Uncensored, racist, and shockingly nasty, online gossip forum Juicy Campus has students trembling. But should it be banned?

This article is from the July/August issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here.

There are plenty of ways to run afoul of the digital lynch mob that is the Juicy Campus community. Being a total lush, or a cokehead, or a stoner. Going around spreading the herp to unsuspecting sorority pledges, or slipping Rohypnol into their Long Island iced teas. Being lousy in bed, or hung like a grape. Being a JAP-y slut, or using too much self-tanner. Thinking you're hot shit. Being fat. These, and hundreds of other offenses, can get you written up on the nine-month-old website, a virtual bathroom wall upon which college students across the country scrawl slurs, smears, and secrets, true or otherwise, about their classmates, and other users vote on the "juiciest."

As for J.D. Rees, his only infraction was sticking up for a friend.

Rees, a lanky 20-year-old international relations major, was vaguely aware that Juicy Campus had started a discussion forum dedicated to his school, the University of San Diego, but he didn't pay it much attention until his roommate and fraternity brother, who we'll call Michael, came home one day in a state of near-despair. Someone had authored a post—anonymously, like almost all Juicy Campus posts—identifying him as a heavy drug user. Michael was, in fact, struggling with addiction at the time and "really took it to heart in a way that wasn't good," recalls Rees. "So I went and checked it out and said, 'Whoa, this is ridiculous.'"

As often happens on Juicy Campus, the initial note of truth had quickly deteriorated into an orgy of slander and ad hominem brutality. "I didn't want him to continue to feel undefended," says Rees, so he logged on himself and replied, vouching for Michael and excoriating the people spreading rumors about him. In a flourish that he hoped would shame his friend's anonymous tormentors into silence, Rees signed his name to the rebuke.

And that's how, soon after, Rees found himself the target of a Juicy Campus post titled "In the Closet." "Who is a fag that hasn't been outed yet?" began a thread that would eventually receive 109 replies­ (the most of any post yet on the USD board) and an 82 percent Juicy rating. Here's a taste of the relentless barrage that followed over the next few weeks, which ultimately resulted in Rees's cell phone number being published online:

RE: IN THE CLOSET: Definitely J.D. Rees. What heterosexual would start an a
capella group? Total fruit!

RE: IN THE CLOSET: This is a Catholic school, and homosexuality is a sin! If
you think it's okay for J.D. to be gay, maybe you should write his phone
number in every men's room from here to San Francisco, so he can meet as
many of his kind as possible.

For the record, Rees is not gay, nor is he the kind of straight guy to whom being called gay is a mortal insult. "I think it's a tribute to my character that they can't level any legitimate claims against me," he says. "It's been sort of funny, but at the same time  ..."

It's hard to understand how a mere appeal to conscience could, on its own, inspire such an outpouring of bile and keystrokes, but Rees insists he has no enemies that he's aware of, no one with a motive to smear him. "I can't pinpoint a time in my college career that I've done anything that would make people as angry with me as they appear to be on this website," he says. "I just haven't made that many ripples. I'm the guy who's nice, who tries to say hi to people." Rees has considered the possibility that a single antagonist with a grudge is authoring most of the comments, but even so, he can't point to a suspect: "I literally have no idea who these people are."

This isn't what Matt Ivester, the founder and owner of Juicy Campus, had in mind. Not exactly, anyway. Ivester debuted his creation at seven pilot schools last October, two years after graduating from Duke University, where he double-majored in economics and computer science. A member of Sigma Phi Epsilon—the same fraternity as J.D. Rees—Ivester was active in Greek life as an undergrad, at one point serving as the vice president of the Interfraternity Council. Immediately after graduation, he worked in Manhattan as a strategy consultant, but, having grown up in Silicon Valley during the tech boom of the 1990s, he "always wanted to start an Internet company," he says. "I've always known this was what I wanted to do. I'm kind of living my dream." In the past nine months, the site has colonized a total of 63 schools, with plans to expand to several hundred more this fall.

But in the short time it's been around, Juicy Campus has taken on a life of its own, one that may be beyond the control of its founder. If you are female and anything short of gorgeous at one of the schools in Juicy's network, for example, you now have reason to live in fear: "She's a stinky ugly Jew with a hopelessly oily face, deformed looking mouth, and droopy tits," wrote one UCLA poster recently, naming "the most hated slut on campus." At Columbia University, another young woman was awarded Ugliest Girl of '08. "This girl is so gross," reads a comment, "her face looks like the Andes with all those zits and pimples. Ewww ... so gross."

Then there's the University of California Santa Barbara student who "has a fucking extra toe." Or the "Biggest Cornell Cokehead." Or members of Vanderbilt's largely Jewish Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity, who woke up one morning to the following post: "We need to send a German professor over to that Jew hive to gas the whole house. Hit the showers, boys. Then we pile their shoes out on the sidewalk as a warning to others." Or the "red-headed dance team slut" at Penn State: "You've all seen her. Big monkey ears?... Or perhaps you've seen her slutting around Nittany Apartments fucking people's boyfriends, because she does that too." Three comments later, a user identified the woman by name.

In both design and function, Juicy Campus is almost laughably primitive, nothing more than a bulletin board for people to initiate and comment on discussion threads. Its "killer app" is extreme anonymity. Users aren't required, or even allowed, to register or provide screen names, and the site doesn't associate a computer's IP address, or unique signature, with anything a user writes. Those who have a heightened interest in concealing their identities can even find advice in the site's privacy statement on how to further cover their tracks.

Such measures belie Ivester's contention that he conceived Juicy Campus merely as a place where people could collect the "hilarious, entertaining, and fun stories" that emerge from college life. "We thought people might talk about what happened at some fraternity party last weekend, or to rank sororities. That sort of thing," he insists. "And if you look, you'll definitely find those fun stories. And then there's a bunch more stuff that we didn't realize people would use the site for."

But it's this "bunch more stuff"—the unsubstantiated accusations of promiscuity, drug abuse, plastic surgery, homosexuality, rape, and eating disorders, along with enough racist, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic invective to make David Duke blanch—that seems to generate the majority of the page views. It's also put Juicy Campus at the center of a national debate on free speech and brought a slew of free publicity. The site made the newswires in February, after the student government at Pepperdine University asked the school's administration to ban it from campus servers. A few weeks later, it landed in the pages of the New York Times when someone used it to post links to gay porn videos made by a Yale student. Shortly after that, the University of Virginia's student council formally voted to condemn the forum and to encourage classmates to boycott it.

Justine, a sophomore at a state school in the Midwest, had her own brush with the site in February, after she received an e-mail from her roommate. "I found your name on Juicy Campus," it read. "Is this a joke?" The item in question was a list of people supposedly carrying sexually transmitted diseases.

"If you know me, that's just ridiculous," says Justine. "I'm really conservative." Like Rees, she claims to have no idea who would write nasty untruths about her, but suspects it was someone with a grudge against her sorority. "There isn't anybody I don't like, and I don't know anybody who doesn't like me."

Kim, a sophomore at a large Southern university, was singled out as one of the "biggest sluts" in school. (And, like Justine, she asked me not to use her real name to avoid antagonizing the tormentors.) So far, she has resisted the urge to read the post about herself, although her friends are always sure to let her know when a new comment is added. "I try to keep that out of my head as much as possible," she says. "I have enough to worry about without that nonsense."

For Ivester, the growing chorus of criticism represents an awkward public-relations problem. In February, he posted an open letter on the site's companion blog about why "hate isn't Juicy." The letter, he explains to Radar, "just encourages people to think about what the entertainment value is in putting up mean-spirited posts, and it reminds people words can hurt." He adds, "Ultimately, we leave it to our users to discuss the topics that interest them most and to make Juicy Campus the type of community they want it to be. In many ways, it's out of our hands."

Ivester admits that, someday soon, someone will probably be denied a job as a result of a falsehood posted on Juicy Campus. He suggests that colleges refuse to let employers recruit on campus unless they agree not to use Juicy Campus as a vetting tool. He also realizes it's far from inconceivable that someone attacked on his site will commit suicide. But, he contends, anyone who voluntarily logs on is, in effect, harassing himself, not being harassed. He stoutly refuses to delete individual entries from the site,even when the subject writes in to complain­—or the subject is Ivester himself.

"We don't think the Internet should be censored, and we certainly aren't in a position to say what's right and wrong," he says. "We can't launch an investigation into every post. Our answer is, if you disagree with what's said, reply to the post. Provide more information. Everyone has an equal voice on the site."

Perhaps. But when Rees attempted to provide more information, he only wound up turning himself into a target. Few people seem to log on to Juicy Campus seeking to stamp out injustice. And the Web's increasingly vicious commenter culture all but ensures that dissenting voices are drowned out in a sea of jeers.

In October, New York gossip blog gawker.com identified Atlanta financier John Fitzgerald Page as the "worst person in the world" for being rude to a potential online-dating match. Within days, hundreds of people—virtually none of whom claimed personal knowledge of Page—chimed in to testify to his heinousness. The onslaught grew so frenzied that the beleaguered Page was invited onto network morning talk shows to explain himself.

Of course, it could've been worse. When Paul Tilley, a 40-year-old Chicago advertising executive, ended his life in February by jumping from his hotel room, fingers immediately pointed to the hectoring comments about him posted by readers of AgencySpy and AdScam.

Recently, the attorneys general of New Jersey and Connecticut opened investigations into Juicy Campus's practices on the grounds that its failure to delete comments of the sort proscribed by its user agreement constitutes consumer fraud. Though he's cooperating with these investigations, Ivester dismisses them as preposterous. "Our terms and conditions never say anywhere that we're going to remove posts," he says. Still, a successful prosecution could have wide repercussions, not only for Juicy Campus, but also for a growing number of smaller outlets.

User-generated, crowd-sourced, and wholly dependent on the inexhaustible human impulse to slag one's fellow man, micro-gossip sites like Juicy represent a new and uniquely difficult challenge for the feds. The kind of intimate dirt and slander that was once relegated to locker rooms, water coolers, and boozy late-night bitch sessions now lives online, in perpetuity, on websites that receive millions of hits per month and attract serious advertising dollars. To protect the right to criticize government officials and others in power, American libel law has traditionally made a distinction between public figures and private citizens, with a lower bar set for defamation claims made by the latter. Publishing rumors about random, nonfamous teenagers, either in print or online, would normally invite a lawsuit.

But for Juicy Campus or any other user-driven site, it's a different story, thanks to the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 of that law specifically asserts that website operators are not responsible for content generated by third parties. If the New York Times publishes a letter to the editor containing a libelous claim, the wronged party could successfully sue the paper; if the same claim appears in a comment posted on nytimes.com, the victim is out of luck. Section 230 was originally written to encourage free speech online by ensuring that website owners were not held responsible for the words of others. But its authors most likely didn't envision a site like Juicy Campus, which not only allows but encourages irresponsible speech and creates no content of its own.

The situation is worrisome to free speech purists like Thomas Burke, an attorney with the San Francisco firm of Davis Wright Tremaine who specializes in First Amendment law. "I think a lot of people are concerned that it's the kind of website that may cause the courts to rethink the protections provided in Section 230," he says. Barring a major rewrite of the law, the next generation of Web users will come of age with the understanding that having any public profile whatsoever comes with the risk of unwarranted attack.

"When you look at the people who are torn down on Juicy, it's the fraternity presidents, the athletes, the musicians," Rees points out. "What it's teaching them is that it's better and safer to keep your head down than to take leadership positions and serve your community."

And as Rees learned, it can be hard to tune out gossip even when one doubts its veracity. "There have been instances where I've been introduced to someone after seeing their name on the Juicy Campus, and I'm thinking, Oh, you're that girl from the STD list," Rees admits. "And while I make it a direct point not to believe anything said on the website, it's hard to forget about it."

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The Hate Shift
These days, you don't need to deface public property to anonymously trash your enemies. All you need is a Web connection.

bitterwaitress.com
Come up short on the tip and run the risk of a public shaming.
"Dumb as hamsters. We were crazy busy that night and I still managed to give them perfect service. When the check came, the alpha white trash had me explain every single charge before giving me his card on which he left a $3.00 tip. Fuck you, you proletarian scum."

justrage.com
Where the openly hostile go to let loose on their "fat ass loser" husbands and
shoe-loving roommates.
"How many shoes does one bitch need? Fuck you stinky ugly big foot bitch and all your fucking shoes. Twice. Once for each shoe in each pair."

jobvent.com
Disgruntled workers get even with their employers.
"Nobody enjoys going to work anymore because of our manager. He is always harassing on someone. He thinks he is king poo of turd island."

ratemyprofessors.com
Students slam their professors.
"The most unethical, dishonest, and contemptible person I've ever met."

This article is from the July/August issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here.