James McGibney is an American entrepreneur and former Marine. He is the CEO and founder of Las Vegas, Nevada based ViaView, Inc., which owns and operates the web sites BullyVille.com, CheaterVille.com, CupidVille.com, KarmaVille.com, and SlingerVille.com.
McGibney served in the United States Marine Corps, serving tours of duty with Third Surveillance Reconnaissance Intelligence Group and Marine Security Guard Battalion. He was awarded the Navy Achievement Medal for his service in the US Marines. McGibney founded SecuraTrak, a satellite-based asset tracking system. McGibney was involved with the first deployment of Cisco UCS blade technology in 2009, while employed as data center lead at general contractor Tutor Perini. In February 2011, McGibney announced the website Cheaterville.com, where anonymous users could post claims of infidelity, alongside names and pictures of those accused. He started websites based on similar user participation later in the year, as well as a matchmaking website. In June 2012 he announced he would host his own radio show, VocalVille, on CBS radio station KXNT-FM in Las Vegas.
Is Anyone Up? purchase
In April 2012, McGibney purchased controversial revenge porn site Is Anyone Up? from Hunter Moore for less than US$15,000. Web traffic for the site was redirected to BullyVille.com. This effectively shut down the previous site, and was the stated intent of McGibney. Three days after the transaction, Moore used his Twitter account to accuse McGibney of being a pedophile, of possessing child pornography and threatening to rape McGibney's wife. McGibney sued Moore for defamation in Nevada's Clark County District Court in February 2013. The court entered a default judgment against Moore in the sum of $250,000 plus court costs and attorney fees.
In December 2015, McGibney was ordered to pay a $1 million Anti-SLAPP court sanction and $300,000 in attorney's fees to Neal Rauhauser for filing a series of baseless lawsuits against him. The ruling was temporarily reversed when the presiding judge granted McGibney's request for a new trial in February 2016, but reinstated in favor of Rauhasuer on 14 April 2016 with the SLAPP sanction against McGibney reduced from $1 million to $150,000. The judge ruled that McGibney had filed the suits to willfully and maliciously injure Rauhauser and to deter him from exercising his constitutional right to criticize McGibney. On April 19, 2018 a three judge panel in the Texas 2nd District Court of Appeals vacated the monetary and non-monetary sanctions findings, and reversed and remanded the amount of attorney's fees awarded in ruling that the trial court had abused its discretion. The court of appeals further reversed the finding of "willfully and maliciously" and noted that Rauhauser's attorney had engaged in a "troublesome pattern of heavy front-end loading of legal work" in an affidavit justifying the attorney's fees he sought.
