Scooby Snack has a back-and-forth with Dr. Phil
about what it means to be a
Dirty
Celeb and how she got her name. There’s two versions of that story.

The first, the one that Scooby Snack refers to, is how there was a picture of herself and Scooby that was put up on the site: her in the forefront wearing big sunglasses, Scooby in the background, walking behind her. They were getting off an elevator, and naturally people thought she was on the walk of shame. I claimed that Scooby only fucked her once, hence the “Snack” portion of the name.

She goes on to explain to Dr. Phil, “It was a fabricated name based on a situation that never happened.”

That’s absolutely true.

What she doesn’t talk about is the other version of the story, the part about how she and I fucked, and then Scooby took credit for it. Or got blamed, rather. He “took one for the team” as they say.

Scooby Snack doesn’t out me on the show. It would be a good opportunity to do it. Here on national TV with my wife and lawyer and Dr. Phil and this studio audience. The cameras and crew. She could say, “Nik and I fucked, and because he was so ashamed of it, he made it look like I did it with his friend.”

She could say that, and it would be true…but she doesn’t.

Eventually, Freddy Fags gets his turn, but Dr. Phil only asks him one question about what his name means and moves on. I almost get the feeling that despite our disagreement for the past hour on these issues, Dr. Phil can see why some people end up on the site based on Freddy’s appearance alone.

For the final segment,
everyone but Dr. Phil is relegated back to the audience. Shayne is holding my hand, telling me I did fine up there. “Don’t worry. You got to say what you wanted to say.” Dr. Phil gives his little spiel on how the Internet is both a wonderful and terrible place, and then he opens things up for comments from the audience.

“He doesn’t care. I think he knows he hurts people.”

Then some guy says: “I like to call these kinds of people “bottom-feeders’ of our society.”

Then applause.

Everything kind of goes back to square one. I try to explain that the site is far more than one failed model. We expose politicians, scandal, drug dealers, crooked club owners. We break national news stories and celebrity dirt. We’ve been doing this for some time now, but because this particular show is all about the model, the audience can’t comprehend that. In their minds, she represents every post on the site. When I point that out, Dr. Phil says it’s because the language on the model’s post was one of the few that was clean enough to be read on basic cable.

I continue to urge people to go to the site and judge for themselves.

It’s not all about this one particular girl. Not even close.

After taping, Shayne, David, and myself are all back in the green room.
Personally, I think it went horribly, but David and Shayne are saying otherwise, that it could have been a lot worse had I
not
shown. At least the people know how the site operates legally speaking, David says.

Dr. Phil comes into the green room and thanks all of us for coming on. To me, he says, “I hope I didn’t go too hard on you. If you could help us on other shows that would be great. The last thing I want is for you to have more lawsuits, Nik,” and he gives a quick look over to David who nods in agreement. “I wish you the best of luck. Keep on keepin’ on,” and then Dr. Phil shakes my hand with a smile.

He’s got the whole world fooled. He’s an actor.