Gawker Writes About PWL Being Down

Website That Outed Porn Stars Gets a Taste of Its Own Medicine written by Adrian Chen Posted on http://gawker.com/

Avatar for Adrian Chen Adrian Chen —Website That Outed Porn Stars Gets a Taste of Its Own Medicine In March, we brought you the story of Porn Wikileaks. Built on a database of over 12,000 stolen medical records from an STD testing database, Porn Wikileaks was dedicated to destroying porn performers’ privacy. Now it’s been shut down, thanks to a similarly brutal campaign to expose it.

When it was active, Porn Wikileaks was a cesspool of homophobia, racism and misogyny, pathetically disguised as an attempt at revealing corruption in the porn industry, Wikileaks-style. Instead, Porn Wikileaks made a game of exposing porn performers, posting their real names alongside their performer handles—much of the information stolen from the database of the now-defunct clinic that performed STD tests for California’s adult film industry. If someone tried to get their information taken down or corrected—maybe they weren’t in porn anymore—they were often punished by a campaign of harassment that extended to their families and coworkers.

This made Porn Wikileaks a lot of enemies. Eventually a group of porn industry insiders, led by blogger Mike South (NSFW) , decided they had enough. Since May, they’ve waged war on blogs and Twitter against Porn Wikileaks.

“I got tired of watching the bully people,” South told us in an interview. He was joined by people like porn star Monica Foster, who was serially harassed by Porn Wikileaks and its users, and Shawn Thompson, who had his kids’ pictures posted on the site after he crossed it. South also alluded to a group of vigilante hackers: “They helped us by providing us with technical expertise that we couldn’t have gotten anywhere else.”

The anti-Porn Wikileaks crusaders set their sights on Donny Long—aka Donald Carlos Seaone—a disgruntled former porn star living in Thailand widely presumed to have started Porn Wikileaks to get back at the industry that spurned him. Their tactics should have seemed familiar to Donny and Porn Wikileaks’ supporters. Someone found the Facebook page of Donny Long’s Thai wife. South posted the personal details of a man he claims has been secretly funding the site, while a supposed copy of Donny Long’s positive HIV test circulated among industry blogs and forums. (Long told us that the test was a photoshop job.)

On Monday, the entire user database of Porn Wikileaks was leaked and posted to a blog (NSFW). This scared away users and at least one moderator; they were supposed to be the one doing the leaking. Porn Wikileaks couldn’t take the heat: It unceremoniously disappeared this week, its URL redirected to the real Wikileaks.

Donny Long, who claims he’s just a supporter of Porn Wikileaks but refuses to reveal who’s actually behind it, posted a sad plea for a truce on his website (NSFW): “If you want to all live in peace and see [Porn Wikileaks] stay down then I ask you to leave me alone. I have been forced to skip countries and watch my back everywhere because of the gay mob that started all of this and don’t want the hassle anymore.”

The anti-Porn Wikileaks gang is now being accused of going too far in its quest to shut the site down. Long told us he has been the victim of crimes. “I have personally been in contact with the FBI because of it. Me and my family have been threatened, my site xxxfilmjobs.com was… attacked for hours on end and down, my emails have been hacked by Mike South.” A Twitter user claims South and his buddies created fake profiles on sites to harass her, after she criticized them.  (NL- She being Tara Akinlose of FPSP, who is threatening to sue Mike South and several others)

Which is funny, because that is exactly the kind of stuff a half-dozen porn performers told us they experienced at the hands of Porn Wikileaks!

Porn Wikileaks might be down for the moment, but Long warns of a possible resurrection even as South vows to continue fighting on his blog. “I have a feeling PWL will be live soon and stronger than ever,” he told us. “PWL tried to make peace but the industry just doesn’t want that.”