r/CreepShots and the Non-Consensual 'Creepshot' Photo Scandal
September–October 2012
r/CreepShots hosted secretly-taken sexualized photos of women and girls in public without their consent. After a Georgia teacher case and Gawker's October 2012 unmasking of moderator 'Violentacrez' (Michael Brutsch), the subreddit was shut down.
What happened
r/CreepShots was a Reddit community that encouraged users to take and share sexualized photographs of women and girls in public places without their knowledge or consent, including invasive 'upskirt' and cleavage-focused images. The subreddit drew national scrutiny in September 2012 when a substitute teacher at East Coweta High School in Sharpsburg, Georgia was identified as having posted photos of a female student to the forum. The Coweta County Sheriff's Department opened an investigation; the teacher was fired and banned from Reddit.
On October 12, 2012, Adrian Chen of Gawker revealed that 'Violentacrez,' one of Reddit's most powerful moderators, was Michael Brutsch, a 49-year-old programmer from Arlington, Texas, who had created r/Jailbait and moderated r/CreepShots among hundreds of subreddits. By the day after publication, Brutsch had been fired by his employer.
The controversy was intertwined with 'Predditors,' a Tumblr blog launched around September 29, 2012 by an anonymous woman who compiled the real-world identities of r/CreepShots posters; it had named dozens of users before Tumblr briefly took it down. r/CreepShots was shut down in October 2012 amid this pressure, and Reddit communities retaliated against Gawker by banning links to the site across numerous major subreddits, accusing Chen of doxxing.
Impact
The episode became a landmark case in debates over online anonymity, accountability, and the limits of platform 'free speech,' exposing how Reddit's hands-off moderation enabled the non-consensual sexualization of women and minors. It produced real-world consequences — Brutsch lost his job and reputation, and the Georgia teacher was fired and investigated — while the 'Predditors' counter-campaign raised its own ethical questions about doxxing as a remedy. The scandal helped catalyze later policy shifts, including Reddit's 2015 ban on non-consensual intimate imagery.