Sex, Lies and the Dirty (34 page)

People were saying: “That’s not Nik.”

They could tell it wasn’t me because I had a particular level of bad grammar and a certain way I arranged my words, and the clones weren’t doing it quite right. Something was off. The voice had changed. It was the difference between the real band and a cover band: people can always tell which one’s the original. Then I started to really freak out when people were saying I wasn’t Nik Richie on my own posts.

We scrapped it after a day.

I told the investors, “We’re going to need to convert over to the hub site and I’ll just do as much as I can.”

The hub site was going to bring all the markets together, the original five (Newport, Dallas, Vegas, Chicago, and Scottsdale) and every other major city. Every market under one universal banner. So we needed another domain to unite them under. We went after
dirty.com
, but the guy wanted $700K so we told him to fuck off. After that we approached
thedirty.com
under the premise that we were a small cleaning company. The broker wanted $5,000 but we managed to negotiate him down to $1,500. The investors locked it in and we started the hub site. Nik Richie was everywhere now: the coasts, the Midwest, the South. He was in Canada. Jay had all of his old Club Jenna people in our office, either checking comments or fixing the graphics or deleting spam. Everyone had a little job to do so that Nik Richie could focus on being Nik Richie. If I wasn’t busy doing comments, I was on radio pushing the brand.

We were getting a ton of posts, but then we started getting pickier about the content. More exclusive. We started figuring out who “the cool kids” were, the local celebs. All we had to do was follow the Scottsdale model. Every city had its own version of G-Girl or Brock’s Chick. Didn’t matter if you were in Dallas or Vegas or Detroit, each one had its own resident group of douchebags and sleazy club promoters. From Newport to
New York, all variations of nightlife and fame-chasing were roughly the same. The difference was in the details.

For months it went on like that: going to the Pentagon, posting all day, being Nik Richie more and more, and in between there were radio interviews and meetings with the investors, but for the most part, it blurred. I was plugged in while the investors spent money to make the site grow. We were shelling out $30K in payroll. Jay was spending money like crazy and the cushion was running out again. The expenditures far outweighed the advertising income, and it was finally starting to catch up. Jim and Jay had even begun to openly argue about how to run the thing, sometimes placing me right in the middle of random feuds.

It all came to a head when Jay said he was leaving the company, and this was soon followed by Jim telling me we had to shut down the site.

The money had officially run out.

We were finished.

74
Communications Decency Act (Section 230): No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

20/20 (Part 1)

Scooby gets an e-mail from ABC News.

This guy, Richard Brenner, who’s a producer over at
20/20
apparently, is pitching us on some new show about Internet entrepreneurs called
Web Life in America
. He says that he wants Nik Richie to be the pilot episode, so in my mind I’m thinking it’s a good opportunity to get some exposure and let a wider audience know how the site works. Up until this point, we had taken a lot of flak in the press, but people still remained ignorant as to exactly what the site does beyond “ruining lives.”

So we do the pre-interview: Richard asks me a bunch of questions about
The Dirty
and my background. Basic questions. A few technical ones.

How did you start this?

How long have you been doing it?

What’s the process of a submission?

It’s nothing I haven’t heard before.

Then Richard has one of his film crews follow me around for a couple days, reality TV-style. They follow me everywhere: around the apartment, in my car, everywhere except the bathroom. If I’m sitting in one place for too long, I get the feeling like I’m supposed to do something because there are two cameras on me with a boom mic overhead. We’re all wired for sound. Everyone: myself, Shayne, Scooby and JV. Shayne is fine with it because she’s done
The Bachelor
, so this is nothing new for her. She’s got a gift for tuning things out. The guys hate it, though. Their nerves are shot from being under the microscope. JV wants to sneak off and smoke weed, but he’s afraid the camera is going to follow him back to his place. I keep telling them to relax but they’re both paranoid.

“I don’t even know what the hell you’re worried about,” I tell them. “They’re following
me
. Fucking chill out.”

Day one of the filming captures the day-to-day business: posting submissions, blogging, doing Photoshop, moderating comments. The crew fucks with the lighting so that everything is dark except for the computer screen and my face (which now has a thin coat of makeup). They say this will make things easier to work with in post-production, and then they’ll do things like film my hands or film my face, trying to capture my mood or expression. It’s creepy and voyeuristic but I get used to it after a few hours.

Nik Richie during an ABC News interview at the Valley Ho in Scottsdale, Arizona.

Day two we have to go to Tampa Bay for an event at Venue. JV is extra nervous this time and overcompensates by drinking too much. We get hammered. That feeling of being obligated to do something because we’re being filmed manifests in the form of too much alcohol. Scooby and I get up on the bar and pour it directly into the open mouths of girls. We spray champagne. I do The Rock. The feeling of having to act out, to perform for the cameras—it’s so infectious that everyone in the club gets extra crazy.

We live. They document.

They’ve seen my personal life up close. They’ve filmed me working, filmed me and my team out on the road. They’ve asked us questions. By the time I’m flying out to New York for my one-on-one interview with Chris Cuomo, I’m thinking this is shaping up to be a decent little documentary. People are finally going to understand my side of the story.

Chris Cuomo is a nice guy. We joke around on the set when the cameras aren’t rolling. The Kardashians come up and Chris can’t understand how the hell they became so successful without any talent. I explain that this is more or less what my site does, that even without talent or personality or any redeeming qualities, people can still be famous simply through
attention-seeking behavior. Everyone loves a trainwreck. If they’re a rich trainwreck, even better.

The interview lasts about an hour, and during that time Chris is in his interviewer persona: rigid, professional, all business. I turn on Nik Richie and play the game back. It’s mostly a puff piece, but sometimes Chris gets a little aggressive with his questions. Pushes me. It’s his job so I don’t take it personally. Chris knows just as well as I do that
The Dirty
exists in a gray area of morality, which is probably why it’s such a topic of debate. When something isn’t clearly right or wrong, it can be continuously discussed with no clear conclusion.

Some people like what I do.

Others hate it. Really hate it.

We talk about that. We talk about the power of rumors. At one point Chris asks about what’s going on with me legally, briefly touching on Sarah Jones. It’s the first time her name has come up, but the reality of the situation is that this is all about Sarah. The cameras and the questions and being followed around for two days—it’s all about Sarah Jones.

Deposition
75

The lawsuit starts over.

I fly out to Kentucky to do the depositions, and it’s amazing how long they can drag these out. The lawyers and legal teams coop me up in a tiny room, microphone on. Wired for sound. They sit me down in an uncomfortable chair and start up with the questions about the site and my team and Sarah Jones. Question after question. Everything’s recorded and transcribed, right down to the pauses and breaks in speech.

What’s your name?

Where do you live?

It starts off simple like that and slowly escalates. Deters asks me about my wife, my investors, my LLC. He asks about all my names: Hooman, Corbin, Nik. Same guy, different roles in different periods of my life. The beginning of the deposition feels a lot like Deters confirming his information, perhaps so he knows he’s not suing the wrong person again. He’s trying to redeem himself for his fuck-up. It’s personal. He’s fighting for his reputation and I’m fighting for my First Amendment rights.

When you get right down to it though, the deposition is a game. Deters wants me to slip up and say something stupid. Something incriminating that he can use against me in court. This is why depositions are so dangerous. One wrong move and you can lose everything.

Q: Sarah Jones—it was posted on
theDirty.com
that Sarah Jones had two sexually transmitted diseases that she had gotten from her boyfriend that cheated on her. As the editor of
theDirty.com
, would you not—would you not agree with me that a young woman to be falsely excused [sic] of having sexually transmitted diseases is a godawful thing?

A: Not if it’s true.

Q: All right. What if it’s false?

A: Well, if—if there is something to back it up, I guess, but that wasn’t—in her situation it wasn’t about that, it was more that she’s a public figure and was fraternizing with players, with the Cincinnati Bengals. I was—when I looked at that post it was more—it wasn’t geared toward her, it was a situation.

Q: All right. Who submitted the post?

A: No idea.

***

Q: All right. Now I’ve gotta ask you this. Sarah Jones—the record is clear as day that Sarah Jones requested repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly for these postings to go down. Why didn’t you do it?

A: Like—once again, like I said, she’s one of many, but the situation was more that she was a public figure and she was, you know, claiming—I think she was a cheerleader or something like that, and she was claiming—I thought, in my opinion, she was claiming that she was, you know, I’m not this bad person. You know what I mean? I’m a role model citizen. And the situation, with her boyfriend and the whole thing, it was—you know, it was submitted by someone who truly believed it. So when I was reading the post, in my opinion, I thought it wasn’t something that, you know, needed to be removed at the time.

***

Q: I’ve gotta ask you this question. Can you—how did you—how did
theDirty.com
, you and your team, verify that what—the posts about Sarah Jones were true?

A: We didn’t, there’s—it’s impossible. I can’t fact-check every single post.

Q: But after the posts went up, did you verify that she had ever had sexual relationships with a single Bengals football player?

A: I read what was submitted and I posted it.

Q: So you didn’t?

A: There’s no way of me doing that.

Q: Isn’t it true that after the post went up, you never verified whether or not she had had sex at the high school where she taught with her boyfriend?

A: It’s not my job to verify posts. My job is to put up the stuff that I believe is truthful.

Q: Isn’t it true that—

A: You’re looking at this like this is my opinion of what I think of the situation. You know what I mean? So if I was to say, hey, this post is not believable, like this girl has herpes or it’s a gang bang or something like that, I don’t—it doesn’t even see daylight.