Melissa Esplin: ‘Revenge Porn’ Victim Strikes Back With FBI Help


Melissa Esplin is a successful blogger, wife, mommy of two, and craft project extraordinaire. Melissa Esplin was also the victim of cyber-bullying at its worst. She became the victim of a startling and invading trend on the internet, “revenge porn.”

In an age where everyone has a blog, getting noticed can be a difficult task. Many experts suggest finding something you are good at and becoming a voice for that content. Melissa Esplin uses her blog and her YouTube page to post creative ideas and projects, hoping to help others be successful in the same endeavors. Melissa is active on social media and often post pictures of her family, as many Americans do. But one day, the Salt Lake City mother started receiving very strange Facebook and Twitter messages.

What Melissa Esplin discovered next was enough to make her want to throw up. One of the revenge porn suitors wrote her a letter letting her know that her pictures were being used on a website in sexual positions. If Esplin wanted them to be removed, she needed to visit the website and click on a link to have them removed. Unsure of her decision, she went over to the revenge porn site and was horrified. Her face was plastered on images of naked women, not her own, doing very pornographic things.

Melissa Esplin clicked on the link to have the images removed, only to find that she was now also the victim of extortion. The revenge porn website owners wanted $400 from her to take the images down. Not to mention they would need her credit card information. Smart enough to know better than to handle the situation on her own, Esplin contacted the FBI and local news station KSL.

Whether or not Melissa Esplin, 29, can ever have the pictures fully removed is difficult to know. Revenge porn sites like the one where she found her picture are hard to track down. Former FBI agent Brad Garrett told Good Morning America, “The internet is hard to control. And there’s not much you can do once your pictures are misused.”

In a special piece last year, ABC News spoke to some women who had been the victim of revenge porn like Melissa Esplin. They were out to bring down the people who were exposing and exploiting them. Their stories helped shed light on the global internet cyber-bullying tactic.

Melissa Esplin and many other women have learned a valuable truth about keeping themselves protected on the internet, prevention of revenge porn is far easier than trying to take it down after the fact.

[Image via melissaesplin.com]

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