Sex, Lies and the Dirty (32 page)

Although Dr. Phil would never admit it, he and I are more alike than people realize. He spent the last hour hating on me and my work, but I know if I called him up for that golf game, he’d say yes in a heartbeat.

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Dirty
Celeb best known for his association with Scooby Snack in the Vegas club scene. It’s rumored that he is her pimp, although this has never been substantiated.

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Age 13; bullied in person and through Instant Messenger.

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Age 12; bullied in person and through Instant Messenger.

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Age 17; bullied in person and through MySpace.

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Age 13; tormented through a fake MySpace account.

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Age 18; ex-boyfriend circulated nude photo.

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Age 15; bullied in person.

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Age 17; cyber-bullied through Facebook.

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Age 18; was filmed without his consent by roommate performing homosexual acts.

Origins (Part 4)

When Ben Quayle resigned from
Dirty Scottsdale
, it meant more than losing the contributions of Brock Landers. My legal connection over at Snell & Wilmer was also cut. It couldn’t have come at a worse time because I had actually just received my first cease-and-desist letter, and back then those seemed much more threatening than they actually were. I freaked out about them, so I was looking for legal representation the very next day.

There was a really popular site called
Ripoff Report
that was always in legal trouble. The reason they were on my radar is because my company, NPMG, was always on there, so I made a habit of checking it out to see what people were saying about us, the scam, and all that. Most of the claims were fairly accurate. It was a chop shop. The word had gotten out, but I continued working there because it was a steady paycheck that allowed me plenty of Nik Richie time while I was on the road as an SAE.

My thinking was, whoever
Ripoff Report
was getting representation through had to be good, so I did some poking around and found out who their lawyers were.

This is how I came to meet David Gingras.

Nik Richie was the sword; David became the shield.

I met with David and another lawyer named Maria
over at the offices of Jaburg & Wilk. Maria was a cunt. Abrasive. Anytime David tried to answer one of my questions she’d cut him off mid-response. We were sitting in one of the offices, and I asked if I was doing anything legally wrong on the site, anything that might be considered harassment, invasion of privacy, libelous,
etc.

David said, “No—”

“—What you’re doing is 100% legal,” Maria cut in.

“So what’s with the cease-and-desist letter?” I asked. “How do I deal with this?”

David said, “Yeah, you’re probably going to get a lot of those, however—“

“—however,” Maria cut in again, “you’re protected by something called the C.D.A.
⁷⁴
So, for example, this person is saying that you’re the author of the post, correct?”

“Right.”

“But all you did was publish it. The content came from a third party, and the legal system recognizes that difference,” she explained. “Anything said in the comment board, you’re not liable for. Anything that comes in from another person, you’re also not liable for. That’s how the C.D.A. works.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure that I’m going to need you guys,” I said. “The problem is the site doesn’t make any money.”

“That’s definitely a problem,” David said.

“Even if you’re legally in the right,” Maria told me, “you’re going to drown in legal fees trying to defend yourself.”

The meeting made one thing explicitly clear: if the site was going to continue, I needed to turn it into a profitable business. Otherwise, it was going to sink.

I needed money.

I needed investors.

The site was so popular that even the people at NPMG were talking about it in their cubicles. That’s when it hit me that I was doing something positive: stealing time from the man and giving it to the poor. I was making people laugh, providing a distraction from their shitty jobs. It was the first time I considered turning the site into more of a business and less of a recreation.

I sat down with my wife to tell her that I was going to take $25,000 to invest in the site, that I was going to turn it into a business and start cashing in on its popularity. We currently had about a $50,000 nest egg,
and my wife had drawn from it before for her own business endeavors. I wanted to do the same with
Dirty Scottsdale.

“But I need your blessing,” I said. “Can I have your blessing?”

Without even thinking about it, she answered, “No fucking way.”

I loved the site more than I loved my wife, so
I went ahead and took the money. I quit my job at NPMG and didn’t tell her. We were so distant from each other at that point that I wasn’t worried about the consequences: divorce or anything else she could throw at me. Nik Richie made me happier than the marriage, so I risked it.

Everything escalated.

The site was in five markets: Chicago, Newport, Dallas, Vegas, and Scottsdale. I went hard. Before I was making two or three posts a day. Suddenly, I was putting up eight or nine in each market. I made MySpace pages for each of them, friending more girls, seeing more douchebags and fame-chasers. All these club kids were checking it out. It was going viral again. More and more people from around the country were becoming aware of me, the site, the message. Nik Richie was spreading just like he had done in Scottsdale.

If you were in Vegas about to get your photo taken, you thought twice about it.

All those buxom Dallas girls doing coke in the bathrooms got a little bit paranoid.

Once again, people were asking, “Who the fuck is Nik Richie?”

And: “I’m going to fucking kill this motherfucker!”

Just as I thought, the method worked, but I still needed money. It wasn’t a business yet, just something people went to and commented on between Facebook and MySpace. I needed someone with some real business sense, and as much as I didn’t want to, that meant telling another person who I really was.

I ended up going with a guy named Saroosh.

We had become friends because he was the only other Persian dude that I saw out, and we had been traveling in close circles for a while out at the clubs in Scottsdale. I was in the calm circle of married guys and his
people did drugs and fucked all the bottle rats. They were out of control and I wanted no part of it. Saroosh was a cool dude, though, the guy that wanted to take care of people: get them deals on bottles or tables or getting them into the VIP. He was always hanging with rich people and getting the highest-priced shit on the menu, but what I liked about the guy was that he was never flamboyant or in your face about it. Saroosh was lowkey, and that’s a big part of why I thought I could trust him with my Nik Richie secret.

So I let Saroosh in, told him who I was and how well the sites were doing on traffic. I asked him straight up, “You know rich people. Do you think any of them would be willing to invest in this?”

Saroosh knew nightlife—he had been living in it for quite some time, and
Dirty Scottsdale’s
core demographic was the people in the scene. He simply added two and two together and pitched the idea of doing a party, explaining, “We’ll call it a pull wool party and charge $20 a head.”

I said, “Saroosh, no one is going to fucking come to this thing.”

“Yeah, they will. You’re doing this as a business, so just out yourself.”

“No fucking way,” I said, “but I got an even better idea. How about we get an actor to play Nik Richie at the party?”

The buzz was out.

Nik Richie was going to host an event at Axis Radius. I put it up on
Dirty Scottsdale
that this was going to be my coming out/pull wool party and you could buy tickets off the site. At the time, I was making fun of Southwest Airlines (referring to them as Southworst) so I had these tickets with the letter “C” on them. Southwest had that A-B-C seating policy, and I always used to say that it was better to get the C group because no one likes to sit in the middle and you could get next to the hot chicks on the flight.

The party sold out.

So many tickets were bought that it went over Axis Radius’ 1,200 occupancy limit and they had to open up Suede across the street to handle the overflow. Everyone wanted to see Nik Richie, but anyone who came out that night and thought they were speaking with me or taking a picture with me really wasn’t. It was my buddy John Carlo from Orange County.

He was one of the few people I told that I was Nik Richie, and I basically tricked him into doing it under the premise that it’d be cool to see how
many chicks tried to get with him.