THIS past Halloween, 18-year-old Nikki Catsouras was killed in a car crash. A few days later, Catsouras’ teenage cousin – answering a text message – flipped open her cellphone and was confronted with a picture of the mortally wounded Nikki, who suffered massive head trauma and lost most of her face and head, at the scene.

While Catsouras was still being mourned, more pictures from the scene were anonymously posted on the dead girl’s formerly benign MySpace page, and they are now – without the family’s consent, which is not needed – being used in at least one criminal-law class at a local community college. (Police admitted on Tuesday that an officer leaked the pictures; the family has filed a $20 million lawsuit.)

“It’s evil,” says Lesli Catsouras, Nikki’s mother. “It’s evil, and this was done maliciously, as a joke, and it has devastated our lives completely. People should know that this can happen to them.”

The Catsouras family – Lesli, 41, her husband, Christos and their three daughters – no longer go online or use e-mail. Their 15-year-old dropped a class because it required using the Internet for research. Their lawyer, Tyler Offenhauser, says there is little in the way of legal recourse: “The Internet is growing in leaps and bounds,” he says. “The law is not.”

And yet a 28-year-old Upper West Side graduate of Harvard Law School – who has yet to take the bar – has been surprisingly effective. As the founder of the 2-month-old ReputationDefender, Michael Fertik, a self-described fighter for “truth, justice and the American freakin’ way,” has, since his hiring by the Catsouras family, managed to remove the photos from some 300 Web sites (as of press time, they were still up on about 100 others).

How? Fertik – who charges $9-$15 a month for what he calls “destroys” – uses a searchbot to find any and all mentions of a client. Then he writes letters to the operators of each site, politely and firmly requesting that the content be removed.

If that fails, Fertik issues another letter (“we can escalate the language”) and, if that fails, they refer clients to a lawyer. “There is no silver bullet,” he says. “If there was, I’d be a billionaire already. But you need someone to advocate.”

Among Fertik’s other clients: Ronen Sergev, who was arrested for calling Priceline.com 215 times in a row, demanding a refund – and whose efforts to remove all links of said incident from the Web have sparked a mini-controversy regarding his Wikipedia entry, which no longer references his arrest, and which some suspect has been tampered with by ReputationDefender.

Fertik denies any involvement in the repeatedly edited Wikipedia entry; he says he would never consider it, both for ethical and commercial considerations: “We understand the blogger community, and they will jump all over you if you try to edit Wikipedia,” he says.

“People are really suffering,” adds Fertik. To wit: “I have a client in D.C.; after a breakup, his ex posted pictures of him in sexual positions – fun, S&M play photos. That’s what they were into. And they’re up there, and you can see his face, his genitals.” He pauses. “I will work until the cows come home to make sure those pictures come down, because no one has the right to do that to anyone else.”

Yet there are some who worry that despite ReputationDefender’s above-board tactics, asking someone to remove content that another finds offensive is a form of censorship. “Today it starts as a polite request, and tomorrow the Internet police will be telling you what you can and cannot publish,” wrote one poster on Consumerist.com, where the case of Reputation-Defender vs. the Internet has been an ongoing story of interest.

“The tone was polite, but I found the message – Please help us censor the Internet – offensive,” wrote another.

“We have a civic responsibility not to attack anything from the press,” says Fertik. That said, he thinks there is room for debate: ” ‘I heard this story about person X – what a douchebag,’ – a post like that is a different argument,” he says. “Now, the answer could be that we just need to have a higher level of tolerance. But this is so outside the human experience that we’ve seen to date. Would you do something like this to your own friend? Or your family?”

“Frankly, this is a great idea,” says William Bierce, a New York City-based lawyer who specializes in computer law and information technology. “The paucity, the retardedness, of Internet law – it is way, way behind the Internet,” he says.

“There’s a penumbra of conflicting rights between freedom of the press and the constitutional right to privacy – but the legal issue you’re addressing here is so far behind the times because it hasn’t had the kind of debate identity theft has.” (Identity theft, he says, was finally addressed by Congress due to its effect on the economy; this debate and its ramifications are far more esoteric and difficult to quantify.)

In the meantime, the beleaguered and online-averse can seek recourse through Reputation-Defender, which will take on anyone’s cause unless they are, as Fertik says, “a child rapist, a child pornographer or work in human resources.”

Plus, Fertik himself now feels a special affinity with his clientele, given the adverse reaction in the online community to his company’s involvement in the Priceline debacle: “My company’s name is now irrevocably smeared by a blogger who claims we tried to take something down from Wikipedia,” he says. “And there’s no way to remedy it.”