The Man Behind TheDirty.com Is Just As Awful In Person

Nik Richie—founder of a website that cruelly mocks non-famous people—appeared on Dr. Phil today (with his wife Shayne Lamas) defending himself and his “service” to society, and remaining emotionless when confronted with the tears of people he’s ridiculed.

Nik — whose real name is Hooman Karamian — admits that he’s probably hurt people’s feelings (and it would be hard not to admit such a thing when you have a girl that you called “a shim” crying in your face) but that his website is a “necessity” to our culture. He says, “It’s a form of holding people accountable for their actions.” And by “holding people accountable,” he means accountable for being what he believes to be ugly, whether they got that way through birth or by overly spray tanning. And commenters on his site are encouraged to chime in on the derision. In the case of the woman in the clip below, she was labeled as having STDs, needing a nose job, and having given her step-father a blow job in exchange for a boob job. She said the repeated mockery (eight posts devoted to her over a period of time) destroyed her self-esteem and “ruined” her life.

Dr. Phil essentially ripped Nik a new asshole, telling him, “You’re selling dirt and lies and you’re making a profit off it.” But the criticism has made no impact; Nik thinks he’s awesome. He’s self-aggrandizing, to say the least. He brags about achieving his own celebrity status through the site, and about how he gets paid to make appearances in nightclubs. He also feels that what he is doing through his blog is “revolutionary.” It’s hard to tell which more abhorrent: that he’s an asshole or that he’s a deluded asshole. And in regards to that delusion, Nik also insists that his site is “helping” people. He knows, because they email him and thank him.

He actually told Dr. Phil that he thinks that his site also helped the girl on stage (you know, the one who can’t stop crying) saying, “It looks like this picture affected her in a positive way and [now] she looks put together and she looks great.” Clearly Nik deserves credit for that. When she asked him how he would feel if someone committed suicide being teased on his site he said, “I would say they are looking for attention.”

Later, Nik’s wife Shayne—winner of The Bachelor season 12, daughter or Lorenzo Lamas, and star of the short-lived E! reality show Leave it to Lamas—also appeared on Dr. Phil to defend her husband, even though she doesn’t condone what he does for a living. In fact, she didn’t even know what he did for a living when she married him—because they got hitched in Vegas 12 hours after they met. This is because she’s living on another planet. Or so she says: “I didn’t know what my husband did for a living. I come from a different world.”