Jill StewartWomen everywhere should be rejoicing now that L.A.'s douchiest resident, Charles “Gary Jones” Evens, the revenge porn nightcrawler who hacked into 300 email accounts to steal and post the private nude photos of utter strangers, is heading to prison.
Studio City resident Evens, a shake-down artist who targeted innocent women, today managed to make Charlie Sheen, who claims to have been shaken down for $10 million, look kind and helpful. But a blistering review of Sheen's admission that he's HIV-positive in TIME magazine made clear that Sheen is as slippery and down on women as he ever was.
Meanwhile, besides Evens' upcoming two years in federal prison, there's a good chance that Hunter Moore, the mastermind of the revenge-porn website in question, Is Anyone Up?, will also face a withering time in front of a judge when he is sentenced to prison, just after Thanksgiving.
This all gets back to Charlie Sheen, but let's dispense with Evens and Moore first. Moore can only be described as a chump, telling the Los Angeles Times at one point, of the women who pleaded with him to remove sexual shots of them from his website, “I understand it can hurt your reputation and your job and yadda yadda yadda.”
How crass and foolish, for man who has already admitted his guilt and goes before a federal judge on Nov. 30 for his sentencing, to trash his victims once again.
Moore paid Evens about $200 a week to illegally burrow into women's email accounts to find and steal nude photos for Moore to post on his website, federal prosecutors said.
As reported by Fred Shuster at City News Service last night in Los Angeles, the two men left a trail of human wreckage behind them.
During a hearing closed to the media and public on Monday, one of the victims told the judge of the personal chaos the hacking caused, according to the woman's mother, who handed Fred Shuster of CNS a copy of her daughter's troubling statement.
The victim, a waitress who had innocently stored nude photos of herself in a computer folder with her selfies and family photos, explained that a friend alerted her. Within one day, a text with her photo had been delivered to all her restaurant co-workers and she was told she might be fired.
“She proceeded to tell me that I had a topless photo on the Internet along with my full name, Twitter account link and current city,'' the woman said in her statement. “I didn't know what else to do other than call my mom. I made her promise not to tell anyone, including my father and stepfather.
“I lost a role in a film, not to mention the tens of thousands of strangers who saw, commented on or even possibly saved the photo.''
When she got home that night, she discovered that, “a bunch of random guys'' had connected with her on Facebook and were following her on social media.
“I received vile, sexual messages and rude comments,'' the woman said in her statement to the court. “One guy even told me he saved the photo, which mortified me.”
Creepiest of all, perhaps, “The porn star Ron Jeremy even contacted her to `talk business.' This disgusted me immensely.''
Eventually, everyone she knew found out, she said.
“At home, I was scared for my life. There was even a stalker parked in front of our house on two evenings.”
“I will have to keep a Google alert on my name for the rest of my life in order to make sure that the photo does not reappear. What Charlie Evans did to me will affect me for the rest of my life.''
Which brings us around to Charlie Sheen, who is being defended by some after The National Enquirer was the first to disclose this week that Sheen had contracted the virus, a report that came on the heels of a detailed story by Radar Online saying that Sheen, who it did not name in the story, contracted the virus four years ago and had unprotected sex.
A writer for the Daily Beast, for example, argues that Sheen's “right to privacy has been thoroughly trampled” by a media running on “full shame-and-speculate stampede.”
The way the two situations — Sheen's and Evens/Moore's — intersect, is in how Sheen still managed to attack women while going public, saying he had paid millions to silence some of those who knew he was HIV-positive, leaving his children poorer.
Among other things, Sheen insisted he had unprotected sex only with those who knew his status. But that diverted attention from how long Sheen was partying with HIV — he admits he has no clue how or when he first began carrying the virus detected in 2011. His claim that only two people, both who assented, had unprotected sex with him, is meaningless.
His placing of blame on others for having to go public, a veiled slam on the women in his past, conjured up the old woman-slamming Sheen, and maybe that's why he looked so haggard and uncomfortable as he played his hand on the Today Show.
As TIME culture writer Daniel D'Addario summed it up:
As a piece of television, the Sheen interview was a slippery, uncomfortable thing; the human impulse for empathy ran up against Sheen’s well-documented ability to produce meaning-free but self-aggrandizing word salad, not least when he said he planned to “deliver a cure” for HIV.
Asked if he might be in criminal trouble for potentially not having divulged his HIV status, he replied: “Having divulged it is the reason I’m in the mess I’m in with all the shakedowns.” The Today interview was a stress-inducing portrait of HIV as a sentence to years’ worth of turmoil; it’s hard to imagine that this framing did anything to reduce stigma.
It's worth remembering how Jezebel explained Sheen's scorn for women in its 2011 timeline on the actor's ugly incidents and alleged attacks involving women since 1990, starting with the bizarre “accidental shooting” of actor Kelly Preston, who Jezebel says immediately broke up with Sheen after being shot in the hand.
In that story by Tracie Egan Morrisey headlined Charlie Sheen's History of Violence with Women, Jezebel asked why, while Sheen was fired from Two and a Half Men after calling its producer a clown, the show's executives did nothing after “his repeated physical attacks against women?”
Two events seem likely to unfold at about the same time in Los Angeles between now and the end of the year:
Hunter Moore will be sentenced to a federal jail of some kind, and women — and perhaps men — will claim, some of them possibly with credibility, that Sheen infected them with HIV well before his 2011 diagnosis, and seek redress in the courts.
If Sheen wants to help take down the HIV virus, as he boastingly said to Today, his efforts should be focused on convincing men not to be like him. Condoms cost $1, and are the most effective prevention against HIV and AIDS.
Credit: Sarah Deer
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