The most notorious troll on Reddit is looking to get back into his old game: posting sexually explicit pictures on the Internet. Only now, the notorious Redditor recently unmasked as Michael Brutsch is hoping to do it legally, as part of the porn industry.
Brutsch, aka Reddit user "Violentacrez," was fired from his position at a financial services company less than 24 hours after Gawker reporter Adrian Chen outed him as the man behind forums that posted pictures and hosted discussions about dead teenage girls, rape, and anti-Semitism, the Daily Dot reports.
Brutsch moderated subreddits such as r/rapebait, r/incest, r/picsofdeadkids, r/jailbait, and r/chokeabitch.
Now the 49-year-old from Arlington, Texas, is looking for a job, and he's reportedly hoping his unconventional experience as a Reddit moderator will be found attractive to an employer, according to Fox News.
“For hire: Senior Perl programmer looking for position in the adult content industry,” Brutsch posted on Reddit last week. “5 years’ experience building and maintaining adult communities."
The hundreds of comments following the post ranged from the constructive ("have you tried posting on gfy.com? Lots of adult industry people there") to the dismissive ("you don't deserve reddit's help").
Brutsch's online resume touts more than "twenty-five years of programming, design and systems maintenance experience with a focus on the UNIX/Linux environment and systems software."
It's been a swift, hard fall for a man once awarded a gold-plated Reddit bobble head for his contributions to the so-called "Front Page of the Internet."
After Chen's comprehensive exposé hit the Internet on Oct. 12, Brutcsh went from a man almost nobody knew to a man everyone knew -- and who many openly reviled.
Understanding what would happen if his identity ever was revealed Brutsch pleaded with Chen to not publish his piece.
"My wife is disabled. I got a home and a mortgage, and if this hits the fan, I believe this will affect negatively on my employment," he told Gawker. "I do my job, go home watch TV, and go on the internet. I just like riling people up in my spare time."
Sure enough, he lost his job. "Nothing like living in the US with a disabled wife and no health insurance," Brutsch wrote on Reddit, now under a more transparent pseudonym, mbrutsch. He also posted a link to his Paypal account so Redditors could donate money.
Brutsch agreed to an exclusive sit-down interview with CNN last week, during which he issued half an apology.
"Well, I am to some degree apologizing for what I did," Brutsch said. "Again, I was playing to an audience of college kids. And you know, when two years ago, when all of this was at its height, the audience was appreciative and supportive of the sort of gallows humor that I put out there."
He has also said part of the blame lies with Reddit. "I understand that, you know, Reddit enabled and encouraged this sort of behavior and I shouldn’t have been a part of it," he said.
In an email to CNN, Reddit said it now regrets not taking strong enough action to stop Brutsch's activity and regrets sending him the trophy, a statement that is contradicted by Brutsch's claims the forum lauded him "for making significant contributions to the site."