LUTHMANN’S NOTE: This wasn’t revenge porn. It was revenge panic. Two thin-skinned YouTubers mistook satire for a felony because they can’t stand losing control of the narrative. No nudity. No intimacy. No privacy. Just a joke that landed too close to home. Instead of laughing it off, they screamed “crime,” threatened their own audience, and exposed the oldest trick in the censor’s handbook: sue, shout, and silence. The Supreme Court settled this decades ago. Public figures don’t get veto power over mockery. If a meme sends you into hysterics, the problem isn’t the joke. It’s your ego. This piece first appeared on FLGulfNews.com.
By Dick LaFontaine with Richard Luthmann and Michael Volpe
YouTube Grifters Cry “Revenge Porn” Over a Satirical Meme
Jeremy “Germ” Hales and Megan “The Shmear” Fox – a sue-happy YouTube duo known more for drama than dignity – have hit a sensational new low. The pair erupted in outrage this week, accusing commentator Richard Luthmann of creating “revenge porn” because he posted a raunchy satirical video meme and YouTube video poking fun at them.
Hales, famed for his What The Hales channel (once about storage locker treasure-hunting, now about suing and harassing critics for clicks), and Fox, a former PJ Media columnist turned “scummy content creator” who has “lost all of her ethics” according to Luthmann’s co-host, are blasting a parody as if it were a criminal act.
Fox took to Facebook in a fury, urging her own fans to report Luthmann’s post “for sharing revenge porn,” screeching that she “did not consent to [her] image being distributed in a gross sexual manner” and ordering followers to “leave this group” if they support “this kind of disgusting content.”
In the same breath, Fox – who herself had publicly body-shamed Luthmann as “fat” – declared that depicting her in a sexual satire was far worse than her own insults.
Hales, true to form, chimed in with a legal threat: “We’ll see what the courts have to say about it,” the YouTuber warned. The spectacle of two public figures howling “revenge porn” over an obvious joke has their audience recoiling – and Luthmann laughing.
Revenge Porn or Revenge Whining: Satire, Free Speech & the Law – Hustler v. Falwell Redux
Luthmann, a legally trained pugilist commentator, isn’t biting his tongue. In a discussion on The Unknown Podcast, co-host Michael Volpe and Luthmann dismantled the absurd accusation with legal ferocity and tabloid-style flair.
First off, revenge porn?
Even one of Hales and Fox’s own associates had to concede the term refers to “non-consensual sharing or dissemination of intimate images” – typically nude photos or sex tapes shared by ex-lovers without consent.
In this case, no one was actually naked; no real intimate act was caught on camera. It was, by all accounts, a satirical digital collage – “cartoonish figures… clearly Photoshopped,” as Luthmann noted.
There was zero expectation of privacy (the images of Hales and Fox were public), and zero prior intimacy between Luthmann and the offended duo.
In other words, the basic elements of any actual revenge porn claim are missing – no private lovers’ tryst, no leaked nudes, nothing.
“Where was the nudity, the sexual organs? When did you consent to the sexual act?” one commentator mocked in the flaming Facebook thread, pointing out how Fox can “dish s**t out, but [she] can’t take it.”
Luthmann shot back at Fox’s cries with a dose of her own medicine: he quoted the legal definition of revenge porn and pointedly asked “So you admit, we did the nasty?” – highlighting that calling it revenge porn implies there was something intimate to avenge.
While Fox fumed, Luthmann and Volpe invoked the 1988 Hustler Magazine v. Falwell Supreme Court case, a famous free-speech showdown. In that case, Jerry Falwell sued Hustler over a vile parody implying he had drunken sex with his mother; the Supreme Court bluntly ruled that public figures cannot recover damages for emotional distress caused by parody, even if it’s offensive.
Or, as Volpe put it in more colorful terms, the justices essentially said you gotta learn to take a joke.
Hales and Fox, by thrusting themselves into the public eye and throwing punches online, are fair game for satire – and the law is squarely on Luthmann’s side.
“You are mocking her. She can’t take a joke. You are protected by this case,” Volpe reminded Luthmann, citing Hustler v. Falwell. Florida’s own revenge-porn (or “sexual cyberharassment”) statutes similarly target genuine betrayals – like ex-partners leaking real explicit images – not obviously fake lampoons.
Unsurprisingly, Fox hasn’t even attempted an actual revenge-porn lawsuit or police report. As Volpe noted, YouTube never pulled Luthmann’s video, and no authorities came knocking, because the content clearly isn’t criminal.
At most, Hales’s ongoing civil suit (an omnibus tantrum against a host of critics) complains that his “feelings” were hurt by the parody video.
But hurt feelings don’t trump the First Amendment. In the legal arena, this “revenge porn” claim is DOA – a farce dressed up as a legal threat.
Revenge Porn or Revenge Whining: Luthmann’s Outrageous ‘Confession’ – Turning Parody Up to 11
Faced with the ridiculous allegation, Luthmann did what any provocateur with a law degree and a dark sense of humor might do: he played along – in the most over-the-top way possible. On the podcast, Luthmann mockingly “accepted” Hales and Fox’s narrative and cranked the satire dial to 11.
“Since they made the allegation that it’s revenge porn, I was the third person in the car, right?” Luthmann deadpanned, referring to the imaginary rendezvous at the center of the video meme. “I was filming the video… And that means that I’ve had sexual relations with Jeremy Hales and with Megan, right?”
In other words, if Hales and Fox insist this was an actual sexual scenario, then sure – Luthmann will be the cameraman in their pretend porno!
The tongue-in-cheek tale only got more outrageous from there. Luthmann went on to spin a lurid spoof of events: He joked that there was “a leather gag and ball” involved in this fictitious three-way escapade, and that Fox had him tied up for days.
In a jab at Hales’s fragile ego, Luthmann quipped he even had to throw a warm bottle of yogurt on Hales’s back – “to protect his feelings,” of course – as the absurd climax of this make-believe encounter.
By the end of his satirical soliloquy, Luthmann was chuckling that Hales might just be suffering “a bad case of hemorrhoids” from the whole imaginary ordeal.
The entire “confession” is pure parody – a sarcastic spectacle meant to highlight just how preposterous the revenge porn claim is. No one actually believes Luthmann “had sexual relations” with these YouTubers or literally filmed anything in a car; the video in question is obviously a comedic mash-up.
As Luthmann and Volpe noted, no reasonable viewer would think Fox was truly performing a sex act on Hales – it was a figurative depiction of her acting as his slavish “media whore,” always ready to do his bidding.
In short, Luthmann’s outrageous narrative is satire within satire – protected speech answering an unhinged accusation with a hearty dose of ridicule. (For the record, folks: this “car scene” never happened outside of a cartoonish video meme.) The only thing real here is Luthmann’s message to Hales and Fox: your claim is a joke, and I’m going to treat it like one.
Attacking Fans and Flouting the First Amendment
If Hales and Fox’s goal was to scare critics into silence, their strategy backfired spectacularly. Instead of rallying their base against Luthmann, the duo ended up attacking their own audience and looking downright unhinged.
Fox’s Facebook tirade didn’t just target Luthmann – she essentially called any fan who chuckled at the satire an enemy, telling people to report the post and leave the group if they didn’t condemn it.
Volpe observed the obvious: “When you have this kind of contempt for your own fans, it never works out well.” Indeed, Hales and Fox showed their true colors by threatening supporters with legal action simply for not sharing their outrage.
“This is what he thinks of you, his fans. If you ever cross him, he’ll sue,” Volpe said of Hales’s sue-crazy tendencies.
Fox, for her part, explicitly warned that anyone who posts content that “harms” her or poor Jeremy’s reputation will be dragged to court, boasting that she even got another critic’s page deleted as punishment. The irony is thicker than Hales’s skull: Fox openly harassed Luthmann by fat-shaming him, but cries foul that she was depicted (fully clothed, cartoon-style) in a sexual gag.
She raged, “He has taken my image and depicted me in a sexual act… it is illegal and disgusting… nothing like saying someone is fat,” arguing that her insults were fine but his satire crossed the line.
That brazen double standard has even their own followers cringing.
In the Facebook fracas, one moderator begrudgingly defended Luthmann’s right to speak, noting that yes, his posts are “designed to shock, offend, be vile and hateful,” but “that is freedom of speech… he has the right to share his opinion.”
In trying to label a jokey meme as “sexual harassment,” Fox and Hales have only proven Luthmann’s point about their thin skin. The Hustler v. Falwell precedent looms large: no matter how much Hales and Fox holler about being offended, they cannot muzzle satire.
Public figures are expected to have thicker hides – but these two are busy showing the world that if you mock them, they’ll menace you with lawsuits and name-calling.
As Volpe concluded, Jeremy Hales is acting like a classic legal bully, and Fox, who once promoted herself as a champion against bullies, has now become one of them.
The ultimate joke? By overreacting so wildly, Hales and Fox have drawn far more attention to Luthmann’s video than it ever would have gotten on its own.
“If she hadn’t said anything, no one would still be talking about this video,” Volpe mused, adding that he’s starting to “like [the video] more and more because of her reaction.”
In true tabloid fashion, one might say Hales and Fox made a scandal out of a shmear. They’ve turned a biting but silly video meme into a full-blown circus – threatening fans, misusing revenge-porn laws, and trampling on the First Amendment, all because their egos got bruised.
Satire isn’t a crime – but trying to bully and silence critics sure is pathetic.
The punchline writes itself: Luthmann’s raunchy spoof exposed Hales and Fox’s hypocrisy, and their own ham-fisted response proved his point. In this tawdry tale of revenge-porn accusations, the only thing truly obscene is the duo’s assault on free speech and their own followers.
The lesson from Hustler v. Falwell still stands: if you’re a public figure who can’t take a joke, the joke’s ultimately on you.
