San Diego Revenge Porn Impresario Pleads Not Guilty To Extortion Rap

San Diego “revenge porn” web site owner Kevin Christopher Bollaert had a big day Friday. he started out copping a plea deal on a gun charge that will keep him out of prison. Then, just a few hours later, he was arraigned on 31counts of felony conspiracy, identity theft and extortion in connection with his site, ugotposted.com, San Diego’s Channel 6 News reports.

On that site, Bollaert encouraged users to post nude and sexually explicit images of ex-wives and husbands, ex-boyfriends and girlfriends or just anybody — all without the consent of the people in the photos.

The photos were generally obtained by people who during relationships took and kept nude photos of each other. But when the relationship went bad, one party kept the photos anyway. Or sometimes the images were just stolen. It didn’t matter to Bollaert.

But Bollaert’s San Diego-based site, unlike many similar “revenge porn” sites, required users to post the subject’s real name, personal and social media information. That in itself is illegal in California, where obtaining personal information for any criminal purpose, including harassment, is against the law.

The key to the San Diego alleged scheme is that when a subject would become aware that there were compromising photos on ugotposted.com, Bollaert would direct that person to another site, also controlled by himself, called changemyreputation.com.

That site would charge the victims to remove the offending, private photos.

Of course, the nature of the digital age is that simply taking photos down off a web site rarely accomplishes much, because images can be copied and distributed hundreds even thousands of times in a very short period.

Bollaert and his unnamed accomplices posted more than 10,000 nude and sexually explicit pictures of unwitting subjects in a 10-month span ending on September 17 of last year.

“This web site published intimate photos of unsuspecting victims and turned their public humiliation and betrayal into a commodity with the potential to devastate lives,” said California Attorney General Kamala Harris, quoted in the Independent newspaper.

Prosecutors say that Bollaert fielded about 2,000 e-mails from people — the vast majority of them women — whose pictures appeared on his site and that he extorted “tens of thousands of dollars” from them.

Before his arraignment on the revenge porn-connected charges, Bollaert pleaded guilty to giving a phony address on an application to buy guns. Police seized 31 firearms from a warehouse and a hotel room. His attorney said that Bollaert was a gun collector, according to the U-T San Diego newspaper.