Rivalhost Owner Accused of Racism Over Chimpmania.com

Rivalhost Owner Accused of Racism Over Chimpmania.com

A year ago, CBS 11 brought the world the tragic but ultimately hopeful story of Whitney Mitchell. The Dallas woman, 21 at that time, had been an aspiring dancer until sepsis took all four limbs when she was 18. The aspiring dancer was learning to walk again with prosthetics and dreamed of becoming a fashion designer.
Chimpmania
Not everyone found the aspiring dancer's story heartwarming, as Mitchell shortly absorbed from the Internet.

"Every now and then she'll Google her name," Mitchell's mother, Patricia Kirven, explains. Not out of conceit but because paraphiliacs, aka "devotees," will "steal her graphics, and they will place them on these types of amputee-porn sites."

Finding those was disturbing, but more upsetting to Mitchell and her mom was a post she discovered on Chimpmania.com.

If you're not familiar with Chimpmania, or when the name isn't enough self explanatory, its a web forum devoted to mocking African Americans in the most vile way imaginable. It's described here as a "hate site consisting of permabanned rejects from Niggermania and Chimpout."

The post that Mitchell stumbled upon, name "amputee wants legs to dance wiff," featured various screenshots from the CBS 11 report, crudely doctored to include watermelon, fried chicken, malt liquor and comment that's largely too vile to replicate.

Mitchell was distraught for a few days and remains worried, but she's mostly accepted it as an inevitable byproduct of the net.

Her mom, nevertheless, is still pissed.

"I merely made it my mission to get that web site taken down," Kirven says.

She scored a modest success early on when she notified Warner Brothers that her daughter's pictures was placed into copyrighted images, one featuring Larry the Cable Guy, another a screenshot in the film Dolphin Tale. The original post was removed but was rapidly replaced by one that was not dirty of copyright infringements.

Kirven doesn't have a lot of options for getting that second post, much less the whole website, taken down.

The First Amendment offers comprehensive protections to speech, even the kind of invective spewed on Chimpmania. Supreme Court precedent holds that hate speech is permissible, so long as it does not directly incite lawless actions. Hurling racist insults in a quadruple amputee, while disturbing, does not appear to rise to that threshold. The attorneys Kirven has spoken with have told her as much. Chimpmania
 
Instead, Kirven is attempting to beat up enough of a public outcry the organization that hosts Chimpmania, boots the site. Thus far, Kirven'sorg request has collected close to 22,000 signatures.