Sex, Lies and the Dirty

by Nik Richie

  Nik Richie's debut on Dr. Phil.

  When the show goes to break, the lights on the cameras that indicate they’re recording blink out and the pieces start moving around. Beyond the stage, there are lines of tape stuck to the floor, and the cameras get shifted over on wheel carts to align with the next “mark.” Angles change. The lighting adjusts. A production assistant yells how much time they’ve got to do this, which is about thirty seconds. During that period, a makeup girl comes onto the stage with a white foam triangle and foundation kit.

  This girl is touching up Dr. Phil’s face as he says to me, “Nik, thank you so much for coming out, I really appreciate it.”

  I nod like, Yeah…whatever, man.

  “Hey, don’t you live in Scottsdale?” he asks, but he’s asking in this genuinely friendly way like the last ten minutes never happened.

  I say, “Yeah, I’m in Scottsdale.”

  “It’s beautiful out there,” he says, and the makeup girl gives him one final touch-up and bolts off the stage. “Hey, we should go golfing sometime.”

  I never get a chance to say yes or no.

  The cameras are back on, and so is Dr. Phil.

  We talk about suicide.

  One of the things not very many people realize about The Dirty is that we actively avoid high school stuff. Technically and legally, I could post it, but that’s not our demographic. The site was founded on the twenty-one-and-over club scene, so anything high school-related I want nothing to do with. If I get a picture and the person even looks like they could be in high school, I pass on it. Although it’s unofficial, that’s always been my policy. Of course, no one tells Dr. Phil this beforehand.

  He’s listing names off: Ryan Haligan 66…Jeffrey Johnson 67…Rachael Neblett 68…Megan Meier 69…Jessica Logan 70…Phoebe Prince 71…Alexis Pilkington 72…Tyler Clemente 73.

  These kids, he tells me, killed themselves all due to bullying/cyber-bullying-related instances.

  “In my opinion,” Dr. Phil says, “it’s not a matter of “if,’ but “when’ that’s gonna happen based on what’s being posted on Dirty.com [sic].”

  I’m thinking, Is Dr. Phil trying to mindfuck me?

  Five minutes ago he asked me if I wanted to go golfing.

  Now he’s saying I’m about to have blood on my hands.

  I have difficulty evoking empathy because I grew up in a time when bullying meant getting the shit kicked out of you and having your money taken. It meant coming home with bruises because you were physically overtaken. You were helpless. Fast-forward to the present, and we’ve got kids offing themselves because of a rumor or some mean thing so-and-so said. Gossip can kill now. We officially live in the generation where hurting someone’s feelings is just as powerful as a loaded gun.

  My viewpoint of suicide is black-and-white in that I blame the triggerman, not the guy who sold you the bullets. You don’t commit suicide because of something done to you; you commit suicide because you’re done with yourself. Dr. Phil and I won’t agree there because he’s one of the many who believe suicide is like murder: it takes at least two people to do it. One provides motive and the other executes.

  Currently, my site has no suicides, so that fact that he’s associating what I do with these dead kids pisses me off. He’s speculating, but the audience is eating it up like he’s telling the truth.

  Dr. Phil says, “I think it’s a real danger, don’t you?”

  I shake my head, saying, “No…no.”

  He’s trying to get me to bend. Trying to break me, make me turn on myself. Incriminate myself. Get me to admit fault. But I just keep shaking my head, saying “no” or “wrong” or “that’s not right.”

  We go to break.

  It happens again.

  Cameras and lights are shifting.

  A production assistant is yelling out to the crew.

  Now Dr. Phil is saying to me, “Y’know, you could do your site a little differently. There’s a few things you could take down, but overall, it’s pretty entertaining.”

  I’m like, “Great, could you please say that on-air now?”

  Filming resumes, and it’s like the conversation never happened.

  The next segment is with a girl that was posted on the site, and already she’s playing up the victim card. Crying. Wiping her eyes with Kleenex. Dr. Phil asks leading questions to make this girl seem as normal as possible, which is sort of an interview trick to get the jury on his side. This is his star witness, so to speak. The intent here is that when the episode finally airs, everyone is going to think that every post on the site is exactly like this girl: a poor little nobody who took a few modeling pictures. She’s just like you. Nothing special. They won’t think about girls like Leper or Alien because they won’t know any better.

  This girl on the big screen behind us is attempting to look sexy or whatever in these modeling pictures. Spray-tanned orange and confident. Live and in person, she’s on the verge of losing her shit again, saying, “That’s my first photo shoot I ever did. That was my very first one. Obviously, I don’t have practice,” she explains. “But because of that, I don’t do anything. Because of you, in a way…and you pretty much ruined my life because of that,” but the last part of that sentence comes out sounding jumbled from the crying.

  I tell her, “It’s not because of me; it’s because of your friend or the person that actually submitted it.”

  “Who’s the creator of the website?” she asks.

  “I am,” I say.

  “Exactly! You’re the one accepting all these pictures.”

  It’s a faulty argument to begin with. If someone is harassed on Facebook, you can’t really blame Mark Zuckerberg. Fake accounts became extremely popular on MySpace back in the day, but you couldn’t get upset with Tom Anderson. What it boils down to is that 99.9% of any problem is going to be user-related, and it’s not specific to just my site. Pick any YouTube video or Yahoo! News article and you’ll find it: racism, sexism, bigotry, foul language, threats of rape and murder. Just check the comments section. It’s all right there. People are horrible now. Give them the cloak of anonymity and it’s even worse.

  Dr. Phil brings us up to speed, quoting what people said about her on the site: “She looks like a tranny…alcoholic…druggie…not up to par… stop giving Washington a bad name…she gave her stepfather a blowjob in exchange for a boob job…she’s got herpes…she could use a nose job.”

  People saying whatever they feel like saying with no accountability: this is what the 1st Amendment has become. I’m the one that has to defend it on national television.

  So we fight:

  I explain that the comments are all third-party. I didn’t make them. The girl reminds me that I did, in fact, make a comment of my own. That’s true. For every post that goes up, I make a comment. It’s not always bad, but I imagine for her it was.

  She asks me if I remember the comment I made.

  I say it was probably two years ago.

  She says that I said she looked like a man, but that doesn’t sound like Nik Richie.

  “Shim,” I say. Based on her masculine facial features, specifically, the jawline, I probably called her a shim. I’m not afraid to say it to her face. I’m giving my honest opinion of her looks. Dr. Phil asks me why. Why would I say that?

  “When I say something, it’s what I’m thinking. I’m truthful,” I say. “That’s just how I am.”

  Lots of people do this. The difference between those people and myself is that I’ll attach my name to it. You’ll know the source. I’ll even say it to your face.

  Dr. Phil keeps asking leading questions to make me look like a monster.

  The girl calls me a joke, says it right to my face.

  And the audience applauds.

  There’s no small talk during the next break.

  A production assistant is getting my wife and my lawyer into their respective seats. Dr. Phil is going over his note cards. The model is silently fuming.

  I’m slowly
learning that even though Dr. Phil and I are in the same venue of entertainment, the methods are vastly different. It’s not just that he’s a TV guy and I’m an Internet guy. Dr. Phil is a surgeon. He’s crafty. He can carve a conversation into whatever he wants, change the mood of the audience with one comment and turn your own words around. Whereas I’m more blunt with my comments, Dr. Phil always manages to ask just the right questions to make you look bad.

  He does this with Shayne and me.

  Dr. Phil asks Shayne how long we’ve been married.

  She says six months, so we’re still considered newlyweds.

  Dr. Phil asks if Shayne knew about the site when she married me.

  She says no, so now the audience thinks she’s an idiot. You can practically hear them thinking it: What kind of woman marries a man not knowing what he does?

  Shayne tries to explain why she didn’t know about the site, but Dr. Phil cuts her off and drills her with the next question.

  “How long did y’all know each other when you got married?” he asks.

  It’s just like TMZ. He already knows the answer; he just wants everyone to hear her say it.

  “Twenty-four hours,” Shayne tells him, and the audience scoffs.

  The audience judges our marriage. Like a reflex.

  Dr. Phil asks, “Where did you meet?”

  Shayne says, “We met in Vegas.”

  Now the audience is laughing, openly laughing at us and our joke of a marriage: because it’s not long enough, we barely knew each other, we did it too quick and met in the wrong place. That’s what they think about us, and they’re laughing and judging and doing the thing I’m being crucified for on national TV. All people judge. It’s just a matter of showing them something they disagree with. This is why we’ll never settle on one religion or one brand of politics, because it’s human nature to dismiss the thing we don’t automatically agree with.

  Right now, the audience is dismissing us. Shayne and I.

  “I married my husband, who you all don’t know…and I do,” Shayne says, motioning to the audience. “And we married and it’s been amazing.”

  This is Shayne’s eloquent way of saying: Sitting in a studio audience doesn’t mean you know anything about us.

  Eventually, Dr. Phil gets to the part where he throws what my site does in my wife’s face. He flips through his note cards and says, “You grew up in an entertainment family, then you got into the entertainment world, and they’ve written about you in the tabloids.”

  Shayne nods. “Yes,” she says.

  “I wrote some of those down,” Dr. Phil says. “Reality TV star, Shayne Lamas, shows off big new boobs…Reality star, Shayne Lamas, busted for DUI…Lorenzo Lamas’ ex, Shauna Sand, had an affair with his son… Shayne Lamas caught cheating on bachelor, Matt Grant. So they take shots at you,” he says.

  “And those don’t feel good,” Shayne says. “Absolutely…but I know who I am and I know the truth.”

  Then, like the class act that Shayne is, she tells this model not to let me or anybody else stop her from pursuing her career. She tells her to be confident, to own her image. Shayne tells her she’s beautiful, and she says this genuinely and with the utmost sincerity.

  It’s true what they say: for every man there’s a better woman standing behind him.

  Next segment: My lawyer, David, finally gets to speak.

  The interaction literally lasts less than three minutes, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s a matter of control. In a conversation which has mostly been dominated by Dr. Phil, David is the one guy that could turn the tide. That’s what lawyers do. They’re fixers. They take an issue and present it in a simple and convincing way that an audience or jury can understand, and now he’s going to do that with The Dirty.

  He explains that there’s a difference between what the law is and what’s right. David admits that some of the comments made against the model fell into the “not right” category, and he offers his own personal apology for that. It’s sincere. He means it. David is the guy that’s always told to me to be nicer, to have a heart.

  David explains, “The law allows Nik to do what he does because he’s not the one writing those nasty comments.”

  Dr. Phil counters with, “What do you think of the fact that he just said he took responsibility for it by the fact that he evaluates and edits all the comments before they go up on the site?”

  “Legally,” David starts, “I know that doesn’t make any sense, but that is irrelevant. If I—”

  “—It’s not irrelevant,” Dr. Phil cuts in.

  “It is absolutely.”

  Dr. Phil points at David like he’s talking to one of his kids, telling him, “It’s not irrelevant and you know it.”

  Never mind the fact that Dr. Phil isn’t a lawyer and is, at most, making a wild guess how the law on this works. Because he’s saying it with conviction, the audience begins to clap. David waits for the storm to pass. He breaks this down so any idiot could understand it, explaining that if he went onto Dr. Phil’s website and made a comment—doesn’t matter if the comment was offensive—the subject can’t sue the owner (in this case, Dr. Phil) because it came from a third party. Just because a comment is allowed on Dr. Phil’s website doesn’t mean that Dr. Phil made the comment himself. Same thing applies to The Dirty.

  When a user comments on a picture claiming that the subject is a nasty cunt that needs to stop going out in public, no one is liable for that but the user. If the law viewed this otherwise, there would be no YouTube. No Facebook or Google. Anything with third-party content would be extinct.

  “And it does not matter if he edits it,” David says. “The law actually encourages him to do that kind of editing.”

  Dr. Phil concedes that although he’d like to see more editing on my part, he’s glad I at least do some.

  David goes on to explain, “You have to keep in mind the law draws a distinction between the user’s comments and the website’s comments. They’re not legally the same. And in this case, most of the nasty comments that you quoted about this woman here are user-generated comments. Nik is not legally responsible for those, even if he can edit them, even if he doesn’t edit them. They’re not legally his responsibility.”

  It’s just like David said: what is legal is not always what is right.

  And now the world knows the difference.

  In the next segment, Scooby Snack has a back-and-forth with Dr. Phil about what it means to be a Dirty Celeb and how she got her name. There’s two versions of that story.

  The first, the one that Scooby Snack refers to, is how there was a picture of herself and Scooby that was put up on the site: her in the forefront wearing big sunglasses, Scooby in the background, walking behind her. They were getting off an elevator, and naturally people thought she was on the walk of shame. I claimed that Scooby only fucked her once, hence the “Snack” portion of the name.

  She goes on to explain to Dr. Phil, “It was a fabricated name based on a situation that never happened.”

  That’s absolutely true.

  What she doesn’t talk about is the other version of the story, the part about how she and I fucked, and then Scooby took credit for it. Or got blamed, rather. He “took one for the team” as they say.

  Scooby Snack doesn’t out me on the show. It would be a good opportunity to do it. Here on national TV with my wife and lawyer and Dr. Phil and this studio audience. The cameras and crew. She could say, “Nik and I fucked, and because he was so ashamed of it, he made it look like I did it with his friend.”

  She could say that, and it would be true…but she doesn’t.

  Eventually, Freddy Fags gets his turn, but Dr. Phil only asks him one question about what his name means and moves on. I almost get the feeling that despite our disagreement for the past hour on these issues, Dr. Phil can see why some people end up on the site based on Freddy’s appearance alone.

  For the final segment, everyone but Dr. Phil is relegated back to the audience
. Shayne is holding my hand, telling me I did fine up there. “Don’t worry. You got to say what you wanted to say.” Dr. Phil gives his little spiel on how the Internet is both a wonderful and terrible place, and then he opens things up for comments from the audience.

  “He doesn’t care. I think he knows he hurts people.”

  Then some guy says: “I like to call these kinds of people “bottom-feeders’ of our society.”

  Then applause.

  Everything kind of goes back to square one. I try to explain that the site is far more than one failed model. We expose politicians, scandal, drug dealers, crooked club owners. We break national news stories and celebrity dirt. We’ve been doing this for some time now, but because this particular show is all about the model, the audience can’t comprehend that. In their minds, she represents every post on the site. When I point that out, Dr. Phil says it’s because the language on the model’s post was one of the few that was clean enough to be read on basic cable.

  I continue to urge people to go to the site and judge for themselves.

  It’s not all about this one particular girl. Not even close.

  After taping, Shayne, David, and myself are all back in the green room. Personally, I think it went horribly, but David and Shayne are saying otherwise, that it could have been a lot worse had I not shown. At least the people know how the site operates legally speaking, David says.

  Dr. Phil comes into the green room and thanks all of us for coming on. To me, he says, “I hope I didn’t go too hard on you. If you could help us on other shows that would be great. The last thing I want is for you to have more lawsuits, Nik,” and he gives a quick look over to David who nods in agreement. “I wish you the best of luck. Keep on keepin’ on,” and then Dr. Phil shakes my hand with a smile.

  He’s got the whole world fooled. He’s an actor.

  Although Dr. Phil would never admit it, he and I are more alike than people realize. He spent the last hour hating on me and my work, but I know if I called him up for that golf game, he’d say yes in a heartbeat.