Trial by Fury: Internet Savagery and the Amanda Knox Case Read Free Page B

Even the murderers I put away didn’t fight me as hard as these nutcases over at PMF and TJMK.”
    The posts attacked Moore, ridiculed and mocked his Christian faith, called him a pedophile, a white supremacist, a liar, and a fool. They accused him of molesting his daughters. His oldest daughter received menacing phone calls. Michelle, Steve’s wife, became a particular object of attack. “Michelle was the recipient of some of the most vicious, nasty stuff, some of them saying ‘I long to do to you what they did to Meredith, only it won’t be as nice,’ telling her she needed to be raped.” Someone sent her pornography. The discussion about Moore on the three anti-Amanda websites ran to hundreds of posts. “True Justice” opened a separate file on Moore in its “Carpetbaggers” section.
    Skeptical Bystander got the ball rolling at her website, PMF:
My bullshit detector is on high alert! … When I was a kid, my mom would threaten to wash our mouths out with soap if we lied or swore. Next time Steve is on television, he’ll probably have soap bubbles seeping from every orifice.
GEEZ Skep! Give a body a warning, would ya? I’d rather not even think about Skeevie, let alone his orifices. He’s a walking, talking orifice.
he pretends to be on a crusade to save the Holy Land of Amanda, who’s just another drunken immoral college kid like the ones he despises at Pepperdine, except she’s a million times worse! Oh, but she’s young, she's hot, she’s got blue eyes, she’s sexy, so he lost it. He’s a real Jekyll-Hyde and so is his wife, she drove him to this insanity…
    Pepperdine immediately became aware of the online furor. Moore returned on September 3 to a “firestorm” at the University. Officials there had been following the posts at “Perugia Murder File,” “True Justice,” and elsewhere, and they were troubled. Ten days later, Moore got a letter from the administration, which demanded that he stop advocating for Amanda. Their reasons were, in part, that they were concerned about “the threat to the University’s reputation as some begin to question your investigation, your qualifications as an expert in this matter, and your motives.” The “some” could only refer to the blogosphere, as only anonymous bloggers had raised these questions. (The regular media had received Moore cordially and treated him as the expert he clearly was.)
    “I was gobsmacked,” Moore said. “Stunned. In shock. It wasn’t just the vicious, malevolent and defamatory criticism by PMF/TJMK … it was that some sophisticated people believed their garbage. That’s the danger with these types of Internet trolls; if they use the right verbiage, callow people will believe it.”
    Moore felt too strongly about the Knox case to abandon it. Pepperdine fired him. The bloggers went wild with jubilation.
There was no doubt that his suicide mission would fail … He is just another Knox agent in a long line of very ordinary sock puppets and he will not be the last one who will ruin him/herself for the murderess.
Moore would seem to be the sacrificial moron … Go get him, Mignini
I am glad another murderer sympathizer is getting what he deserves. He will not be the last one. More research is been done to make sure.
    Moore sued Pepperdine for wrongful termination. Pepperdine settled for a “mutually satisfactory” sum. When I asked Moore what “mutually satisfactory” meant, he said, dryly, “I think I might say I was very satisfied with the settlement.”
    “I feel like I have a purpose in life now that I didn’t have before,” he said. “I see injustice out there. And who is better to help right injustice than someone who knows how the justice system works?”
    The blogosphere didn’t forget. For the past four years, Moore has been pilloried online. Even today, he and his family are contending with vicious, anonymous attacks. In November 2012, a blogger named BRMull went to Moore’s daughter’s website, copied some