Damien Leonhardt, 17, who went by the name "Jessi Slaughter" online in 2010.
Damien Leonhardt
“You dun goofed!” was the line that turned Jessi Slaughter into a meme, the accidental start of a viral video seen over a million times in just a few weeks in 2010. Jessi was only 11 years old. In the video, Jessi wears a zebra-striped T-shirt and cries while Gene Leonhardt (Jessi’s dad), down one one knee, screams into the camera, pointing his finger. “I know who it’s coming from, because I backtraced it … you’ve been reported to the cyberpolice … And if you come near my daughter, guess what? Consequences will never be the same.” His bumbling misunderstanding of the internet and malapropisms only fanned the flames of the exact trolls he was trying to ward off.
Jessi, at 17, now identifies as Damien and prefers they/them pronouns (the surname Slaughter was sort of a nom de emo). Damien talked with BuzzFeed’s Internet Explorer podcast about how the video impacted their life and why the internet in 2010 was such a mean place.
Leonhardt’s over-the-top rant ensured that the video blew through the tiny corner of the internet that birthed it and found a much more mainstream audience, one that was just happy to chuckle at a funny video during the office lunch break. The video was picked up by a number of blogs and websites (including a nascent BuzzFeed), and eventually the family even made an appearance on Good Morning America.
However, the series of events that led up to the video was more disturbing than most people who got a mild laugh out of “you dun goofed” realized. Damien, as “Jessi Slaughter” (their real last name was Leonhardt), was a big emo music fan and was active on Myspace, along with fellow “scene kids.” Damien was very aware it was the last gasp of the platform’s days.
They also were active on Stickam, a streaming video platform popular with teens and younger people, especially scene kids (somewhat similar in concept to today’s YouNow live-streaming platform). A site called StickyDrama acted as a sort of gossip page to discuss various popular live-streamers. Someone on that site wrote a post claiming that some scene kid who went by Jessi Slaughter had hooked up with the singer of a popular emo band, Blood on the Dance Floor. It was written in a way that scolded and condemned the 11-year-old for promiscuity. Damien denied this on their Myspace page.
The singer, whose stage name is Dahvie Vanity, was about 25 at the time, and Damien was a child. This wasn’t a rumor about a groupie and a rock star; it was a suggestion of child sexual assault. When BuzzFeed spoke with Damien, they told us they could not discuss this topic (persistent rumors spread online that Vanity had sexual contact with other very young fans). In any case, it was at the very least spurious internet gossip meant to slut-shame a young girl.
The allegation, along with other brash and profanity-laced videos Damien had on their YouTube account, attracted the attention of 4chan. (Damien believes it was someone from school who initially posted the video to 4chan.) It was this harassment — of a possible victim of a heinous crime — that caused Damien’s father to scream into the camera, trying to protect his young daughter.
The video came out over summer vacation, so the impact on Damien’s school life wasn’t immediate. However, when they came back that fall, things had changed. “I kind of lost all my friends and had to make new friends,” Damien says. “I had a clique of friends — the emo kids — in sixth grade, and none of them wanted anything to do with me after."
Life was not kind to Damien in following years. Not long after the video, they were placed into foster care. “My dad was really abusive toward me and my mom,” says Damien. “You kind of saw the anger issues with him [in the video], and that put extra stress on the family, which made him even angrier.” In 2011, their father died of a heart attack, and in 2012, Damien moved back in with their mother in a small town in Florida. “I kind of lost all my friends and had to make new friends,” says Damien.
The harassment never stopped. “At first it was just comments on YouTube and stuff like that,” said Damien. “And that was like, well, it's public and people are dicks. But when people are actively seeking your stuff out to send you hateful messages and harass you, that's scarier to me.”
Six years later, Damien has some perspective on what happened. They have an active Tumblr, where despite some trolling, there’s a positive community. They get messages to their Tumblr from people asking for advice and help experiencing harassment. “I want to use my experiences to help other people, and also to help myself grow as a person and to get more involved with things that can help other people.”
The internet is a very different place now that it was in 2010. Even though the internet wasn’t new or frightening then, it wasn’t like today, where everyone’s aunt is on Facebook and has a smartphone and understands the basic concepts of social media. And somehow, in the years in between, the internet has become something of a nicer place in many ways (although of course harassment still exists).
The way we understand patterns of harassment has completely changed. Cyberbullying isn’t just something you hear about on the news relating to teenagers — online harassment is a very real issue, even to many adults. No one knows this better than Damien. “Nowadays, people are a lot more understanding that, yes, there's a person behind that photo, there's a person behind that video,” they said. “It’s not just a funny picture that has no meaning when you share things. It has a meaning to the person who put it there. We're connected; it's not just a cold screen. But even now, I feel like people still sort of don't understand completely that what they do has an impact. Even if you're not meaning it to be harassing or harmful, it still has an impact.”
Listen to BuzzFeed's Internet Explorer podcast's interview with Damien, part 1 of our series on years that changed the internet:
Subscribe to the Internet Explorer podcast on iTunes.
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