Last week we told you about how Gawker’s Adrian Chen had unmasked “Violentacrez,” a Redditor notorious for being arguably the biggest troll on the web. In Chen’s words, Violentacrez unleashed “an unending fountain of racism, porn, gore, misogyny, incest, and exotic abominations” during his years of trolling on Reddit. Since being unmasked, Violentacrez, who in real life is a middle-aged suburban dad (of course!) named Michael Brutsch, his world has predictably fallen apart — he was fired from his job, causing his to lose the health insurance used to cover medical expenses for his disabled wife. The whole thing is just ridiculously sad, but utterly fascinating at the same time.

I suppose Brutsch — having hit rock bottom, or close to it — now feels as though he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by speaking to the media about his ordeal, because he actually sat down for an interview with CNN that aired on Anderson Cooper’s show last night. In the interview, he apologized for his behavior, charging that Reddit encourages trolling because trolling is good for pageviews (they awarded him a gold-plated Reddit alien for excellence in trolling, apparently), and he also tried to explain what motivates a troll like him.

“All I can say is, that, you know, I’m sorry. I have made mistakes,” Brutsch said in the interview. “Reddit encouraged and enabled this sort of behavior and I shouldn’t have been a part of it.”

About the burning desire to troll that overcame him for years, Brutsch said: “There are hot-button topics that you can make a comment about and just enrage people. And sadly for me I enjoyed doing that. I like going in and making people really mad…apparently I have a gift for pushing buttons.”

“I like going in and making people really mad.”

F*cking. Trolls. They’re the worst. THE WORST.

Anyway, here’s part one of the interview, which CNN posted to YouTube…

And here’s part two, which CNN did not post to YouTube, for some reason (maybe to troll me?!?!)…

http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/.element/apps/cvp/3.0/swf/cnn_416x234_embed.swf?context=embed&videoId=bestoftv/2012/10/19/ac-exclusive-interview-reddit-troll.cnn

And because this is all so depressing, here’s Kristen Schaal voicing the title character in an animated version of a story by a 2nd grader titled, “Diary of a Blueberry”…