Our hate mail this week questioned the nature of tips@gawker.com, proposed a great idea about buying gold dust bars, and suggested some confusing courses of action. Some examples of the enlightened correspondence sent to us this week are included below.

Addressed to tips@gawker.com. (I would suggest story ideas, shout-outs, and amusing finds, but a blank email works as well.)

SUBJECT: Like what kind of tips?

BODY: [Blank]

Du respect to you too, man.

SUBJECT: hello

BODY: Dear

with all du respect, i lead a group of suppliers

in gold dust and bars from west africa.

we are looking for partners or buyers in europe , asia ,

america for the quantity of gold of 22 carat and 95% of purity origin

from guinea conakry we currently have.

we are abble to bring the said gold anywhere the buyer want us too

after discussing about the proccess and sign sale and purchase agreement.

waitting for your urgent reply to send you some certificat of the gold we have now.

i'm presently with that said gold at morocco in transit .

Thank you

best regards

None of those suggestions make too much sense, but keep working on your syntax and get back to us.

SUBJECT: Hey asshole

BODY: Go fuck yourself, sodomite. Go queering in the closet. Go eat the pee from a dick. It is so provoking.

That's all for this week. Have a wonderful weekend!

[images via Olly, Rangizz, Konstantin Sutyagin, Shutterstock]

As many as seven people—including the shooter—were killed today in a violent rampage across Santa Monica. Read updates to the situation here.

Mark Zuckerberg took to his personal Facebook account today to address charges that his company has cooperated with a secret NSA program called PRISM that monitors private citizens' internet activities. Zuckerberg called the press reports about PRISM "outrageous," and said Facebook has never given the U.S. government direct access to its servers (though, as Buzzfeed's John Herrman notes, "a lack of 'direct access' does not preclude the type of sweeping surveillance described in the leaks").

Upon the release of Zuckerberg's statement, which came shortly after Google CEO Larry Page and Google Chief Legal Officer David Drummond released their own statement, some couldn't help but notice the similarities between Zuckerberg's words and Google's words.

Here's a Google doc with the Page and Zuckerberg denials: docs.google.com/document/d/1mv… Similar passages are bolded.

— Alexis C. Madrigal (@alexismadrigal) June 7, 2013

The overlaps in language will probably lead some conspiracy theorists to presume the world's huge internet companies are in cahoots to keep the truth from the people. That's a possibility. But the likelier explanation is that the highly paid attorneys at tech companies whose job it is to draft these kinds of things are of a similar mind on how to elegantly dodge serious questions from the public.

[Image via AP]

After their initial blustery outrage at yesterday's revelations about PRISM, tech companies, including Facebook and Google, have admitted that they have cooperated with the government, even changing their own computer systems to better monitor users under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The true extent of their participation and the lengths to which they have gone to accommodate the government in surveillance of users is unknown, as employees who have cooperated with the government are barred from discussing FISA requests by law, or even acknowledging its existence. The Times reports that some employees at these large tech companies have even been given national security clearance.

While the levels of secrecy involved makes it hard to paint a very specific picture of exactly what is being monitored and by whom, it's very clear that the tech companies and the government have been working together to create a secret system by which the government can request information on a user and the tech company could give it to them through a secure server (basically the government is being afforded the privacy that users are not). These "lockboxes" are most likely related to the confidential legality of the spying practice, which the Obama administration has asked citizens to trust them exist.

“The U.S. government does not have direct access or a ‘back door’ to the information stored in our data centers,” Google’s chief executive, Larry Page, said on Friday. “We provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law.”

Page is possibly alluding to the "lockbox" creation, which according to a Times source, is the preferred method for retrieving user information, as it doesn't give the government direct access to the company's server.

Nelson Mandela is in serious but stable condition after he was hospitalized early this morning for a recurring lung condition.

Mandela has long suffered from lung problems after contracting tuberculosis during the 27 years he spent as a prisoner of apartheid, but the New York Times is reporting that this time the issue may be more serious. It is the fourth time this year that the former South African president has been hospitalized, and the African National Party is reportedly telling the press that the party is prepared for the worst.

Mandela's public appearances have grown increasingly rare, and his last publicized outing was during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. In May, the South African government drew criticism for releasing photographs of a frail-looking 94-year-old Mandela during a visit with South African president Jacob Zuma.

Mandela was South Africa's first black president and served from 1994-1999. He earned a Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for his leadership.

[NYT, photo via AP]

Want to buy a PRISM t-shirt? You can't: Someone is claiming copyright over the logo of the vast NSA surveillance operation, and they took down my Zazzle store.

Like all real Americans, I am an entrepreneurial, small-business job-creator type, so when I learned that the NSA was collecting immense amounts of data from nearly every major tech company on the planet, my first thought was: How can I make a buck off of this?

Naturally I turned to apparel. Zazzle.com is a company that allows you to design and sell your own t-shirts and other products. (For examples of the possibilities afforded, see the wonderful Zazzle Poetry.) I grabbed the PRISM logo from The Guardian's website, slapped in on a white tee, and put it up for sale.

Positive response on Twitter led me to add more products: a mug, an iPhone case, and a black hoodie. I set up a Zazzle store—PRISMMerchandise—and over the course of Friday sold two tees and two mugs, for a grand total of seven dollars. I was in business.

Until Uncle Sam stepped in.

Late last night I received this email (as the NSA likely knows):

Dear PRISMMerchandise,

Thank you for your interest in Zazzle.com, and thank you for publishing products on Zazzle.

Unfortunately, it appears that your product, PRISM NSA T-Shirt - #Rare PRISM Shirt SPIES, contains content that is in conflict with one or more of our acceptable content guidelines.

We will be removing this product from the Zazzle Marketplace shortly.

Please help us make our content approval process better by taking this short survey.

The details of the product being removed are listed below:

Product Title: PRISM NSA T-Shirt - #Rare PRISM Shirt SPIES

Product Type: zazzle_shirt

Product ID: 235336285725181211

Result: Not Approved

Policy Notes: Design contains an image or text that may infringe on intellectual property rights. We have been contacted by the intellectual property right holder and we will be removing your product from Zazzle’s Marketplace due to infringement claims.

Image: Image

If you have any questions or concerns about the review of your product, please email us at content_review@zazzle.com and we'll be happy to provide you with additional support.

Best Regards,

Content Review Team
Zazzle Inc.

I received the same notice for PRISMMerchandise's other three products as well.

Theoretically, the logo is the work of the U.S. government, which has not officially acknowledged the PRISM program.

But it had to have been the feds. No one else has any claim to the logo. (While in most circumstances, U.S. government works aren't protected by copyright laws, federal law bans "the manufacture, sale or possession of items bearing the insignia of federal offices"—not that this has stopped other Zazzle shop owners.)

I've emailed Zazzle's "content review team" to find out who contacted it claiming to be the rights-holder of the PRISM logo, and will update the post when I hear back. Until then, you will have to do your own screen-printing.

Update: The photo in the logo isn't clip art, but rather taken from a library of free photos by science writer and presenter Adam Hart-Davis—who's on vacation, and unlikely to be trawling Zazzle for copyright violations.

[image via Zazzle]

Sylvie Cachay thought her layabout boyfriend needed to change a few things. She asked him to “Hold me after sex and say sweet things . . . Do not overuse paper towels . . . Show me that I should be with you.” Apparently, the letter did not go over well with Nicholas Brooks, who is now standing trial for her murder.

"Take me on dates!” she asked Brooks, then 24, who was almost a decade younger than Cachay. “No random over drinking or drug use . . . Every now and then spray bug spray.” She implored him to get a job and to stop using her credit card. And only a few days after she wrote the letter, she was found dead in a bathtub in a high-end hotel, with Brooks the last person to be with her.

Now Brooks is standing trial for her murder, and the prosecution is rolling out the final personal correspondences between the two. The hard-partying Brooks, who was the son of songwriter Joseph Brooks (who killed himself after a sexual assault charge in 2011), and the fashion designer Cachay had a turbulent six-month relationship, that ended with a reconciliation shortly before Cachay's death.

"Why don’t you come over and get in bed with me and we can hold each other?” she texted Brooks. “Think about it,”she said. “I love you and just know everything will be alright.”

Mr. Brooks apparently ate a steak in the hotel lobby while Cachay was expiring upstairs, and only when he returned to the hotel in the morning was he brought in for questioning.

Cachay had asked him in the "to-do" list to help with cleaning around her apartment, cut back on drinking, and stop smoking marijuana.

“If you can’t do all these things, then this likely won’t work,” Cachay wrote, finishing her letter to Brooks.

The demolition operator in the Philadelphia building collapse that killed six people was a felon with a lengthy rap sheet who was high on marijuana and painkillers at the time, officials say.

Police are still looking for 42-year-old Sean Benschop, whose rap sheet spans 11 arrests in nine years for drugs, theft, and weapons possession charges. The AP reports that Benschop, who also goes by the name Kary Roberts, served time on drug trafficking convictions in the 90's, and was most recently arrested in January, 2012 for aggravated assault. That case was dismissed for lack of evidence.

City officials say that witness statements, toxicology reports, and evidence taken at the scene show that Benschop was high on marijuana and possibly codeine as he operated the demolition equipment on Wednesday. Benschop's blood and urine were tested about two hours after the collapse, and CBS reports that police officers say Benschop was speaking in an extremely slow and quiet manner, "as if he were whispering." He allegedly told investigators he was taking painkillers after cutting his finger.

The building Benschop was demolishing collapsed on top of a nearby Salvation Army store, killing two employees and four customers. It was the first day of work for one of the employees killed in the collapse, and thirteen other people were injured when the building fell.

There may also be charges coming to the demolition contractor, Griffin Campbell. Video of the scene shows that the sidewalk was left open to pedestrians as bricks fell from the building shortly before the collapse, and an attorney for one of the injured victims says there were multiple federal safety violations.

Currently, Philadelphia does not require inspections during demolitions, and the state of Pennsylvania does not license demolition contractors. Carlton Williams, the head of the Philadelphia's Department of Licenses and Inspections, told the AP that demolition contractors are not required to show proficiency, but that a pre-inspection of the building revealed no issues. Officials inspected four of Campbell's other demolition sites and found violations at two of them. Those projects have been suspended.

Police raided Benschop's home Friday, taking two computers and other evidence, but they are still trying to locate Benschop. When they do, he will be charged with six counts of involuntary manslaughter and six counts of risking catastrophe, among other charges.

[The Washington Post]

The logo for PRISM—the huge NSA data-mining operation revealed by The Guardian and The Washington Post on Thursday—features a photo by Adam Hart-Davis, a writer, photographer and television presenter in the UK.

As anyone who's looked at the PRISM PowerPoint presentation can tell you, NSA doesn't have much in the way of design sense. They apparently don't have much of a budget, either, given that they seem to have stumbled on Hart-Davis' prism photo—offered for free, at low resolution, along with other science-related photos—and decided it was good enough for their uses. (The photo had previously been described as "clip art.")

Hart-Davis, a "second cousin of David Cameron and distantly related to the Queen," has written dozens of popular science books and presented shows on science and nature.

I emailed Hart-Davis to ask if he was aware that the NSA had used his photo, but he's currently on vacation (making it unlikely that he submitted a takedown request to Zazzle over these t-shirts). I also emailed his assistant, and will update this post if she gets back to me.

You can find the original photo here, on Hart-Davis' website. For reference, here's the PRISM logo.

Here's a side-by-side comparison:

Hart-Davis has been in the news lately for non-NSA related activities: Several BBC producers accused him of "inappropriate touching" and "sexual comments" last year. Hart said he was unaware of any warnings, and deeply regretful of the single incident he had been told about.

I’ve rejected Boston.

On a good day, I’d say we are acquaintances. Polite. Not invested enough to step on the other’s toes. On a bad day, I’d say we’ll both heave a sigh of relief when I’m gone. After all, neither of us is too good at pretending.

The truth is we’ve never tried too hard to get to know one another. I’ve been cautious here, uncharacteristically reserved.

“I live in Boston,” I tell people, and the words just don’t sound right. I try again. “Well not Boston. Cambridge. And not Cambridge really, more like a four-block stretch of sidewalk where I roost.” They ask do you like it, or will you stay, and I shake my head. “No. I’m just passing through.”

I can’t stand the way the snow turns to ice, and stacks into piles. I don’t like the tangled freeways, or the streets abruptly changing names. Once a cab driver drove off with my suitcase and he never turned it in. And no one says hello or thank you and everyone is all hardened jawlines and hardened humor. The plan was always to do just what I did – keep my head low, mark thirty-six months of law school off the calendar, board a plane at Logan to JFK, and move on to a place that understood me better.

***

I have barely seen Boston.

I’ve barely even seen Cambridge. I walked around a tiny stretch of the Charles once, the water shiny with slivers of late October frost. I’ve ventured across the river rarely, only in obligation or offering. And I glance at the city as I head to South Station or Logan, only fractionally interested by the sharp neckline of the horizon. Other than that, the entirety of my Boston experience has been in the confines of courthouses.

In Atlanta, where I’m from, I memorized the details of the city, in reverence to a place I love so deeply. In my five years in New York I had countless options and yet I got gluttonous, always in pursuit.

Here it is different. Here someone suggests “downtown” or “Davis” or “Allston” and I recoil. I don’t know those places. I don’t need to. Sure, Cambridge isn’t Boston, and Harvard sure as hell isn’t Cambridge. But I haven’t sorted them out. The map of my existence has been very tiny – friends, library, two bars, the few streets in between. ​

***

Seven Mondays ago, there was an explosion at the Marathon.

A few of us heard about it in the hallway. We were acquaintances, really, but in those few minutes after hearing something happened, we improvised as friends.

We walked out of the building and stood facing the square as if its squat, empty horizon would tell us something. “Bomb,” a few people said, scrolling frantic through the Internet on their phones, and I shook my head no.

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” I said primly. “Maybe it was an electrical explosion or something.” I tried to think of other possibilities but electrical explosion was all I had. But they kept repeating it – bomb, bomb, bomb, and the tiny drops of dread multiplied in my gut.

After a few pictures of the gravel painted in blood I knew what happened.

The Marathon isn’t that far from where I live. I know because I can picture the street in my head, something I can’t say for most of the city. When people from other places called to check up, I talked about how weird it was to be in the same general area as someone who could do this. Reports of suspicious packages poured in. People on the streets looked somber, the bars filled up and we shuffled inside.

We speculated. One person? Ten?

“That fucker is far away by now,” an old man drinking beer told us from a few seats down. “If he has any sense he’s in Mexico on the beach.”

He wasn’t far away at all.

*** ​

For three years I’ve lived on a quiet street with small apartment buildings and houses you’d never find in the South – New England architecture to match the weather, painted bright shades of primary colors. My building is short and fat, brick, tucked out of sight from the road. Three blocks to the law school and ivy creeps up my windows so thick that in the summer my whole apartment is dim.

It closes me in.

I came here from Harlem, where, after five years, the claustrophobia started to grate away at my sanity. During my last few months there, I found myself unable to sleep, counting how long it had been since I had been alone. Really alone. Alone enough for a stranger to snatch me off the street without anyone noticing. Alone enough to scream without anyone hearing. Someone always wandered around the apartment above mine, and people slept on the other sides of my walls. “I know I’ve never met you but I need you to go out for a few hours,” I wanted to tell them all. “I need a little time to myself.”

A couple nights, I found myself sitting in the grass of Jackie Robinson at 2 AM. I just wanted to get away from people, but in New York you’re rarely more than twenty feet from the nearest person. And it’s never really quiet, like the quiet where you can hear the leaves talk. It was also never really dark, not the kind of dark where you can’t tell what color your shirt is.

Cambridge is different. I’ve looked forward to those nights where I don’t leave the library until well into the early morning hours. The street stretches empty for blocks, not even silhouettes in the windows. I am alone. The roads are empty and the traffic lights perform without an audience.

***

It’s an old story now. Admit it. That fear, the guttural response to the action flick that played out on the streets of Cambridge that night – you’ve forgotten it. I have too. That’s how the brain works after all, sweeping away the scraps of nuance and detail in order to make space for the next crisis.

There were four of us in a room on a Thursday beginning the long haul towards finals. We looked like the beginning of an off-color joke someone would tell in some small town – an Israeli, an Indian, an Iranian, and black me. MIT was just two stops away on the T. There was the influx of frantic messages telling us to stay inside. The beats of loaded silence once we realized these were the same people. The mix of privilege and fear and elitism that contributed to our incredulity. How could someone have possibly done this here? In Cambridge?

One of us stood up and silently locked the front door.

I stayed up all night, long after the others had gone to sleep, drinking Red Bull and refreshing Twitter. I followed the second brother on the Google Map someone constructed of his whereabouts. I counted the miles between us.

Five. Three. One-and-a-half.

I watched as the entire Internet identified him as a missing kid from Brown. I replayed the rapid drumbeat of gunfire in that civilian video clip and then I replayed it again. I watched a man affix a handwritten DO NOT LEAVE sign to the front door of my building.

The sirens began and didn’t stop, the crescendo of them coming closer relentless for almost twenty-four hours. I couldn’t sleep so I went outside and stood. After a while I sat at the bus stop, my knees to my chest, shivering on the street corner in the 5 AM darkness, watching as people outfitted for emergency hurried by. Sometimes they saw me, and they yelled at me to go back inside as they passed. It was 6 AM, and then 7. Police cars and fire trucks and ambulances, flashing lights cutting through the dark, filtering through the window.

​***

Three years of rejecting Boston.

I hadn’t realized that’s what I was doing, but crisis has a way of drudging up epiphanies. There’s more than just a little shame in my voice when I admit I never gave it a chance.

And yet, the city has accepted me anyway. There is a stock of pride in the people here, but somehow it’s not exclusionary. It’s a hard tightrope for a city to walk. I know, because I’m from a city that’s the opposite. In Atlanta we require adoration. We crave it. We’ve convinced ourselves that we are underdogs, and we’re quick to get unabashedly defensive if you don’t like our humidity or our rap music or the fact that all of our streets have the same name. In Atlanta, the overly critical just get edged out.

But Boston balances. Every Labor Day for literally hundreds of years, the city’s been infested by a new crop of students, people like me who turn their noses up at the weather, or the geography, or the people, or any of the other things we find inconvenient. Yet Boston does not begrudge us. It willingly accepts even the most conspicuous outsiders.

Still, understand – just because it will take you in doesn’t mean that it will change for you. To really gain traction here, to really affect this place, it’s not enough to just have the right intentions. You must understand the city intimately, something that you can’t accomplish in just three years.

Boston begets Boston.

This place has respected me, but it has never catered to me. It has more dignity than that. It has shrugged off my surliness without begging me for devotion. There is no marketing scheme to the city. It is exactly what it is. And what it is works.

*** ​

I’ve spent plenty of time trying to decipher the peculiarity of native Bostonians. Not the assorted anti-heroes of my law school saga, but the hodgepodge of other people I’ve encountered along the way. Cashiers, cab drivers, my hair dresser, the two men at the local magazine stand, my therapist, the elderly used book seller, the men who drive the free late-night shuttle, the smirking RN at Mass General. And, most importantly, my clients. The dozen or so I’ve had over the years. They get this place. Each of them sprouted from Boston soil, but it’s more than that. It’s that they’ve stayed.

I can’t explain, exactly, what makes people from Boston different. I’m not sure how to describe the quirks ingrained in people from here, translated in those ubiquitous accents.

I’ll tell you this, though – they don’t try to escape from their history. Things are old here, at Harvard especially. Established, maybe that’s the word. But old nonetheless. Old buildings, rectangular architecture. Old professors, brilliant and bearded and mumbling. Old law. And all around the rest of the city – the folk heroes, the narratives, the traditions – all old. Being the country’s eldest city comes with it’s own entrenched effects. It requires strength, it requires honor. After all, you can’t catch a clean slate here. Being surrounded in the remnants of your choices requires fortitude.

Another thing - they like to share. They’re not warm, really. At least not like people from Georgia. But they still crave connection. They know off the bat I’m not from around here, and so they inundate me with stories.

“Oh you’re from Atlanta? So was my ex-wife. You’re in law school? My cousin has had some trouble with the law. Just got a misdemeanor possession charge. You like the snow? Yeah, I thought the weather here was bad too - until those two summers in Vietnam.”

The stories here are always a little bit sad. Chock full of regret and struggle and history. But they are not told that way. I have been ashamed to find myself leaning back in my chair hysterical over stories of pain told with matter-of-fact humor. No one in Boston claims that life is easy and glamorous. But they only want my ear, if I’m lucky. Never my pity.

​***

Seven weeks ago I watched as the city reacted. This week I packed up to say goodbye. Both times, alone in my apartment, I voiced my regrets. “I took you for granted,” I said, towards the general direction of downtown. “I wasn’t fair to you.”

I have yet to see a Bostonian ask for help. I have only heard of those dying to give it. MGH packed to the brims with the limbless. The deep roots of responsibility, of resilience run through the people here, and I have seen it over the past couple of months – the people are careful but not dramatic, unyielding but not vicious. They care for their own. They muster the strength. Deep resolve exists in abundance here. Yes, they are different. There’s this self-assuredness without the ego, this persistence without pathetic.

I rolled my eyes at this place infinite times, turned my nose at the mere mention of its name. But this is not a mea culpa. Boston doesn’t care what I think, anyway.

All I mean to say is, Boston, I like you. The vulnerability in the voice of every cab driver, telling me details about their children’s love lives. Clients, hat in hand, polite and apologetic. The profuse gratitude from men and women I stood next to in court.

No, it’s not for me. It’s not home. I’ll forget about this place like I’ve begun to forget about that Thursday night. I’ll distill it down to one or two sentences that I recount at cocktail parties. But I’ll be doing this city and these people a biting injustice.

Atlanta taught me how to be fun. New York taught me how to adjust. But Boston taught me how to be tough. Tough through the relentless winters, tough through the stress-laden semesters. Tough for my clients. Tough with humility, quiet, steel-faced strength. It taught me how to push through; how to savor even the smallest rewards; how to find beauty even when it is not thrust upon you.

This place is both more fragile and more courageous than it lets on. It has taken care of me, but it has never tried to impress me. Push farther, Boston seems to say. Work harder. Don’t complain. Just finish. There is an implicit understanding among us that whatever needs to be done we will do it, because that’s what we do.

OK, I think, looking at my map, this is what I have. It is more than enough, and more than enough is plenty.

Josie Duffy recently graduated from Harvard Law School and will soon begin working as a staff attorney at The Center for Popular Democracy. She writes regularly at thetruefight.squarespace.com.

In a new project overseen by contributing editor Kiese Laymon, Gawker is running a personal essay every weekend. Please send suggestions to saturdays@gawker.com.

[Image by Jim Cooke, photo via AP]

Newark mayor Cory Booker has formally announced his candidacy for the Senate seat vacated by the recently-deceased Frank Lautenberg. The special election will be this October. Chris Christie avoided the possibility of Booker being on the same ballot as him to the tune of $25 million in taxpayers money.

Maybe you don't think of yourself as someone who makes dessert. Maybe you think of dessert as a spoon and a tub of Ben & Jerry's, or a bowl of fruit, or maybe you just don't eat dessert at all because it makes more "sense" to just "eat dinner until you're not hungry anymore" and you "don't want diabetes" because you don't "have a latent death wish" because you haven't "wasted your whole life anyway."

Great. Grand. Good for you. Make peach cobbler anyway, ya friggin' jerk.

Look. I know what it's like. I used to think of dessert-making as something for the blue-haired set and, like, French people and Martha Stewart and successful grownups who have their shit together enough to actually make yet another quasi-meal at the end of a long day. I still think all of that, but I also have some peach cobbler, which makes it OK that my kitchen appears as though a giant picked it up and shook it vigorously for five minutes before dropping it roughly back into place.

The point here is that peach cobbler is goddamn great, and that it's June now, which means that peaches are in season and you are going to turn some of them into cobbler or so help me I will write you one hell of an angry letter. It's easy, it's delicious, and it will finally justify the presence of that 9-inch round baking pan you've had wedged into the back of a cupboard since time immemorial. The following preparation originated as a very delicious recipe from the fine folks at Epicurious, then went through many different, progressively tastier iterations in my devastated kitchen. You'll need a bunch of peaches (I mean, obviously, duh) and a lemon, which you do not currently possess, as well as a moderate number of typical baking ingredients, which you also do not possess, but which your nearest blue-haired or well-adjusted relative certainly does.

Let's get started.

The first thing to do is preheat your oven to 425 degrees.

While you're waiting on that, prepare your peaches. A word about that, if you don't mind. And also if you do.

Here's where a recipe in a cookbook would say something like, "Slice 8 peaches into thin wedges," and you would say, "Oh, that seems pretty straightforward," and an hour later you would emerge from your home, sobbing, clutching the mangled, mushy remains of your wasted peaches in your clawed and bitter hands and holding them up reproachfully to the blind, empty heavens. And then, instead of eating delicious dessert, you would change into a black turtleneck and smoke clove cigarettes in the dark and be just the worst, all because nobody bothered to talk to you about working with peaches.

Working with peaches is a pain in the ass—especially if, as all non-synthetic humanoids do, you prefer your peaches slightly softer and juicier, and so buy softer, juicier peaches for your cobbler. Here's why. The first step in producing sliced peaches is to separate the flesh of the peach from the pit; you do this by inserting a paring knife, cutting all the way around the peach in one direction, then grasping the two halves of the peach in your hands and gently rotating them against each other until one of them separates from the pit. Then you remove the pit from the remaining half of the peach by sticking the tip of a knife or your finger under the end of the pit and levering it the hell out of there. If you do this with a ripe, juicy peach, here is what will happen: You will grasp the two halves the peach in your hands and rotate them gently against each other, and the skin of one of them will completely detach from the flesh underneath, which will remain resolutely attached to the pit and far too slimy to handle, and then your peach will be useless for slicing, period, forever and ever, world without end, amen.

You should not infer from this that if you use harder, less fully ripe peaches, preparing them will be a breeze, because it will not be. You will still accidentally pulverize at least one or two of them with your clumsy hammerhands; you will still get sticky peach juice all over your arms; you will still rue the day the first stupid peach budded on the first dumb peach tree. Hang in there. Your eventual peach cobbler, when you taste it, is going to teach you Cantonese.

So eventually, after much wrangling and cursing and cat abuse, you will have transmuted a bunch of peaches into a bunch of peach slices. In a bowl, toss your peach slices with some other stuff: a third of a cup of sugar, the zest of a whole lemon plus most of its juice, and a heaping teaspoon of cornstarch. If you want to add a couple of wee drops of vanilla extract, that's not a bad idea, but it's also not necessary. Use your hands or a big spoon for the tossing, and be gentle: You're not producing sugary peach baby food, here. Once this stuff's all tossed together and there are no pockets of dry sugar or clumps of dry cornstarch anywhere, dump this mixture into an 8- or 9-inch round baking pan and stick it in the oven for 12 minutes.

Now, while the peaches warm and soften in your oven and the lemony sugary liquid congeals into a rich, sweet goo and your head turns into a drool firehose, take a break (if you should happen to have a tube of pre-made biscuit dough laying around and are lazy) or alternatively make some (both literally and figuratively) sweet biscuit dough. Decide for yourself how you'd like to go, here; either option is going to taste good, because cooked biscuit dough tastes good. If you'd like a reason for making your own, the directions following this will produce a sweeter biscuit-y topping for your cobbler than what you'll get from the cardboard tube. Also, it's really incredibly easy, and can be completed in the 12 minutes your peaches are cooking in the oven. Also, you'll feel more like you're giving the readers of your online food column a fair return for their zero dollars.

If you'd like a reason for using dough from a tube, doing so will give you 12 precious minutes of unencumbered nosepicking time.

So, let's pretend you're making your own dough. Here's how to do that. First, in a tiny little saucepot, bring a cup of water to a boil. While that's happening, in a bowl, stir together a cup of flour, half a cup of sugar, a heaping teaspoon of baking powder, and two big, generous pinches of salt. The salt is important, here: Your peach mixture is going to be sweet and tart; the ice cream you're eventually going to scoop on top of this thing is going to be very sweet; if salted properly, the biscuit-y crust will, when you taste all the elements in a single bite, balance all that sweetness and literally—literally!—cause your head to emit visible light. So, really, two generous pinches of salt. Don't be afraid.

Now, get a stick of cold butter out of your refrigerator and hack it into small pieces. How many? How big? Who cares! Just, cut a stick of cold butter into small pieces and, with your fingers, knead and pinch and crush these small butter pieces into your dry flour mix until your dry flour mix looks like it has a bunch of crushed little wads of butter in it, because that's what it has in it, and also your wedding ring, and you should probably get that out of there.

Is that little pot of water boiling? Good. Gently turning and stirring the flour mix with a fork in one hand all the while, drizzle some of that boiling water into the mix until it just, just hangs together as a dough, rather than a bowl of flour and sugar that got rained on in some places. (Note: You'll probably wind up using well less than half the water you boiled.) The butter will melt and disappear into the mix as you do this. There. You're done making biscuit dough. If you wanted to make some biscuits with your biscuit dough, this would be a good biscuit dough for making some biscuits.

And hey whoa wouldja lookit that, the timer is beeping and your peaches are done in the oven. Get them out of there; they're soft and good-smelling and also scalding hot so please do not dunk your face into them even though that is all you want out of life at this precise moment. Scoop big, glorious spoonfuls of your dough onto the peaches (or, if you used pre-made dough, just cover the peaches with a bunch of dough-discs, you lazy, lazy person), taking precisely no care to ensure even coverage of the entire baking pan. Once all the dough's on there, stick the pan back in the oven for a half-hour. You may now enjoy the unencumbered nosepicking time previously stolen away from you by your own irrational urge to make your own goddamn biscuit dough.

If your oven has a window and a working oven light, you'll know your peach cobbler is nearing completion when the biscuit dough has spread across the entire surface of the pan's contents and begun turning golden-brown. Alternatively, you'll know it's nearly done when the state of Georgia lifts itself off the continental bedrock, folds itself into an anthropoid shape, and appears outside of your window playing "In Your Eyes" on a boombox. In any case, eventually the timer will go off; yank the cobbler out of the oven, scoop portions of it into bowls, and serve it with vanilla ice cream.

So, look. You've probably eaten lots of things in your life. Stands to reason, right? I mean, unless you're the readingest infant who ever lived, then either you have eaten thousands upon thousands of things in your life or you're the readingest ghost who ever unlived. Many of the things you have eaten were probably very tasty. Delicious, even. This goddamn peach cobbler with vanilla fucking ice cream—hot and sweet and tart, then crumbly and crispy and salty, then cool and creamy and sweet, all the while rich and gooey and somehow just a little bit indecent ... maybe it's not the single tastiest thing you have ever eaten. But, then, why are you rubbing handfuls of it on your chest? Why are you crouched over the empty baking pan, sobbing uncontrollably? Are you always like this?

Weirdo. Make another one. Your guests would like some, too.

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Albert Burneko is an eating enthusiast and father of two. His work can be found destroying everything of value in his crumbling home. Peevishly correct his foolishness at albertburneko@gmail.com. You can find lots more Foodspin at foodspin.deadspin.com.

Image by Devin Rochford.

The gunman who killed at least four people in a shooting rampage at Santa Monica College yesterday had previously been hospitalized and treated for talking about wanting to harm someone.

CNN is reporting that the unidentified shooter was treated for mental health issues "a couple of years ago" but sources aren't sure whether he hospitalized himself or whether he was involuntarily committed.

The FBI has joined local police in investigating the gunman to determine his motives. Investigators believe he first shot and killed his father and brother, then set the house on fire. Dressed in all-black with an AR-15 style rifle and a handgun, authorities believe he then carjacked a woman and demanded she that she drive him to Santa Monica College. As they drove, the gunman shot at a public bus and a Ford Explorer, injuring and killing multiple victims.

The gunman got out of the car and let the woman go once they reached the school. He ran through the school to the library, shooting at people as he went. He was shot and killed by police officers, and died on a sidewalk.

[CNN, photo via AP]

Like most things in Brazil, prostitution is legal.

Sex work even has its own holiday — June 2nd was International Day of the Prostitute. To raise awareness about safe prostitution and to work against the stigma that surrounds the profession, Brazil recently launched an online campaign called "I'm happy being a prostitute." And then they quickly canceled it.

The ads, which carried slogans promoting safe sex like "I cannot be seen without a condom, my love," became a lightning-rod of controversy in the progressive, but still deeply religious country. (Perhaps Mr. Balls could have advocated on their behalf?)

Health Minister Alexandre Padilha dropped the campaign last Tuesday after public pressure, telling reporters that even though the ads were done to promote safe sex, it wasn't necessarily in the right taste for the country.

"The role of the ministry is to have specific content to encourage prevention among sex workers, who are a very vulnerable group," Padilha said.

With the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics both heading to the country, Brazil is expecting to see a massive spike in its prostitution industry. Sex workers have already begun taking free English lessons (because Brazil is awesome) so they can cater to the international clientele that will shortly be coming in their fair nation.

She drove a Mercedes GL4 SUV and rented a five-bedroom, four-bathroom Mediterranean-style home in Scarsdale for $13,000 a month. She purchased a Friesian trotter horse named Magi, but later sold it because it wasn't good for jumping.

Meet Andi Sanderlin: mother, equestrian, and the alleged head of a multi-million dollar weed operation.

Sanderlin was arrested May 20 on narcotics charges alleging that she ran a Queens grow house with about 3,000 plants worth around $3 million. She has been locked up in Brooklyn since her arrest and faces charges with a minimum of 10 years.

As any pot-growing suburban mom of three should, Sanderlin has an interesting backstory. The New York Times reports that the blonde 45-year-old grew up Andrea Shmalz in Virginia Beach with her mother and stepfather. In a neat bit of foreshadowing, friends say she was a bit of a pothead. She moved to Iowa to live with her dad, got kicked out of high school, moved back to Virginia Beach, got pregnant at 16, and finally, moved to New York, where she lived on Beekman Street at one point.

Not much is known about how she went from teen mom to mom kingpin, but her lawyer describes her as "highly intelligent." According to the Smoking Gun, she boarded one horse and leased another at Twin Lakes Farm, a Bronxville riding academy where she liked to ride with her daughter. She won several ribbons in a horse show there. In addition to her Mercedes, she owns a Jeep Liberty and a Chevrolet van. She once had a Maserati registered in her name. She told everyone she was an interior designer and that she sold baby furniture.

Sanderlin's empire crumbled when cops nabbed five men running a similar operation in Manhattan. One man flipped and told police that he knew a woman named Andi who drove a Mercedes SUV and who had fronted him plants and cash. Federal agents staked out her home and were apparently very unsubtle - neighbors noticed them, confronted them, called 911 and got confirmation from Scarsdale police.

Agents also tailed her to the Queens grow house and identified other grow houses via her Con Edison bill, which at $9,000 a month, paid in cash, was a bit suspicious, employees indicated. She apparently owed about $14,000 in unpaid bills for other warehouses she had rented in the Bronx and Brooklyn. The warehouses were registered under the name Fantastic Enterprises. One of those warehouses — and you really can't make this stuff up — was at 420 Tiffany Street in the Bronx.

As DEA agents arrested Sanderlin, another team staking out her house stopped the nanny as she left and found $7,900 in cash in her purse. US News reports the cash was intended for Sanderlin's boyfriend, the father of her youngest daughter. Agents found an additional $6,000 and books on growing weed and laundering money in the house.

Sanderlin has pled not guilty to the charges and is being held without bail.

[NYT, photo via DEA]

Dorothy Rabinowitz will not be intimidated by the all-powerful bicycle lobby. She will stand in defiance, even as her beloved city is crushed under the thumb of a psychotic mob of cyclists who feel like they "don't owe you anything."

No Dorothy, they just don't owe you anything.

After her op-ed video last week, which was widely (and maturely) dissected and discussed by this outlet and a myriad of others, Rabinowitz returned to her perch behind the Wall Street Journal op-ed tele-desk to reaffirm her bravery and her stance against... wait for it... bike terrorists.

To her critics, who say that the bike-sharing program included a long process of community input:

It's quite laughable. Whom are they asking? The people you really need to talk to are the policeman. They know the torrent of complaints and helpless screams.

To the weak politicians who were bowled over by the "all-powerful bike lobby":

They were "terrorized by this thing that really exists."

Note, at this point in the video, the usually pliant host begins to say, "Oh come on," but Dorothy interrupts her because Dorothy doesn't put up with that shit.

And to everyone flipping her the bird:

You would know if you walked in the streets of the city and occasionally asked a bike rider, who was careening down the sidewalk in all of his splendid self-affirming environmental helpist mood, to please not ride on the sidewalk. The answer is invariably an upraised third finger...and I thought that the blogosphere response beautifully captured the general sense of, 'We dont owe you anything. We are the virtuous of the world.'

Actually, all kidding aside, Rabinowitz is kinda being a boss about all this. She won't back down, even as her argument spirals into strange Rand-ian insanity.

Perhaps, in a bike-scarred future, a barren landscape ruled by a virtuous elite, we'll cry out for Dorothy, and she will shake her cold head and turn her back on us. She will ascend to her mountaintop keep without regret, finally free of fear.

An Ohio mom wept as she recalled how a North Ridgeville Humane Officer shot and killed a litter of kittens in her backyard earlier this week while her children watched on in horror.

The unidentified woman says Humane Officer Barry Accorti arrived at her home after she contacted the local police department about an aggressive feral cat living with five kittens in a woodpile outside her house.

After informing the woman that all shelters were full up and the kittens would be going to "kitty heaven," Accorti allegedly took out his gun and shot the two-month-old animals point-blank.

The woman says her kids had witnessed the massacre from a nearby window, and one of them rushed to her side visibly distraught crying, "Mommy, mommy, he shot the kitty."

In a statement released yesterday on its Facebook page, the North Ridgeville Police Department claimed the mother "was aware that the feral cats were going to be euthanized but did not expect it to occur on her property."

The statement went on to say that while the department "recognizes the concerns of those who believe feral cats should not be killed for simply trying to survive," it was ultimately decided that Officer Accorti's actions were "appropriate" and no disciplinary measures would be imposed.

The Facebook page was subsequently inundated with comments from people taking issue with the department's stance, prompting a follow-up post aimed, ostensibly, at providing "a place to speak out for or against what is being reported."

After hundreds of comments, the majority of which were not favorable to the NRPD's position, the post mysteriously disappeared.

"All 1,000 posts were taken down from yesterday???? Why?????" asked one follower. "Is it because 99% of the people who commented DISAGREE with the chiefs decision? What a disappointment."

In a response to the commenter, a police rep said the post was not removed by the department but was mysteriously deleted overnight, along with the comments.

The U.S. Air Force's F-35 fighter jet, which is still in development, is projected to cost us $1.4 million per hour for the next 25 years.

One night this past December, sitting at his laptop in his bedroom in Winchester, Kentucky, Deric Lostutter donned a plastic Guy Fawkes mask, recently purchased on eBay. He turned on the camera of his souped-up gaming laptop and cued a computerized voice to start speaking.

"Greetings, citizens of the world," the pre-written script said. Behind his mask, Lostutter bobbed his head, as if he were speaking along. "We are Anonymous. We are KnightSec." He was no longer the hard-partying, chronically underemployed 26-year-old rapper who lived in his girlfriend's house on the outskirts of a small town. He was KYAnonymous, crusading leader of KnightSec, an offshoot of the infamous Anonymous hacktivist collective.

And KYAnonymous had a new cause. Lostutter had been reading a lot online about Steubenville, Ohio, where two members of the local high school football team stood charged with raping an intoxicated 16-year-old girl. "I literally actually cried over what they did to this girl," he told me recently. "Here is this bright, lovely young girl whose life is forever changed because these people wanted to have a good night, it's bullshit."

So rather than just angrily tweeting about it, Lostutter was declaring war on Steubenville. "Op Roll Red Roll Engaged," the computer voice warned ("Roll Red Roll" is Steubenville High’s slogan). "January 1st. Expect us." Lostutter posted the video to YouTube and tweeted it from his KYAnonymous Twitter account.

Not long after, one of KnightSec's supporters tweeted a photo back at him. "She was on the treadmill at the gym, and she took a picture, and on all the TVs on the wall, I was on every one," Lostutter said. "I was like, 'Fuck.'"

As KYAnonymous, Lostutter had already won some renown for KnightSec by attacking revenge-porn king Hunter Moore and helping shut down a Westboro Baptist Church protest. But the decision to take on the Steubenville case unleashed more powerful forces than he had ever encountered before: international outrage, legions of vigilante followers, and a glaring media spotlight.

It was KnightSec that would obtain the video of a Steubenville teen joking about the rape, turning an alcohol-blurred local crime into a visual that cable news could loop like disaster footage, crystallizing public opinion against the offenders. It was also KnightSec that helped create a toxically false, conspiratorial dossier on innocent parties surrounding the case.

And it was KYAnonymous himself who found an FBI tactical team in his driveway in April, preparing to search his home, investigating the hack of a website during the Steubenville campaign. When he called me at the end of May, telling me he'd been raided and that he wanted to tell his story, I flew to Kentucky to meet him. Was Anonymous' Steubenville campaign a righteous force for justice or an act of mass bullying, doing more harm than good in the town it targeted? I wanted to hear Lostutter's side of the story in the light of day, mask off.

On a recent Saturday, Lostutter slouched in a big sofa in the living room of his girlfriend's house. He wore jeans, and his scrawny tattooed arms poked out from a black t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of Nightshade Records, the tiny local record label that releases his rap albums. Lostutter is a proud country boy, owner of a small arsenal of firearms, a motorcycle, a blue Chevy pick-up, and a hyperactive pitbull named Thor that he swatted profanely off the couch whenever he jumped on it. Sliding glass doors offered a swaying panorama of chest-high bluegrass, in which sat a couple of outbuildings surrounded by clusters of vehicles and old farm equipment. This was not the stereotypical hacker hideout.

“I don't really get down with violence toward women or rape or anything like that,” Lostutter said. He was explaining why he’d felt the need to intervene in Steubenville. “It seemed to me like this girl was taken advantage of. And the people I used to run with and hang out with, and how I was raised, if you did this at my house, or the house I was at, I was going to kick your fucking ass. Period. I was going to take you outside and beat the hell out of you. I can't do that over the internet, so I did the next best thing.”

On April, 15th, the digital beatdown he’d help deliver over Steubenville came back to haunt him. Lostutter had just come back into the house from an early morning turkey hunt among the woods at the edge of the property when Thor jumped at the door. Lostutter opened it and saw what he thought was a FedEx truck. Instead, a swat team poured out, about a dozen guys in full tactical gear who told him to "get the fuck down."

"I got down in the driveway and I yelled at them not to shoot my dog—he jumps a lot but he don't bite," Lostutter said. His brother, who lives in the house too, was upstairs at the time and thought they were being robbed. "He had his .45 in his hand, so thank God he didn't get shot and die."

As Lostutter, his brother, and his brother's girlfriend stood handcuffed in the driveway, agents combed through the house and carted away electronics. An agent sat Lostutter down on the back porch.

"You know why we're here. Who are you?" the agent said.

"I'm KYAnonymous. I know why you're here," Lostutter replied.

During the Steubenville campaign, a Steubenville High School sports fansite had been hacked, and Lostutter was now caught up in the resulting hacking and identity theft investigation. As we talked about the raid, Lostutter's girlfriend came into the living room. (She had come home from work at the very end of the raid that day.) She asked nervously if I would be including where they lived in my article. Lostutter had made a lot more enemies than just the feds as KYanonymous, and she was afraid of what they'd do now that they knew his identity.

“You said half of Steubenville hates you,” she said to Lostutter. "I'm worried about my dogs, that someone's going to come and take my dogs or egg my house."

Lostutter isn’t worried about that. "I feel pretty comfortable in taking care of myself," he told me later. "I'm a registered gun owner. I've been in my share of scraps." He’d run briefly with a gang in Illinois, years ago. He keeps a pair of brass knuckles in the cupholder of his Chevy.

There is no right or wrong way to become Anonymous. It's a loosely-organized group that anyone can swear allegiance to with a hashtag. But the way Lostutter joined Anonymous was definitely not anonymous. One night in September, 2012, he got drunk and created a Kentucky Anonymous Facebook page, and a Twitter account which became his online handle: KYAnonymous. He didn't disable the location feature of Twitter at first so all of his tweets came labeled with "sent from Winchester, Kentucky."

"The rule is I should never be around a computer when I drink," he said.

Lostutter had long been interested in technology, but more in the nuts and bolts of computer hardware than hacktivist causes. His interest in Anonymous was sparked after watching the documentary We Are Legion on YouTube this past fall. We Are Legion tells the story of Anonymous' rise with triumphant hyperbole: Anonymous began as a mob of 16-year-olds mucking about in the cesspool of the online message board 4chan, harassing bloggers and trolling forums. Eventually, as We Are Legion tells it, Anonymous blossomed into noble Internet freedom-fighters, taking down Paypal to support Wikileaks, helping spark the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. (I have a brief appearance in We Are Legion.)

Lostutter had always been vocal about politics, arguing with friends at parties and on Facebook. He identifies as a "Constitutionalist.” He opposed the Iraq war, but is a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment who warns that Obama is trying to disarm U.S. citizens. He is a fan of Alex Jones.

“I was like damn, I do everything that these guys do without a mask already. I'm out here preaching all the wrong shit that's going on in the country,” he said. Anonymous, he decided, was where he belonged.

Lostutter has not had an easy life. His parents divorced when he was 7, and he spent the next few years bouncing between his father's house in North Carolina and his mother's in Illinois. During that time, Losutter said, his mother, an ex-Hell's Angel, went through a "pretty bad bout of alcoholism" and ended up in an abusive relationship. His dad "had some anger issues, and we didn't always see eye to eye." Lostutter graduated high school when he was 21.

A few years ago, he hit an especially rough patch. He spent a year homeless in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was working delivering pizza, sleeping in the car he used for his job.

"I'd just gone through a really bad breakup and so I was at the bars constantly, drinking heavily and partying, just trying to forget the fact that I was homeless to begin with," he said. In 2009 he moved to Winchester, where his mom lives, and started putting his life back together. He got a job at a pawnshop, where he met his current girlfriend. She'd come in looking for some stuff of hers' that had been stolen.

"That's the kind of person you want to date at a pawnshop—the one who's looking for stuff and not selling stuff," Lostutter said. "I invited her over, and she never left."

Last fall, his girlfriend’s father died and she inherited his big house on a few acres of property, which Lostutter refers to as The Farm. That’s where they live now. Lostutter took me on a tour of the grounds: We careened down a tiny path in his Chevy to a defunct railroad line, and fished half-heartedly on the banks of a lily pad-clogged pond while drinking Heinekens. “We’re gonna redneck you out,” he said.

In December, after he'd declared himself part of Anonymous, Lostutter learned that Hunter Moore was resurrecting his defunct revenge-porn site, Is Anyone Up. The first incarnation of Is Anyone Up caused a scandal in early 2012, but this time around it would be worse. Moore boasted to BetaBeat, it would include a mapping function that would lead people right to the door of the people who had been posted, nude, without their consent. Lostutter decided to take on Hunter Moore; his friend had been posted once on the old site and it had come close to ruining her life.

Lostutter threatened Moore on Twitter, and Moore responded with characteristic bluster: "You can't do shit my whole life is public. you fuckin tard."

So Lustutter launched Operation Hunt Hunter. He made a video with Anonymous’ spooky robot voice, warning Hunter Moore he would be held "accountable for his actions." He promoted it on Twitter and in Anonymous’ IRC chat rooms, and Operation Hunt Hunter took on a life of its own. Blogs and news sites picked up the story. Before long, Moore’s website was completely hacked, and his personal information leaked online. (Lostutter said he didn't hack it, and doesn't recall who did.) KYAnonymous was an online hero to anyone who hated Hunter Moore, which was pretty much everyone.

"It was kind of personal between me and Hunter Moore," Lostutter said. "My friend was on Is Anyone Up, and now you challenged me personally? You think you're a God? I'm gonna take you down a notch, I'm that kind of person."

The day after the hack, Lostutter tweeted from KYAnonymous, "#Knightsec has been born… add it to your bio.” Like Anonymous, anyone could be a part of KnightSec, but a rotating core of activists did most of the work. The name was a reappropriation of the slur “White Knight,” used by jaded internet trolls to mock naïve online do-gooders. As KYAnonymous, Lostutter was one of the leaders of Anonymous’ turn towards fighting rape and cyberbullying, an odd reformation for a group that started on 4chan.

Later in December, Michelle McKee, a 50-year-old survivor of sexual abuse, tweeted him information about Steubenville. He read up on the Steubenville case, which had already begun to draw attention from the national media, and was touched. Anyone who's been online in the last year knows the basics of Steubenville: Two football players, 17-year-old Trent Mays and 16-year-old Ma'lik Richmond, were charged with repeatedly raping a 16-year-old girl while she was drunk at a series of house parties on August 11th, 2012. Other students had tweeted callous jokes about the victim, and passed around photos and videos. A crusading crime blogger named Alexandria Goddard reposted the tweets, accusing the town of protecting the perpetrators and witnesses because they were popular football players. The New York Times picked the story. This past March, Mays and Richmond were found guilty, and a new grand jury has been convened to see if any other crimes were committed.

Lostutter said he could relate to the girl’s victimization at the hands of two football players, because his mother had once dated a guy who abused her. He also sensed something fishy with the lack of charges outside of the two players accused. Living in Winchester, where the highlight of the year is the annual Beer Cheese Festival, he knew how things worked in small towns. "The town of Steubenville has been good at keeping this quiet and their star football team protected," he wrote in KnightSec's first Steubenville statment. Sixteen witnesses refused to cooperate with the investigation.

He’d read online that witnessing a crime without reporting it was a misdemeanor, and he saw the callous jokes and photos shared by other students online. So why had the county sheriff told reporters he couldn't charge any of them?

"He was like, 'I don't know that they broke any other law than being stupid,'" Lostutter said. "You can't really be that fucking country to say that shit. I just Googled the law they broke!"

Lostutter began with the video because he knew this might catch the media’s attention and bring a spotlight on the case, just as it had to Hunter Moore. Lostutter is adamant that throughout his career as a hacktivist he never hacked anything himself. He was a hype man, making videos, launching campaigns, and obsessively tweeting about them—he would "weaponize the media," as he calls it, and inspire other people to join and do the dirty work.

“People go online and they read news sites because they want to know what's going on," he said. "And if it ain't from a reputable site then they ain't gonna believe it. So I gotta make sure that anything I do gets put on these reputable sites.”

In this case, Lostutter’s video went from his bedroom to national news so quickly because he expertly tapped into widespread suspicions that something was not right in Steubenville. The popular narrative that emerged pitted Steubenville against everyone else: Steubenville citizens felt besieged by meddling outsiders; everyone else felt the disturbing tweets and photos produced that night revealed something sinister about the town, which residents were trying to cover back up. The tension was captured best in a New York Times article that featured Steubenville’s head football coach growling at a reporter who had inquired about the case: "You're going to get yours. And if you don't get yours, somebody close to you will." Shadowy hackers threatening the town from cyberspace was an almost too-perfect escalation.

“We’re not really the judge nor the jury,” KYAnonymous, masked and with his voice disguised, told an Anderson Cooper 360 reporter, “But it’s fair to say we are the executioner. They incriminated themselves by posting that information online. They took part in criminal activities. If you think they’re guilty, that’s because it’s your conscience telling you they’re guilty.”

The video that launched Operation Roll Red Roll on December included a dramatic ultimatum: If all of the students who were complicit in the rape—bystanders and perpetrators alike—didn’t issue a public apology by January 1, Anonymous would release the “names, social security numbers, addresses, relatives, and phone numbers” of “every single member of the football team, those involved, the coaches, the principal, and more.” The information dump never happened, and Lostutter now claims he never intended to release the private information of minors. Instead, he said, it was a “scare tactic” to get students to come forward with more information. Information did come, but it was not mainly from the students. When the Operation Roll Red Roll video went viral, KnightSec was inundated with thousands of anonymous tips. At one point, 300 users filled an IRC chat room Lostutter had created to organize the operation.

"It was insane," said Cassandra Fairbanks, an anti-rape activist heavily involved in KnightSec at the time. "People were coming forward with all kinds of links. I was getting contacted by people who had other stories of corruption, who had their rapes thrown aside." Fairbanks lived in nearby Pittsburgh. She was the administrator of the Occupy Steubenville Facebook page, and was instrumental in organizing a 2,000-person protest that took place in Steubenville in late December. Armed with the tips, Lostutter began conducting a real-time, crowdsourced investigation. He tweeted out information he deemed credible from the KYAnonymous account. Eventually he gained 30,000 followers, and they acted as a powerful microphone.

When I interviewed KYAnonymous over Skype during the campaign, he explained how he vetted his information, which came mostly over Twitter:

"I consider the source. If I think it interferes with the original story and they have two followers [on Twitter]… then I don't pay attention unless I hear it from another person. If it can correlate somehow then I'll put it out there for the world to judge. Then the world judges and says ‘Yes this happens in our town, no it doesn't.’

If it were just Lostutter, his tweets might have gotten lost in the ether. But he worked in parallel with the website Local Leaks, a Wikileaks-style website that compiled many of these same tips into a big dossier called the Steubenville Files. Local Leaks is run by Christopher Doyon, also known as "Commander X," a longtime Anonymous hacktivist who made a dramatic escape to Canada from California in 2010 to avoid federal hacking charges. He's been on the lam ever since. Doyon is not a reliable source. Once, he boasted to me in an interview that he had access to "Every classified database in the U.S." Still, Doyon's site became a go-to information source for many interested in the Steubenville story, its claims repeated widely by respectable news blogs.

Presented with the Steubenville Files, journalists seized on the narrative that Anonymous was exposing the Steubenville rape case, just as they had exposed military contractors who had attacked Wikileaks in the past. Anonymous publicized disturbing facts: The victim said she had been drugged; one of the parties the victim had attended that night was held at an assistant football coach’s home. They posted the ugly tweets from witnesses, and the infamous photo of Mays and Richmond holding the victim like a sack between them.

But the most explosive facts Anonymous “uncovered” were false. Lostutter and Local Leaks painted a lurid fantasy where "Jane Doe's" rape was just one of many carried out by a self-identifying "rape crew" of football players, aided and abetted by coaches, law enforcement and Steubenville government officials. A child porn ring, an illegal gambling ring, and a drug ring were all allegedly tied to the rape. Steubenville was a Midwestern hellhole out of a Coen brothers movie.

To date, no proof of any of these allegations has surfaced. Many fell apart at the barest inspection. “It was badly written fiction,” said Lee Stranahan, a conservative journalist who has covered Steubenville obsessively on his blog. He believes the media ignored the facts of the case and built up a sensationalistic narrative that fit Anonymous' crusade. “That whole narrative where they were covered up or protected because they were football players, I didn’t see any evidence of that whatsoever. These guys were arrested, they were pulled out of bed the night before school started.”

Stranahan emerged as the harshest critic of KYAnonymous and his Steubenville campaign. He is not exactly neutral himself, writing for right-wing propaganda outlet Breitbart.com and appearing in Breitbart’s 2012 documentary "Occupy Unmasked," a hit job against Occupy that painted Anonymous as dangerous cyberterrorists. But he is also a competent reporter who self-funded multiple reporting trips to Steubenville and developed sources within the community. And it should be clear to anyone who reads the Steubenville Files today that it is total bullshit.

One of the central targets of the “Rape Crew” conspiracy theory was James “Jim” Parks, the webmaster of RollRedroll.com, a Steubenville High School sports fanpage not officially connected to the school. On December 23, 2012, RollRedRoll.com was hacked and defaced with Lostutter’s KYAnonymous video. Parks’ email account was hacked and his private emails leaked in a .zip file to the internet. This was what brought the FBI to Lostutter’s door in April.

Lostutter and other KnightSec supporters spun the contents of Jim Parks' emails into more proof of a Rape Crew fantasy. In a statement accompanying the hack, KnightSec declared that there was possible child porn in Parks' email, as well as a photo of Savanah Deitrich, another high-profile rape victim. (The woman in the photo was clearly not Deitrich.) From this, the statement concluded, Parks was "possibly hiring the team to go to different parties and send him pics of girls they take advantage of."

Parks decried the “terrorist group” who had attacked him. “The outrageous claims they made while controlling this site were totally false, completely absurd, and totally unfounded,” he said in a statement after the hack.

These days, Lostutter no longer stands by his claims of a sinister football player-child porn ring led by Jim Parks. During the raid, his FBI interrogator informed him that the women in Parks' email were over 18. The interrogator explained that by spreading Parks’ emails and the photos inside, Lostutter had actually created more victims.

“I never looked at it this way,” Lostutter said.

Discussing Parks was one of the few times Lostutter's conviction faltered. "I feel bad, if I could talk to the dude and say sorry, I'd tell him I'm sorry for putting his name out there and putting his business out there," he said. But that doesn't mean he wouldn't do it all over again.

“If I had to go to bat for a victim, I'd do it,” he told me. “Even if I was wrong I would do it. The good guy stands up for the victim.”

The facts were secondary to the mission of avenging Jane Doe for Lostutter. But it’s puzzling why so many others repeated Lostutter's outlandish claims so credulously during the height of the Steubenville story. It may be a testament the power of the mystique surrounding Anonymous, or the irresistible urge to play amateur detective when faced with dubious digital evidence, recently on embarassing display during the Boston bombing manhunt. Stranahan said he believes that Lostutter’s heart was in the right place, but he was caught up in something bigger than he could control.

“I don't think Anonymous should be getting any credit for doing anything good here,” he said. “They did nothing good. They clearly raised awareness, but they spread a false narrative and attacked a guy who had nothing to do with it.”

Despite the false accusations, others still believe that the light Lostutter helped shine on Steubenville was instrumental to the convictions of the two boys, and to the convening of a new grand jury investigation to see if any other crimes had been committed that night.

"If it wasn't for Anonymous," a Steubenville bar patron Yahoo in March, "this would've been swept under the rug." Lostutter and other KnightSec members repeatedly claimed that the victim herself had voiced support of Operation Roll Red Roll through friends on Twitter.

Waiting in the security line at Newark International Airport on my way down to Kentucky, I got a call from another one of Lostutter's biggest supporters, the comedian Roseanne Barr. Barr has emerged as an unlikely Anonymous booster, something that she told me stems from her early involvement in Occupy Wall Street. In an interview with KYAnonymous on her internet radio show she’d gushed that he had "restored my faith in males."

“I think he totally spoke with the intelligence and the voice of a survivor of abuse,” Barr told me. “He is like a lot of these guys that are just like, ‘Wait a minute, I got to be a man and stand up for this. I can't look at this anyway but this one way.’ I think he's brave. Going against power for the right thing, that's scary.”

Even as he spent more and more time on Steubenville, Lostutter struggled to keep friends and family in the dark about his alter ego. When his girlfriend would ask why he was spending so much time on the computer, he simply replied he was "working." At the car dealership where he worked at the time, he spent much of his time hunched over his computer, organizing the campaign. (It was probably not a coincidence that he only lasted a few months there once Operation Roll Red Roll took off.)

Sometimes his online activities would intrude on his real-life ones. In mid-December, fresh off the success of the Hunter Moore campaign, Lostutter launched an operation against the Westboro Church, which had announced it would be protesting the funerals of victims of the Newtown, Conn. school shooting. Someone hacked the Twitter account of Westboro matriach Shirley Phelps. Lostutter was at a strip club with his girlfriend when it happened, but that didn't keep him from gloating on Twitter.

"I tweeted, 'Shirley, I'm in the strip club and these boobs reminded of yours," Lostutter said with a laugh. "That shit got 300 retweets right off the bat."

Once, he was at the supermarket with his girlfriend when someone messaged him on Twitter with dire news: The person claimed an inside source had revealed the Department of Justice was hunting Lostutter: He’d seen “KYAnonymous” written on a whiteboard at an FBI office, somewhere in Ohio.

"I just turned bright white like a fucking ghost," Lostutter said. He had long suspected he’d be targeted—all prominent Anonymous members eventually were. But the realization that it was finally happening sent chills down his spine. His girlfriend asked him if he was OK. "I said yeah, I'm fine, I just ate something."

If the FBI raid had a silver lining, it was the lifting of this weight of secrecy and uncertainty from Lostutter's shoulders.

"The FBI, coming to raid you—they're threatening to put you in prison, but they're also freeing you," Lostutter told me. We were sitting at the Waterfront Restaurant and Lounge, Lostutter's favorite Winchester bar, on a sprawling deck overlooking the muddy banks of the Kentucky River.

Lostutter turned to a woman sitting next to us. "What did you think about that case in Steubenville where the football team raped that girl?" he asked. "And what did you think about that stuff where the hackers took down the team's website?"

The woman gasped. She had heard about the case, but not the hacking. She asked, "Who hacked the website?"

"Some good-looking kid who's sitting at The Waterfront with a reporter next to him writing a story about him," Lostutter said with a huge grin. Later, Lostutter relayed that he had overheard the woman walking around telling other patrons "there's some hacker here.”

Lostutter later asked me not to report the hacking comment. He is adamant that he did not actually hack or help plan the RollRedRoll.com hack. A hacker named BatCat later took responsibility in the Steubenville Herald-Star, saying he broke into the site in 15 minutes by guessing the password.

Lostutter said BatCat approached him one day during Op Roll Red Roll and offered to hack the site: "I formed an IRC channel, BatCat jumped in, said he could hack the site. I said OK, whatever. Everybody says they can hack." However, in our first phone call Lostutter had told me that he logged into the administrator panel of RollRedRoll.com using a password BatCat gave him, then changed the password. Lostutter said he admitted this to the FBI during the raid. This was almost certainly illegal.

Operation Roll Red Roll caused a furor among Steubenville residents, most of whom, it’s safe to say, had little idea what Anonymous was before it came to town. After the initial shock, some began their own public relations campaigns to counteract KYAnonymous’. At the end of January, I spoke with Nicole Lamantia, a longtime Steubenville resident and the wife of a Steubenville High School football coach, who had created a blog to combat the rumors.

One involved a relative of hers, who had been accused on Local Leaks of having orchestrated a complicated revenge plot to set Jane Doe up to be raped. The names and photos of the relative and her boyfriend were splashed prominently on the page. But the girl was out of town the night of the rape and had absolutely nothing to do with it, Lamantia said.

Lamantia said, "You have this 16-year-old girl who lives a normal teenage life, and all of a sudden her name and picture are up there. And granted Anonymous isn't dangerous. But you've got 2,000 people at a rally and you can't guarantee that there are no dangerous people in that rally. Her parents were petrified—what if some crazy person is trying to harm her because they believe what's on Local Leaks?"

When Lamantia launched her blog, she was quickly attacked by KnightSec supporters. She singled out KYAnonymous in particular for terrorizing the town. "We were all kind of bullied into silence by him," she said. "We were afraid that if we disagreed we would get hacked. He didn't try to back up his facts. He didn't take the time to reach out to any of us to hear the other side, and that's upsetting to me."

Anonymous' shadow over the trial may have had the opposite effect than Lostutter intended. The prosecutor in charge of the case, Marianne Hemmeter, said that Anonymous’ attacks had made her job harder. In a press conference after the trial, she said: “We had pretty good working relationships with some of the witnesses that you heard from, but once Anonymous hit, there was a chilling effect.”

But most of the downsides of KnightSec’s campaign have been overshadowed by the undisputedly spectacular leak in early January of a video of a Steubenville football player, Michael Nodianos, drunkenly joking about the rape. When Lostutter began Operation Roll Red Roll, he had been shown a screen shot of the video and told to keep an eye out for it. One day, a random Twitter account tweeted him to say they had an interesting video but didn't want to give it to the Steubenville authorities for fear it would be covered up.

"It clicked for me as soon as I seen that screenshot pass in the video," Lostutter said. "I was like, that's the fucking screenshot, I found the video. Yes!"

The video exploded. Nodianos' disgusting jokes cycled over and over on cable news: “She is so raped right now.... They raped her harder than that cop raped Marcellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction." Although Nodianos was not present during any crime and, his attorney claims, didn’t even know the victim, the video did more than anything else to make Steubenville a household name.

The video wasn’t forensic evidence of a crime, but of the attitude that could allow something like the rape to happen over and over again. When people talk about how Anonymous “exposed” Steubenville, they can’t mean the facts of this case, which were utterly botched by KnightSec and its allies. What they mean is that Anonymous exposed how sexual assault is a bigger issue than bad people doing bad things. That it is enabled and even celebrated by a culture that tells young men it’s OK to laugh off a horrific rape as harmless late-night debauchery, to be instagrammed and tweeted about, then expects the rest of us to feel bad for the perpetrators when they're punished. That’s the valuable lesson of this video, and KYAnonymous alone had uncovered it.

As the Steubenville story got bigger, Operation Roll Red Roll went out of control. The Nodianos video had raised the expectations on KYAnonymous and attracted another flood of frenzied supporters. And when the January 1 deadline Lostutter set in his original video passed with neither apologies from the football players nor the promised information bomb, people began to take things into their own hands. There were death threats to football players. The sheriff said people in Guy Fawkes masks were going door-to-door terrorizing residents.

Lostutter tried to rein things in, encouraging followers to distance themselves from the more violent tactics. But the anarchic structure of Anonymous that had helped him attract mass support was now working against him.

“Half of Anonymous is like 16-year-old kids so they can do whatever the hell they want and you can't tell them nothing," Lostutter said. "It sucked as far as that went because it made me look bad."

Lostutter was simultaneously becoming distracted by an increasingly vociferous gang of critics and haters. A hacker named IcanHazCandy and a rival group called Team Intricate worked day and night to discredit his findings, out his identity, and confuse his allies by sowing misinformation.

By the end of January, Lostutter decided decided he'd had enough. He was sick of the trolls, and of constantly looking over his shoulder. He wanted to spend more time with his girlfriend. Lostutter announced on Twitter that he was going dark.

“Basically I just wanted to really wanted to focus on life for a while,” he said. This would not be as easy shutting down a Twitter account. Minutes after he announced his retirement, a newly-created Twitter account tweeted at him: "Why would you do that, Deric Lostutter of Winchester, KY? And what are you going to do without your twitter followers?!"

Lostutter doesn't know how his identity leaked—he suspects an angry ex-girlfriend or a local Winchester rival who learned his identity back when all his tweets still all said “Winchester” on them. Terrified, he gathered his Anonymous mask, flag, and newspaper clippings about his work as KYAnonymous and burned them outside his girlfriend’s house.

“That’s what I see on TV, they burn everything,” he said. “They're getting raided, they investigate for murder or shit like that, they've got a barrel out back and all their clothes are in that motherfucker.”

Now Lee Stranahan and his other opponents picked up their attacks, armed with information about his real life. They suggested he was making money off of Steubenville. Lee Stranahan noticed Lostutter had been “bragging about his new truck” on Facebook. "Note To Deric Lostutter aka KYAnonymous: Anonymous Is Not Your Personal ATM," Stranhan wrote in a blog post.

Lostutter denies he was ever paid for his activism, or that he engaged in any hacking-related financial crime. He recently bought a motorcycle and a truck, but he pointed out both were used, not new.

But Lostutter's activism did coincide unusually with a new career. In January, while he was still active as KYAnonymous, Lostutter became a contractor at BullyVille, an anti-bullying website. BullyVille had been a strong supporter of KnightSec and KYAnonymous from its earliest days.

When KnightSec hacked Hunter Moore in December, James McGibney, BullyVille’s outspoken owner, was among the loudest cheering. He has a longstanding feud with Moore and recently won a $250,000 defamation lawsuit against him after Moore accused him of being a pedophile and threatened to rape his wife. McGibney regularly shouted out to KYAnonymous on Twitter and a copy of KYAnonymous’ anti-Hunter Moore video was even posted on BullyVille.

When Lostutter was unmasked as KYAnonymous, critics accused McGibney of paying him to attack his rival under the cover of KnightSec. McGibney denies this. He said that he did not know Lostutter was KYAnonymous until after Lostutter started contracting for him. Losttutter approached him with information about some vulnerabilities on his site and McGibney hired him, knowing nothing of his double-life, according to McGibney. “He's doing a lot of good work for us,” McGibney told me.

That work is interesting considering Lostutter’s past. In addition to some computer security work, Lostutter is paid by BullyVille to find the personal information of James McGibney’s enemies on the internet. One of McGibney’s favorite sayings is “sometimes you need to be a bully to beat a bully.” Bullyville sends him Twitter handles of people to track down for naming and shaming for various nebulous offenses.

“I can take it off your Facebook,” Lostutter said. “If you checked in somewhere on a map and checked in at home, it's on Facebook maps. I got your cross street, I know where you live.” Lostutter’s own anonymity was once the most important thing in his life—now his job is destroying others’.

KYAnonymous has been unmasked, but in the wake of the FBI raid, Lostutter is still weaponizing the media. He has yet to arrested or even informed that he's the target of an investigation into the hacking of Rollredroll.com, but his lawyer said in a statement he believes he'll be charged with three felonies under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. (In an email to Gawker, a spokesperson for the FBI’s Cincinnati office wrote, "we are unable to confirm or deny the existence of any potential investigation into this matter.") He wants to put pressure on the Department of Justice before that happens, and raise money for his defense.

"I believe they're trying to make a spectacle of me,” he told me. “They're using me to say that this is what happens when you challenge us. I got in trouble for questioning the government.”

He’s been remarkably successful: Since Gawker revealed his identity a little over a week ago, Lostutter has become a cause celebre online, after outrage went viral over the fact he could face a longer prison sentence than the Steubenville rapists if charged (a technically true, if effectively meaningless comparison). He raised over $30,000 for a defense fund in just a matter of days. (The fund is administered by Lostutter's attorney Jason Flores-Williams, a founder of the Whistleblower Defense League, which specializes in defending hacktivists and leakers.)

"I was shocked, I was stunned, I think I drank a whole fifth of tequila in celebration," he said. Now he’s selling "Free KYAnonymous" stickers on his new website, ProjectKnightSec.com.

When we were at The Waterfront bar, Lostutter grew reflective after downing a couple bourbons on the rocks from red plastic cups.

“I always knew some weird shit was going to happen in my life,” he said. “You work these jobs, you work at Old Chicago, you work at Best Buy, you just feel like you're meant to do so much more.” He remembers watching the livestream on the day of the big protest in Steubenville that he helped organize and inspire. Hundreds of miles away, 2,000 people had braved bone-chilling December temperatures to stand up for Jane Doe and speak out about rape.

“I thought, this is what I'm supposed to do.”

After we finished up at The Waterfront, Lostutter took me to meet Juan Greene, the owner of Night Shade Records and Lostutter’s longtime rap producer. Lostutter started rapping in middle school and has put out a couple albums on Night Shade Records under the name Shadow.

But first we had to help Greene jump-start his Chevy Avalanche, which had stalled in a WalMart parking lot. When we arrived, Greene was sitting in the decked-out vehicle with his wife. Greene is a big, 36-year-old black guy, and as he hunched over the engine next to the scrawny white Lostutter they looked like partners in a buddy cop film.

After a few minutes of failed jump attempts, a towering Dodge pickup pulled up next to the two Chevys. A man with an huge beard and a lush, braided rattail hopped out. His grey T-shirt said SECOND AMENDMENT and was tucked into his jeans to accommodate the handgun on his waist. He noted the puniness of the jumper cables Lostutter and Greene had been using and produced a set of cables the size of a child’s forearm from his own truck.

“Never skimp on jumper cables,” he advised. As the battery charged, the three discussed the merits of each others’ trucks. (It was decided the Dodge was superior.) Lostutter admired the man’s handgun. “Did you see that fucking rattail,” Lostutter said once we were back in the truck, on the way to the studio. “Welcome to Kentucky!”

The studio was a tiny, stuffy room tucked into the top floor of Greene’s house. A soundboard dominated the entire left wall and a couple of CDs tacked above the door, including Lostutter’s album “Nighshade,” were the only decoration. We sat as Greene delivered a lengthy monologue on the importance of Lostutter to Night Shade Records, especially in regards to keeping relevant in the social media era. “Dude has been stupid instrumental to keeping the brand alive,” he said. “Any Facebooks, any Soundclouds, that’s all him.”

Lostutter has developed a small following in Winchester, with upbeat rhymes that glorify Kentucky country life. In "Boondocks," he raps about getting wasted on Bourbon to a sample of the country group Little Big Town’s song of the same name. Green said, “I like that he does some personal music. He keeps it with what's going on. He can 'neck it out a little, with boots and everything. Dude's a people person—his music is about himself.”

Lostutter came to the studio the night he was raided to blow off some steam. He was ready to rap about his life online. “I went to the studio and I freestyled,” he said. "'The feds checked in to see what my trap about,'" he recited, so quickly I could barely write it down. "'I got held up with guns you boys only rap about.'"

Writer and fame sculptor Cat Marnell is too busy getting paid more than most people to write her memoir, so she has hired 18-year-old Alex Kazemi to handle her "publicity." (He's not pictured above; that's Riff Raff. He's not organized enough to be anyone's publicist but his own and even that seems accidental.) This partnership was announced via TwitLonger:

Hello world this is Cat Marnell's new TEEN PUBLICIST @alexkazemi . I'm in her account for the time being but she will be tweeting regularly via ME on this account, in her voice. - AK

So far, Kazemi's duties have consisted of tweeting as himself from Marnell's account and in the process, animating the voices that go through anyone's head but especially a head that's as active and sometimes addled as Marnell's. You'd think that Kazemi needing to resort to TwitLonger to send his first tweet through Marnell's twitter might be an omen, but it's going great:

“@msemilymccombs: @cat_marnell @alexkazemi WHAT IS THIS SHIT CAT”Cat says: "What, are you JEALOUS of my TEEN PUBLICIST?" - AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

"Cat Says: @janepratt, don't YOU think @msemilymccombs seems JEALOUS of my TEEN PUBLICIST?!" - AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

CAT says: "You know, if more teens were publicists and felt less... DISPOSABLE, then they wouldn't get all meat cleaver-y on themselves"- AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

#CatSays

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

Cat has been isolated in her apartment accompanied by the sounds ofBlackout by Britney Spears as she writes her S&S memoir... - AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

I apologize, the last statement was false. Cat says: "I made that up and she would never say that!" - AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

CAT says: "I'm making her look like a loser to all the guys she wants to get with" - AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

I'm learning a lot.. - AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

Cat says:"I'm 18, so I can tweet a sensual teen masturbation story if I want to..." - AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

Cat says, I, AK, am using quotes wrong and am making HER sound like the sensual teen masturbator.

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

Cat says: "Go do your homework, bitch!"- AK

— Cat Marnell (@Cat_Marnell) June 12, 2013

I reached out to Cat to ask her what is up with this. Below is our ensuing exchange.

I don't feel like taking another screenshot, but regarding Marnell's good deed, she added, "It's like what Jung said how a ton of his patients didn't have a diagnosis, just aimlessness and senselessness in their lives! This teen WANTS to be someone!"

Update: Full disclosure: Cat Marnell and I have done poppers together.

[Cat Marnell/Riff Raff image via Facebook]