Amelia Gentleman

My name's Amelia Gentleman.

I'm a reporter with The Guardian newspaper.

So what we do know about him is he was born in Ukraine.

He was born in Soviet Ukraine in Odessa.

He moved with his family to the US when he was about six.

He was a very good student, was very good at playing chess, went to Northwestern University and studied economics and graduated in the top of his class.

But even as a teenager, even before he graduated, he had somehow understood that there was money to be made in pornography or in adult content websites.

And as a teenager, he set up his first website called Cybertania.

which was quite grim in that it sold passwords to internet users that purported to allow them access to very, very explicit content, often promising to give access to bestiality and child sex abuse material.

It's uncertain whether or not

that content, whether or not the passwords actually allowed users access.

But anyway, that was what the business model was.

He asked his mother to be director of the company.

So he was very precocious in the pornography sphere.

It's a tiny point, but I suppose he would have said it was a significant point.

There is a question mark about whether or not he did actually grant people access to that illegal content.

The website promised to, but it may not actually have worked.

So to some extent or another, it was a scam in the adult industry adjacent web area.

So after university, he continued to be in the adult industry.

I believe he set up a webcamming company, allowing users to see women via live streams.