Grimes' recent Vanity Fair cover was full of revelations, from her breakup with Elon Musk to their secret second child together, but what you may not have expected is for the artist to admit to being behind the take down of a polarizing indie music blog.
Appearing in a supplemental video piece for the magazine looking back on some of her most cancel-able moments, Grimes reflected on a picture of her kissing a friend at party that apparently ran alongside a demeaning story on the blog Hipster Runoff back in 2012. "I was trying to be like all integrity and, you know, like, start my career. And it was, like, Grimes gone wild or something," the musician told Vanity Fair. "it was just this, like, super wack, like, mean story. And it was, like, this meme that was going all over the internet."
Grimes went on reveal that in response to the story, she and a friend in the video game industry orchestrated a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on the site in an effort to get the owner to take the article down. "We were like, like, we’re not gonna let you run your — put your site back up until you take the story down," Grimes explains. "And he did, in fact, take the story down. And it was like my coolest hacker moment."
The veracity of Grimes' anecdote seems to be backed up by the fact that the anonymous owner of Hipster Runoff, Carles, told Motherboardat the time that “My hosting company and support team say that there are signs of foul play on the server, and some of the last actions before it crashed are very suspicious.” Adding that, “My server disk has crashed and remote backups were sabotaged.”
As ethically and legally questionable as Grimes' tactics may have been, they do appear to have been pretty effective. Not only did Carles end up taking down the inflaming story, but Hipster Runoff didn't post anything about Grimes between April 2012 and October 2013. The DDoS attack would go on to be the beginning of the end for the blog which was sold to Brooklyn Vegan a couple years later and remains entirely inactive to this day.
The wild part is that Grimes would openly admit, not only to outright extorting the blog, but to conspiring with a friend on what is still considered in the US and Canada to be a cyber crime. Under both American and Canadian penal codes, DDoS attacks are considered a crime and could result in a fine and up to 10 years in prison. Unfortunately for Grimes, who was living in Montreal at the time, the criminal code regarding DDoS attacks is still the same as it was 10 years.
As to whether or not Grimes' cavalier admission will result in any sort of legal repercussions remains to be seen but we know there's at least one person that's thankful for the artist's morally grey actions.
To be on the receiving end of hipster runoff hate was severely damaging to my mental health. I know y\u2019all thought it was funny but tbh it sucked VERY MUCH.— Best Coast (@Best Coast) 1648138153
Photo via Getty/ Barry Brecheisen