YouTube, Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images, YouTube
As someone who writes words on the internet, I receive a lot of press releases in my inbox. Some of them pique my interest. The vast majority of them do not. This is a story about one of the latter that somehow transformed into one of the former.
On July 27, three days after The National Enquirer and Radar Online published quotes from Hulk Hogan’s racist tirade about his daughter possibly dating a black man, I received an email stating that a site called WatchingMyDaughterGoBlack.com was offering the Hulk (a.k.a. Terry Bollea) and daughter Brooke $1 million to do porn. The site wanted the pair to perform a “Father-Daughter Cuckold Style Scene,” which they claimed would “resolve [Hulk’s] issues with his daughter Brooke” and also help him to “address his problems with other races.”
Screen shot of press release email sent by Mike Kulich, CEO of Stunner PR, on July 27, 2015.
Everything is terrible, I probably thought to myself. But then something caught my eye: the word “Dogfart.” (FYI: This story mentions the word “Dogfart,” like, 11 more times.) The studio behind the press release was The Dogfart Network, which, with 23 sites, bills itself as “the largest Interracial and Black Adult Entertainment Network on the web.” The name rang a bell because, about a month prior, the network’s PR machine had sent me a similar release offering Rachel Dolezal (that Rachel Dolezal) $50,000 to perform in four separate scenes for them. Also, it’s called “Dogfart.” The word “Dogfart” will always ring a bell.
Screen shot of press release email sent by Mike Kulich, CEO of Stunner PR, on July 17, 2015.
Thinking there was no way that these offers could be serious, I reached out to Mike Kulich, the CEO of Stunner PR, which represents The Dogfart Network and all 23 of their sites. Kulich told me that neither Dolezal nor the Hogans had responded to the studio’s offers, but he said that the network is “honest” about all the offers it makes.
Even so, the Dogfart Network’s efforts feel inherently cynical and hollow: “real” as the offers to do porn may be, they seem far from genuine. The network claims to boast more than 4,000 scenes on its sites, but how many of those scenes actually feature celebrities (much less “celebrities”)?
When asked, Kulich only named one public figure who had accepted one of Dogfart’s offers: Janelle Ambrosia, the woman who found YouTube infamy after a video of her hurling racial slurs in a Buffalo parking lot went viral. She ultimately backed out before filming began, Kulich said. (I was unable to confirm this story with Ambrosia, as it appears that she has scrubbed herself entirely from social media.)
Instead, Dogfart appears to be trafficking in what we like to call “clickbait” in order to promote their main business. It’s an easy sell: They offer a timely, SEO-friendly headline about how “Rachel Dolezal Already Has a $50,000 Offer to Do Porn” to raise awareness of their sites—and maybe raise their subscription count in the process. Lo and behold:
Headlines of articles published by Complex, The Frisky, and Death and Taxes on June 17, the same day I received the Dogfart Network press release.
On June 17, the very same day that I received the initial press release from Dogfart, a host of news sites published posts relating to the offer. Perhaps their interest was piqued. Perhaps the allure of more Rachel Dolezal content was too enticing to pass up. Either way, that’s enough “Dogfart” talk for one day.