Remember how Jonah Mowry's anti-bullying video went viral after it was posted in December 2011–and led to the Lake Forest teen becoming a national celebrity and inspiration to millions? Wonder if the same fate will befall “Scott Spideralamode,” a man in his 50s who employed the same cue-cards-on-video strategy as Mowry in a video that's now catching fire on Facebook–even though it was first posted a month after Mowry's.
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Jonah Mowry and Daniel Mendez of OC Among Bullied Teens Honored at National Event
As of early Tuesday afternoon, the video had 795 comments, 1,344 likes and 20,066 shares. By the middle of that same afternoon, those figures were pushing higher.
The keen interest at this late date seems to be attributable to child molestation survivors spreading links to it. (The Weekly was tipped off by Joelle Casteix of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests-SNAP.)
The video has the man nicknamed “Spider” silently holding up cue cards ala Mowry about his “dirty little secret.” He goes on to say he loved attending Brookhurst Junior High School in Anaheim but later moved away to another school, around the time his personal nightmare began.
It happened after the then-12-year-old Spider played pinball next to a grown man in an arcade at the Orange shopping mall that in those days was called The City, later was renamed the Block and now goes by The Outlets at Orange. The pair became friends, the man invited the boy to his apartment to play with a pinball machine there and the lad went along … and discovered the man had no pinball machine in his residence.
It's more dramatic to read the whole story as Spider tells it in the video, so click here to watch it. Needless to say, the experience ruined his childhood, turned him into a bully, led to future arrests, drug abuse, toxic relationships with women and the breakup of his family.
Near the end, Spider reveals why he shared his dirty little secret for the first time … and with the world: to encourage other children with such secrets to tell someone so they can get the help they need and not have to live the hard life he has lived. (He also almost identifies his tormentor, who as of the video being posted was still living in the Santa Barbara area.)
This comment left with the video Tuesday afternoon by Amanda Allen pretty much sums up the hundreds of others that are being left: “God bless your heart for going out and posting this. These things that hurt from our past can hurt deeply and for years. It's hard to talk about something so traumatic. It is a comfort if you can help someone else. I am sure you're not alone.”
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.