14 DAY TRIAL // Reddit influential moderator Violentacrez was exposed last week by Gawker to be 49-year-old Michael Brutsch. Brutsch was fired from the financial company he was working for as a programmer.
According to the Huffington Post, the man was fired less than 20 hours after news of his identity was leaked.
"It's amazing how much you can sweat in a 60 degree office," he had said to Gawker's Adrien Chen, when the journalist exposed his identity and called him on it online, while he was still at work.
It turns out that financial services company execs from Arlington, Texas, that employed Brutsch were not very fond of this kind of publicity. Brutsch is married and is now facing financial troubles, as his wife is disabled.
"My wife is disabled. I got a home and a mortgage, and if this hits the fan, I believe this will affect negatively on my employment. [...] I do my job, go home watch TV, and go on the internet. I just like riling people up in my spare time, he says."
Brutsch claims to be the only provider in the household and urges his fans to donate to his Paypal account. He has deleted his Violentacrez account and is now posting as user mbrutsch.
"Nothing like living in the US with a disabled wife and no health insurance," Brutsch writes on Reddit.
'I'm eligible [for insurance], but COBRA is very expensive. Who can afford to pay 5 times as much for insurance at the very moment they lose their income? Only rich folks can afford COBRA. I have maybe 3 weeks pay in the bank. I just hope I can hold out a month. My wife hasn't been able to work for over a year, and our savings will last about 3 weeks, not considering the current lack of health insurance."
Violentacrez (pronounced Violent Acres) was behind creepshots, a space where pics of women, unaware that they were being photographed, were published. The photos were taken in public, and were mostly up skirt shots.
He became notorious on Reddit after publishing images of scantily-clad underage girls, the Gawker exposé described. The section was called “Jailbait,” and it erupted on Reddit. Brutsch started calling himself the "creepy uncle of Reddit," and his pics were constantly "upvoted" to the first page.
Reddit founders describe the site as the "front page of the internet," and pride themselves in upholding free speech and allowing most kinds of pics to be published.
Jailbait had 20,000 subscribers that uploaded snapshots of teenage girls in bikinis and short skirts. They dubbed themselves "ephebophiles," after grabbing the photos from the girls' Facebook accounts.