In October, 2011, Kayla Laws, a twenty-four-year-old actress, photographed herself in front of a bedroom mirror and stashed the photos in her inbox for safekeeping. The following January, she was waiting tables when she received a phone call: a topless image of her had been posted on a Web site called Is Anyone Up?. It was one of the selfies that Kayla had taken three months prior. She was frantic, then confused, since she had never shown the pictures to anyone.

Last week, the owner of Is Anyone Up?, Hunter Moore, and a collaborator, Charles Evens—who often went by the name Gary Jones—were arrested by federal authorities and charged with multiple counts of conspiracy, unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information, and aggravated identity theft. According to the indictment, Moore paid Evens upwards of two hundred dollars a week to break into women’s e-mail accounts and steal nude photos of them, which he posted for personal gain.

Hunter Moore’s Web site, isanyoneup.com, trafficked in images like Laws’s: nude pictures taken in private, usually of women. They were typically posted alongside screenshots from Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr—or any other social network that identified the person in the photo—perhaps with a snarky comment, or animated GIF. The photos were often submitted by bitter and jilted exes, a practice known as “revenge porn,” or obtained through more mysterious circumstances. Some women sent their photos directly to Moore, though in the end he didn’t care about their provenance.

Before it effectively shut down in April, 2012, the site received some three hundred to three hundred and fifty thousand visitors a day, and made thousands of dollars a month, helping Moore become, in the words of Rolling Stone, “the most hated man on the Internet.” It was not an undeserved accolade. Billing himself as a “professional life ruiner,” Moore caused some women to quit their jobs and change their names; victims who spoke out were regularly mocked on a section of the Web site set up for that purpose. When Brandi Passante, a star of A&E’s reality show “Storage Wars,” sued Moore for defamation, he responded by sending her lawyer a picture of a penis. In March, on a radio morning show appearance, he threatened a morning radio d.j., “I’ll rape your fucking cohost in front of you.”

How does one grow up to become Hunter Moore? The Daily Beast reported that, as a child, Moore was expelled from Woodland Christian School, then dropped out altogether at thirteen and launched a series of businesses. He told the writer, Marlow Stern, “I just didn’t think I needed school. Now I do because I’m kind of retarded.” When Moore was fifteen, he says, he suffered his first heartbreak, at the hand of a girl named Rachel, which he frames as a pivotal moment in his development: “The only way to get to a point where you have no feelings, you have to have your heart ripped out and shit on. I hate to use the term ‘heartless,’ but you have to have something traumatic happen to get there.” Several years later, Moore found himself “hosting sex parties around New York, catering to middle-aged white businessmen.” At that point, Moore claims, his sister intervened, and he purchased the domain name isanyoneup.com, which he initially used to review night clubs. Then, in late 2010, as Moore told the Daily Beast, “I was having sex with this girl who was getting engaged to a member of an emo band, and everyone wanted to see her naked.” A friend convinced him to post a nude photo of her on the site; the fourteen thousand visitors it garnered in a single day insured that while she was the first victim, she would be far from the last.

By January of 2012, when Kayla Laws explained to her mother, Charlotte, that a topless photo of her was posted on Is Anyone Up?, Moore’s site was making up to thirteen thousand dollars a month, so he likely didn’t think twice about brushing off Charlotte Laws’s letter requesting the removal of Kayla’s photo. When Moore refused, Laws contacted the L.A.P.D. “The detective was pretty condescending, and blamed Kayla for taking pictures of herself,” Laws told me this weekend, from Los Angeles. “So I called the F.B.I.” While her contacts at that agency were initially hesitant to pursue a case against Moore, Laws pressured them until they opened an investigation, later that month. By then, she had also begun reaching out to other women whose pictures were on Moore’s site, in order to compile a thick dossier for the F.B.I. She held a victims’ meeting, attended by F.B.I. agents, during which many of the women spoke of being hacked by a “Gary Jones.” That investigation led to the arrest of Moore and Evens last week.

This past Thursday, Laws attended the arraignment of Evens, who pleaded not guilty. It turns out that he went to high school down the street, says Laws, and shares several of Kayla’s Facebook friends. Laws also says that she spoke briefly with Evens’s mother, though she didn’t reveal who she was. (She insinuated that she was a journalist.) She told me with a laugh that she can’t stand confrontation, though she gave me, without prompting, the addresses of both Evens and Moore. She also intends to be at Hunter Moore’s next court date, on February 7th, when he is expected to enter a plea. If convicted, he and Evens could both potentially face decades in federal prison.

It is currently not a distinct federal offense to post nude photos of a person online without his or her permission, so Laws continues to press for federal and state legislation that would formally criminalize “revenge porn.” “It’s cyber rape,” she told me. Laws was involved in California Governor Jerry Brown’s recent criminalization of the practice, and she told me that she’s met with California Senator Barbara Boxer’s office, and spoken with New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. Laws wants the United States to follow the lead of Israel, which earlier this month enacted legislation that threatens people found guilty of “the dissemination of sexual pictures or videos on the internet without permission” with up to five years in prison.

I asked Laws if she didn’t consider “revenge porn” a misnomer, since “revenge” implies a kind of justice against someone who inflicted injury. “I don’t know,” she answered, granting that the term may not be exactly right. “But then, I suppose, even if you don’t know the person, you are getting revenge against them—because you hate women.”

Photograph by Dustin Fenstermacher.