by Nik Richie
A: No.
Q: You don’t?
A: No.
Q: As the editor, you don’t involve—you don’t play a significant role in creating, developing—
A: I don’t create or develop anything. It’s a third-party platform. People submit stuff and I get it published.
Q: And you edit it, correct?
A: No. I put my line at the end of it. I don’t edit posts.
Q: So you—so you put your line at the end of it?
A: The only thing I edit, I’ll put an asterisk and like if someone says fuck or shit, I’ll put a star and a vowel.
Q: Okay. So you are—you are commenting on this platform about the post?
A: I put my opinion to what I think of the image, yes—
Q: Okay.
A. —or the situation.
***
Q: One of the comments that’s under Nik in the Sarah Jones matter is, “Why are all high school teachers freaks in the sack?”
A: Um-hmm.
Q: Why did you post that?
A: Just, it was my opinion, you know, watching the news and seeing all these teachers sleeping with their students and, you know, just my opinion on all teachers just from, like, what I see in the media.
***
Q: I know that you’re saying that you never did, but you know, Nik, you know that your site, theDirty.com, had a post that said that Sarah Jones had chlamydia and gonorrhea, you know that for a fact, correct?
A: Third party, someone else said it and I posted it [sic] theDirty.com.
Q: I am going to produce evidence at this trial, Nik, that Sarah Jones never had chlamydia and gonorrhea—let me finish the question.
A: Yeah, but that was before the post.
Q: Well, we’ll sort out all the timing and everything else.
A: Okay.
Q: There’s going to be no evidence that Sarah Jones ever had chlamydia and gonorrhea. There’s going to be evidence—
A: But I never said that.
Q: There’s going to be evidence that she doesn’t and never did have chlamydia and gonorrhea.
A: Okay.
Q: How can you leave that up on a website for the—how many people hit in a month, 600,000, potentially 600,000 people to see on a daily basis, how can you leave that up there, knowing that that is false or not knowing that it’s true?
A: It’s not my job to fact-check every single post, I can’t do that. It’s impossible.
Q: Then why do you let them all come up?
A: I don’t.
Q: You did—you did fact-check these posts, though, because you are the editorial committee of the people—
A: I didn’t fact-check—I can’t fact-check. I don’t even know Sarah Jones.
75The following dialogue is between Nik Richie and Sarah Jones’ attorney, Eric Deters. Deposition excerpts are taken directly from their transcript.
Broadcast
My episode on Dr. Phil airs.
I don’t watch it. I had been seeing previews for it, most of them painting me up as the bad guy with the mentions of suicide and whatnot. Unlike most people, though, if I think someone is saying bad things about me, I can stifle the urge to investigate. Self-torture has never been my thing, which is why I avoid the comment boards if the article is about me. Same with the show. I intentionally miss it, but people are calling and texting. I’m getting recognized on the street. The reactions are mixed, but I’ll take that over the definitive negativity I got from the studio audience. Most importantly, the site hits record numbers.
All those Dr. Phil people that had never heard of The Dirty before are checking it out now. It’s cross-promotion at its finest. The episode, I’d find out later, is one of Dr. Phil’s highest-rated. It would air again a month later, and I would sit down and watch it only to find out that it’s as chopped up as it could get.
During the filming, Dr. Phil had given me a ton of flak for my editing (or lack thereof) on the site, so it’s interesting that his episode uses little editing tricks. For the most part, there’s not a lot of dialogue cut out. That’s not the issue. With television, you change the mood of things using the audience. I only realize this because I can compare the show with what happened on the set, but what I’m noticing is that certain points of the interview that were once silent are peppered with applause or “boos” or people laughing. Post-production doesn’t need the audience to do much more than sit there. If things are too quiet or the mood isn’t right, they can mix in the sounds that suit Dr. Phil’s agenda.
So I end up on the receiving end of “the magic of television,” but I can’t deny that Dr. Phil brought in the business for me. He was nice, and he gave me an open invitation to come back. It pushed The Dirty more into the mainstream. Honestly, I get the feeling that Dr. Phil is a little bit of a fan.
But this show is merely a prelude for the clusterfuck that is 20/20.
20/20 (Part 2)
A couple things happen with the 20/20 people.
Richard Brenner reaches out to Scooby to let us know that he has great news. He says that the pilot is still ongoing for Web Life in America, but they want to feature my episode on 20/20. So I’m fucking stoked about it up until David Gingras calls me, mentioning in passing that during the Sarah Jones deposition the topic of interviews came up. The legal team asked who (if any) networks or interviewers she’s sat down with, and one of them was 20/20. She met with Chris Cuomo, David tells me. The same Chris Cuomo I sat down with.
“She flew out to New York and everything,” he says, but I write it off as a weird coincidence up until I’m watching myself on 20/20.
Chris Cuomo says his opening line: “The name alone makes you want to take a shower: TheDirty.com, but wait till you see what this website can do to innocent people,” and from that point on, I know this is all going to be about me getting fucked. It’s all about Sarah Jones and her crusade against me because she’s actually the feature. Not Nik Richie. All that time being followed, the cameras and microphones and the interviews, it was all about getting B-roll footage to make me look evil and indecent.
They play up the teaching angle for Sarah. 20/20 shows her running her class. They play up the cheerleading captain angle. 20/20 has her dancing in uniform and going on a USO tour to support the troops. The idea is to sell to the public that Sarah Jones is a role model, a decent person. Sarah Jones is not only the opposite of Nik Richie, but also a victim. That’s what they’re getting at.
I’m fucking mortified. Shocked. They’re talking about me, the site, referring back to the Carrie Prejean scandal and how she lost her crown. They showcase blurred-out screenshots of the Matt Leinart post partying with young girls. Both are cast in a negative light, as if I went looking for nude photos of Prejean posing topless, as if I forced Matt Leinart to party with underage chicks in a hot tub. The angle is that Nik Richie is the villain. He’s the one that ruins lives, Sarah’s being one of them.
During her part of the interview, Sarah explains that she sent at least thirty emails to me trying to get her post down. 20/20 takes her word for it. The issue of how that’s a fabricated number never comes into question. When you’re the victim you don’t get cross-examined, so when the second Sarah Jones post is addressed (the one regarding her having sexual diseases), Chris Cuomo never asks her if she actually does. Lawyers do that, not talk show hosts. They’re just trying to make good TV.
Sarah’s the good guy. Nik’s the bad guy.
If there’s anything that sells better than sex, it’s conflict.
It’s the sweet innocent teacher versus the big bad Internet blogger. It’s being televised nationally, me answering Chris Cuomo’s questions as they overlap it with B-roll of us out at the club in Tampa, me typing in the kind of dark lighting that makes me look like I have cancer. Like I’m inside a fucking bunker planting Internet WMDs.
Nik Richie is a sociopath. He’s a terrorist.
He’s defaming the all-American girl, Sarah Jones.
This is essenti
ally the entire non-pilot episode of Web Life in America. They snaked me. Tricked me. Chris Cuomo brings up the $11,000,000 default judgment, completely brushing over the part about how Sarah’s lawyer sued the wrong website. Instead, they cut to me saying that I’m going to fight this thing in court. To the casual viewer, Sarah’s already had her way with me in the legal system. Yet, the experts of 20/20 maintain that the site has stained her, that she’s going to carry around a scarlet letter forever.
“The Internet has no delete button,” they say.
It’s the only part of the show I agree with.
Anderson: Episode 1
After a couple of television appearances, The Dirty is picking up speed in the talk-show circuit. It’s a no-brainer, really. Nik Richie equals controversy and controversy equals ratings. After the Dr. Phil and 20/20 spots, the networks are figuring this out. They may not like me or what I do, but they can’t argue with viewership. The only way to up the ante now is to confront me with the person I’m currently in the middle of a legal battle with. This is where Anderson Cooper comes in.
I’m being conferenced in via satellite for my first official one-on-one with Sarah Jones, and it’s obvious she has a lot of pent-up aggression. Anderson asks the leading question, what she wants to ask me, and she says, “I just—I just want to know why. Um, why me? You keep saying I’m a little example but this is my life. So forever, on the Internet, it’s gonna be posted on there, and I just don’t understand what—that I lived my life according to the way y’know, that I want, that my parents raised me, the character that I have, I’ve set for myself. And one posting in one day—I understand that you’re the moderator and somebody sent that in, but you didn’t take it down. It was your choice to comment “All high school teachers are freaks in the sack.’ Y’know, I work my butt off to have a great reputation and a good character, um, to provide the girls and the boys that I teach a strong foundation. Some of my students don’t have that stability at home. They have a bad home life. We see these people that—sometimes teachers are the only solid foundation in their life and that’s what I am to them.”
Applause. She keeps going, “And because of you that’s been taken away from me. These girls can’t look up to me and they can’t—they feel, they see these things on the Internet and they assume that they’re true. They’re fifteen so in their mind it’s true, and I just don’t understand how you could do that, and to say, as a father, as, y’know, you’re about to have a child, to say that you don’t mind if your daughter would have to go through this, I am just very nervous for the way you’re going to raise your child in your home.”
More applause.
“Thanks for being very hypocritical right there. I’ve never attacked you personally and you just attacked me, which is awesome.”
“It’s not an attack. I’m not being hypocritical.”
“How are you not? You just verbally attacked me and I’ve never attacked you once. Even after your husband—I think you’re married now—admitted that he cheated on you.”
“Which is true, so not only did I have to deal with that in my own life, I had to deal with that on the Internet.”
“And it was true.”
“Not by my husband, by my boyfriend in high school, but, yeah, I guess, yeah, and that’s one of those things where you live and you learn. You make mistakes, you learn from them. I was with a cheating boyfriend, therefore, I deserve to be on a site?”
“You act like I didn’t take this stuff down,” I say.
“You did not take those things down. You did not them down until I got my default judgment in August of 2010.”
Oh, this shit again?
“That is not true,” I say.
“I have the documents.”
“You didn’t get a default judgment. You never got a default judgment, you sued the wrong person and the wrong company. We came to you saying “hey,’ we—I actually came to your legal and said, “Hey, I’m the right guy.’ We apologized and said, “Hey, what else do you want from us?’ and you said you want money.”
“An apology—y’know, an apology, I appreciate your apology.”
“You just want to be famous.”
“But—I just want to be famous, no.”
“You just want to be famous.”
“I would love for my—if I could, right now, go, take all of this thing back, if anything, if I could take it back, I just want to wake up and be a teacher.”
Sure you do.
“I already gave it back to you.”
“It’s tarnished! It’s gone. It’s done. You can’t go back from that. You can’t recover.”
“Sarah Jones, you’re painting yourself as the totally wrong person that you are, but it’s fine. Whatever.”
Verdict
Gingras and I fly back to Kentucky to present our case.
The presiding judge is William O. Bertelsman76, and what we find out about him is that he’s old-school. He’s not fully versed in the Internet or Internet law, specifically the Communications Decency Act. He’s also got a soft spot for Sarah Jones. She’s a local, a teacher, a cheerleader for the home team. Also, when Sarah and her lawyer were going after the wrong site, she did what she does best: cried. She cried for the judge and got super emotional, so this guy is looking at me now like, This is the son of a bitch that made this little girl cry.
David does his spiel about the CDA, how it works, and how it applies to The Dirty. It’s all the stuff he said on Dr. Phil but a little bit more formal and intercut with various legal jargon. He makes sure to point out that I’m not the one that wrote all this shit about Sarah Jones. It’s third-party. I’m just the billboard. Judge Bertelsman gets hung up on the name of the site, saying that it indicates we’re looking for dirt. We’re looking for scandal and lies and Sarah Jones is just another victim of that.
I fail to agree with him since practically anything can be called “dirt” these days. You can call the news dirt. Celebrity divorce is dirt. TMZ and Perez Hilton dish dirt. It’s everywhere. I’m not looking for dirt. I’m looking for whatever is relevant at that particular moment. I’m looking for the stir, the wake-up call. I’m looking for the cheating spouse. The athlete not paying his child support. I’m looking for whatever the audience wants to see, and that’s the reason we do everything third-party. It’s your posts, I’m just publishing and making a comment. Then someone decided to put up Sarah Jones.
And in this case, the comment was: “Why are all high school teachers freaks in the sack?” He gets hung up on that, too. According to the judge, this implies that Sarah Jones is a freak in the sack. It’s another way of saying she’s “a slut” or “a tramp” or “a whore.” Any degree of sarcasm is lost on the judge. You can’t use the “I was kidding around’ defense in court. When Bertelsman looks at me, it’s obvious that Nik Richie is a malicious man posting nasty rumors about innocent girls. He wants to make them cry.
So even though David does a good job of explaining the CDA and how it relates to me and the case, it’s not enough. What’s right isn’t always legal and vice versa.
We lose the case.
TheDirty.com lawyer David Gingras and Nik Richie (in mirror) in the green room at Anderson Cooper's show Anderson Live in Manhattan, New York.
76Appointed to federal bench in 1979 by President Jimmy Carter.
Anderson: Episode 2
This is my second attempt at Anderson.
The first time was via satellite regarding Sarah Jones, and it was obvious from the get-go that Anderson saw a crying girl and decided to play the role of the protector. I’m okay with that. Anderson has an audience he plays to the same way that I have an audience that I play to. Any attempt on his part to appear unbiased wouldn’t have gone over well with the crowd, so I can understand why he took her side. It was the easy choice.
What bothers me is, unlike Dr. Phil, Anderson never let me talk. That, and he edited me to death. When you appear via satellite, you put yourself at a distinct disadvantage in
that you can be turned off at any point in the interview. It really is as easy as pointing the remote at the TV and pressing the “power” button, so not only did he cut me off, his people cut up the interview after the fact in editing.
Nothing really got accomplished between Sarah and me since it was more of an argument than a conversation. And yet again, these television hosts failed to see my side of it because they didn’t want to see my side of it. This is my principal reason for agreeing to do Anderson for a second time.
What happened was that Anderson’s ratings were so high after my appearance the people running the show thought it would be a good idea to have me back, but in the actual studio this time. My hits to the site went up as well, but failed in regard to getting my point across. This time, I thought, he’s not going to be able to control the interview by patching me in via satellite. He’ll have to let me talk.
The producers of Anderson Live are awesome.
They’re asking me if I’m comfortable, if I’ve got everything I need, if they can get me coffee or water or a soda. They’re asking me if the temperature in the green room is to my liking.
“Can we get you anything to eat, Mr. Richie? Bagel? Donut?”
“No, I’m good.”
“Candy bar? We got a candy machine down the hall.”
This is my first official warning: when you go onto a nationally televised show and the host hates your guts, pay attention to the producers. If they’re being all extra nice like this, that means you’re about to get motherfucked.
“Smoothie, Mr. Richie? There’s a smoothie place just off the grounds in Central Park.”
“No, I’m fine,” I tell them. “Can you tell me anything about the show? Anything I should be worried about?”
“Oh, it’s just pageant stuff. You should be fine.”
