BY ADRIAN CHEN
Gawker
The racist smear campaign against Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black teen shot to death last month in Florida, has reached a new level of ghoulishness. A white supremacist hacker says he’s broken into Martin’s email and social networking accounts, and leaked his private Facebook messages. We’ve been able to confirm that at least one email account that belonged to Martin was cracked.
The hacker, who goes by the name Klanklannon, posted what he said were Martin’s private Facebook messages to the politics section (NSFW) of the anarchic message board 4chan—called “/pol/”—Tuesday afternoon at around noon. The messages were posted on four slides, strategically arranged to back up the insane racist argument that Trayvon was a Scary Black Teenager and so somehow deserved to be killed by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman that night.
A slide titled “Trayvon Martin Used Marijuana Habitually,” features an exchange between Trayvon and a friend about getting high. Another slide, “Trayvon Martin was a Drug Dealer” features Facebook messages and photos that supposedly prove Martin dealt drugs, including a picture of Martin posing “aggressively with a large amount of cash in his hand.” It’s impossible to verify the hacked messages’ authenticity—like other anti-Trayvon Martin propaganda, they’re probably amix of real and fake content— but they are now being passed around as gospel among the racist underbelly of the internet, including message boards like the neo-Nazi hive Stormfront, which Klanklannon apparently frequents.
In addition to the Facebook messages, Klanklannon posted a list of usernames and passwords for Martin’s social media and email accounts as proof of his exploits. All of the passwords had been changed to racist slurs. (Gmail: “niggerniggernigger” Twitter: “coontrayvonnigger”)
“I realize that some of this information might be to (sic) extreme to believe,” Klanklannon writes in a copy of the original 4chan thread we’ve obtained. “That’s why I offer you evidence. Here are my sources.”
The list included login details for Martin’s Gmail, Yahoo, MySpace, and Twitter accounts. A source who came across the 4chan post when it was live was able to use the information to log onto Martin’s Gmail account Tuesday night. Our source panicked upon seeing that trolls had started using the account to send emails under Martin’s name, and deleted the account. (An email sent to Martin’s Gmail address bounced back today; Martin’s Twitter account has also been deactivated. His MySpace page is still up, showing that the last login was Tuesday.)
On 4chan, Klanklannon made clear their intention to smear Trayvon. Klanklannon introduces the post with, “Today /pol/, tomorrow CNN.” One 4chan user told us Klanklannon had been attempting to break into Martin’s accounts for days, posting periodic updates to the board.
“Where did all the liberals go?,” Klanklannon taunted after posting his slides. “Did they run off because they can’t handle the facts?”
But Klanklannon included none of Martin’s emails in his leak, because the picture they paint is of a normal high school junior preparing for college. A screenshot of Trayvon’s Gmail inbox our source provided us is heartbreaking. Martin apparently used his Gmail account for his college search, and it’s filled with emails about upcoming SAT tests and scholarship applications. (“Trayvon, now is the best time to take the SATs!”) One email included the results of a career aptitude test, our source said. It “talked about his interest in aeronautics and stuff.”
Klanklannon has proven nothing more than the depths to which the racist amateur detectives who have spent days obsessing over every aspect of Trayvon Martin’s short life will sink in their horrible quest to vet a dead teenager.