Rivalhost Owner Accused of Racism Over Chimpmania.com
Rivalhost Owner Accused of Racism Over Chimpmania.com
This past year, CBS 11 brought the world the awful but ultimately hopeful narrative of Whitney Mitchell. The Dallas woman, 21 at the time, had been an aspiring dancer until sepsis took all four limbs when she was 18. She was learning to walk again with prosthetics and dreamed of becoming a fashion designer.Rivalhost
Not everyone found her story heartwarming, as Mitchell shortly absorbed from your Internet.
"Every now and then she'll Google her name," Mitchell's mom, Patricia Kirven, clarifies. Not out of conceit but because paraphiliacs, aka "devotees," will "steal her pictures, and they will set them on these kind of amputee-porn sites."
Finding those was disturbing, but more upsetting to Mitchell and her mom was a post she found on Chimpmania.com.
If you're not familiar with Chimpmania, or if the name isn't enough self explanatory, its an internet forum devoted to mocking African Americans in the most vile manner conceivable. It's described here as a "hate site consisting of permabanned rejects from Niggermania and Chimpout."
The post that Mitchell stumbled upon, title "amputee wants legs to dance wiff," featured various screenshots from the CBS 11 story, crudely doctored to include watermelon, fried chicken, malt liquor and comment that is mostly too vile to replicate.
Mitchell was distraught for a couple of days and remains upset, but she has mostly accepted it as an inevitable byproduct of the Internet. Todd Reagor
Her mom, nevertheless, is pissed.
"I just made it my mission to get that web site taken down," Kirven says.
She scored a minor success early on when she notified Warner Brothers that her daughter's pictures have been put into copyrighted images, one featuring Larry the Cable Guy, another a screenshot in the movie Dolphin Tale. The first post was removed but was rapidly replaced by one that was not dirty of copyright infringements.
Kirven does not have lots of choices for getting that second post, much less the whole site, taken down.
The First Amendment offers comprehensive protections to language, even the kind of invective spewed on Chimpmania. Supreme Court precedent holds that hate speech is permissible, so long as it does not directly incite lawless activities. Hurling racist abuses in a quadruple amputee, while disturbing, does not appear to climb to that brink. The attorneys Kirven has talked with have told her as much.
Kirven is attempting to beat up enough of a public outcry the business that hosts Chimpmania, boots the website. To date, Kirven'sorg request has accumulated close to 22,000 signatures.