Glenn Beck, PR Genius, Spreads the False Rumor He Raped and Murdered a Young Girl in 1990

Some online provocateurs launched an internet meme claiming Glenn Beck killed a young girl in 1990 to parody his maddening fact-free rhetorical style. Now Glenn Beck's trying to shut down their web site, ensuring that people will write about it.

Glenn Beck always says false things and then says, "I'm just asking questions." Like yesterday, when—after the White House threw Van Jones under the bus—he said, "Will Van Jones still work with the White House? [I] can't get answers." So some funny kids over at Fark decided to amplify that little trick thusly: "Did Glenn Beck rape and murder a young girl in 1990? We're not saying he's guilty, but he won't deny it!" And an internet meme was born—according to Mediaite, last week the top suggested Google search terms when you typed in "Glenn Beck" were "rape" and "murder" (they've since been scrubbed).

Last week, an anonymous 34-year-old computer science student decided the meme needed a home, so he started GlennBeckRapedandMurderedaYoungGirlin1990.com, complete with a fake arrest report and a plethora of information on the "case":

We think the gag strides the border between clever and stupid: Accusing someone, even in jest, of raping and murdering a young girl is tasteless and damns the whole enterprise with useless hyperbole. But the site's mimicry of Beck's bullshit tactics is right-on: "We await evidence that he didn't rape and murder a young girl in 1990!" In any case, it's a relatively harmless little internet parody that now Glenn Beck is making sure you know about by trying to shut it down:

His lawyers are claiming that the site is a "defamatory domain," which it would be if any reasonable person could come away from the site believing that Beck actually did rape and murder a young girl in 1990. But it's an obvious attempt to parody his style, and his efforts to shut it down will only increase the number of times "Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990" are encountered by Google's indexing bots.

According to the site's proprietor, who wouldn't give us his name and therefore should be regarded with suspicion, Beck's lawyers have gone after the domain registrar, the hosting service, and even the data center that houses the servers on which his site lives.

"They basically tried to contact every level to shut it down," he says. "My hosting service isn't happy with the situation, but they're standing by me until they get a court order." The anonymous proprietor says he won't reveal his identity because "I don't want my house to get egged," and says the site is designed to "release frustration" about the way the right wing distorts political debate.

"I'm not actually accusing him of these things," he says. "He uses these techniques."

The paper trail of Beck's efforts to shut the site down can be found here. We contacted Beck's personal publicist, who declined to comment but confirmed that Beck believes the site to be defamatory and is trying to get it taken down.

Anyway, that's the story of GlennBeckRapedandMurderedaYoungGirlin1990.com, the site that promotes for parody purposes the false rumor that Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990. And here's the gag that started the whole thing: