Glenn Beck Rape & Murder Hoax

This entry is about the controversial internet joke and Glenn Beck v. Eiland-Hall (2009), a court case filed before the World Intellectual Property Organization regarding a political-satirical domain name.

About

Did Glenn Beck Rape And Murder A Young Girl In 1990 is an internet hoax and a grassroots smear campaign that began as an extreme satire of Mr. Beck’s over-the-top interview tactics on his self-titled TV show Glenn Beck, wherein he frequently asks his guests to disprove highly speculative and often outrageous assertions.

On Glenn Beck

Media Matters’ Misinformer of the Year 2009

Glenn Beck is an American media personality and a political commentator well-known through his nationally-syndicated TV and radio programs. While the conservative icon enjoy popular ratings and large audience base, his provocative rhetorics have been criticized by American journalists and bloggers as fear mongering and misleading the public.

Origin of Joke

The notion that somebody raped and murdered a young girl in 1990 originally comes from a crude joke performed by Gilbert Gottfried at the Comedy Central roast of a fellow actor/comedian Bob Saget in August 2008. After citing a nonexistent rumor that the Full House sitcom star may be an unconvicted rapist and a murderer, Gottfried repeatedly warned the audience not to spread such terrible hearsay that didn’t even exist prior to his performance, which was the whole point of the joke:

Meme Origin & Spread

On August 31, 2009, Gottfried’s highly risqué joke was used to satirize Glenn Beck’s politically insensitive mannerisms, when a discussion thread surfaced on Fark.com, posing the following question:

Why haven’t we had an official response to the rumor that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a girl in 1990?

Despite the preposterous nature of such claim, the thread comment spawned multiple pages of false speculations that Glenn Beck may or may not have raped and murdered a girl sometime in 1990. Upon reading the thread, Issac Eliand-Hall, a college student from Florida, created a single serving site under DidGlennBeckRapeandMurderaYoungGirlin1990.com, which launched on September 1, 2009 and received over 120,000 page views within its first 24 hours.

The meme soon spread to other social media hubsites, including Reddit, Digg, Yahoo!, Answers.com, YouTube and Twitter. For a brief time, “Glenn Beck murder” was listed as Google’s top search suggestion for “Glenn Beck”, using a SEO tricks known as Googlebombing.

Litigation & Media Coverage

Merely days after the launch of single serving site and spread of rumor, lawyers representing Beck contacted the host and requested that the site be shut down for its highly defamatory domain name. After an unsuccessful attempt at shutting down the site, Beck’s legal team then turned to World Intellectual Property Organization--a UN agency based in Switzerland--for arbitration, as Issac’s choice of domain name is protected by the first amendment of the US Constitution.

On October 29, 2009, the WIPO ruled against Beck, concluding that Eiland-Hall was making a political statement through use of parody in a “legitimate non-commercial use” of the Glenn Beck mark. Eiland-Hall wrote a letter to Beck in which he voluntarily turned over ownership of the domain name. He kept the website active at GB1990.com and didglennbeckrapeandmurderayounggirlin1990.com.

Conservative Media & the word “Rape”

YouTube Remixes

The hoax has also spread over to YouTube. There are several videos claiming to be “Glenn Beck’s admissions,” which are just sound bites from his TV/radio show, heavily doctored or rearranged in order. A lot of these videos are tagged as “Glenn Beck 1990” or GB1990.com.

Hitler finds out about the Glenn Beck 1990 rumors:

Glenn Beck signals creepy vibe on his show:

Related: Streisand Effect

Streisand Effect is an observation which says that an attempt to censor a piece of online information has the counter-effective consequence of drawing media publicity to the greater extent than if no censorship had been attempted at all. This is often true when public figures or celebrities bring legal complaints (ex: cease-and-desist letters) against individuals or groups based on the Internet. It was originally coined by Mike Masnick in reference to a 2003 incident in which Barbara Streisand filed a privacy suit against Pictopia.com in an attempt to remove a picture of her mansion taken by a user on the website. As a result of the case and the media coverage, more than 420,000 people visited the site over the next month.