Tucker Max

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Tucker Max

Tucker Max (b. 1975 in Atlanta, Georgia) is an author and the creator of www.tuckermax.com, a website which details explicit stories about his heavy drinking and frequent sexual encounters with women. On his site, he also hosts a forum and a "hook-up application" derived from the date application that was the genesis of his site. His site led to the creation of his company, FesteringAss, a network of websites with TuckerMax.com as its flagship site. The company was renamed Rudius Media August 10, 2006.

In January 2006, Citadel Press released Max's paperback, I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell and it earned a place on the New York Times Bestseller (supplemental) list. Max has announced plans for a follow-up in fall 2007 called Assholes Finish First. He also authored The Definitive Book of Pick-Up Lines, and Belligerence and Debauchery: The Tucker Max Stories which were released in 2001 and 2003 respectively. Both of the self-published books are now out of print.

The material for his stories, which he claims are non-fiction, comes from his drunken narration into a voice recorder, his own memory, or the memory of his drinking buddies.

Background

My life has been one big exercise in inexcusable behavior and unforgivable sins. The simple reality is that even though I'm brilliant and charismatic, I am also young and immature, and am only just beginning to develop enough maturity to empathize with the emotions of others, a necessary predicate to compassionate behavior and moral action, something I know little about.

Although born in Atlanta, Max grew up in and around Lexington, Kentucky. He is the only child of Dennis Max, a successful restaurateur in Boca Raton, Florida and Lanny Evans, formerly a flight attendant for Pan Am.

Max attended Lafayette High School in Lexington before transferring to Blair Academy in Blairstown, New Jersey for two years. He then attended the University of Chicago where he graduated with highest honors, being awarded a bachelor's degree in Law, Letters and Society, and was subsequently given an academic scholarship to Duke University School of Law where he earned his J.D. He has written: "I made a (mistake) going to law school, OK, get off my back. There was a time in my life that I thought I wanted to be a lawyer, but I was terribly mistaken. I didn't know that you had to give up your soul to work in that field."

After graduating from Duke, and unemployed after being fired from his summer legal internship, he moved to Boca Raton to get a job with his father's restaurant business. He later moved to Chicago, Illinois, where many of his stories were written. He then relocated briefly to Austin, Texas before returning to Chicago. In 2005, he moved to New York, New York where he took up residence in Manhattan's Flatiron District. There, he claims to have a small stake in Vapor Lounge, though Max admits "were I to start a bar, it would not be anything like Vapor Lounge at all." However, Max focuses almost exclusively on his career as an internet personality.

In the introduction to his site and books, Max claims to get "excessively drunk at inappropriate times." He is also often referred to as a misogynist, and his stories are called "sexist" by some. Against these allegations, Max claims: "Sexism is treating one sex differently from the other(s). I treat men and women equally: just like shit."

On the Internet

While at Duke University, Max posted a "date application" on the Internet. However, his notoriety on the Internet began with the distribution of an e-mail which he sent several of his friends on June 5, 2000, while working as a summer associate at San Francisco Bay-area law firm Fenwick and West. In the e-mail, he detailed his inappropriate behavior at a charity auction held by the firm. The e-mail was widely circulated among the legal community. His detailed account of the events leading up to the e-mail, and the e-mail itself, can be found in his story entitled "The Now Infamous Tucker Max Charity Auction Debacle."

Tucker Max runs a message board on his website named, "Tucker Max Message Board." The board is known for its heavily moderated discussions.

After graduation from Duke, Max managed his father's restaurant business in Boca Raton before being fired. On August 22, 2002, Max registered his eponymous domain name and transferred his date application page there. The site, along with its acerbic, heavily moderated forums would become increasingly popular with a diverse crowd but is especially popular with 14-35 year-old males.

The period from 2003 through 2005 would see a substantial growth of traffic to Max's Internet site during which its Alexa ranking showed it becoming a popular site on the Internet.

In December 2005, a young woman using the name "Sunshine" posted messages and nude photos of herself to Max's message board. Days later, a Canadian court convicted the 19-year-old "Sunshine" and her 18-year-old sister of first-degree murder for drowning their mother in a bathtub. The Canadian press became aware of Sunshine's posts on Max's messageboard. However, as a result of the Canadian Youth Criminal Justice Act, they are forbidden from referring to them. On June 30, 2006, both sisters were sentenced as youth offenders to 10 years in prison for the murder.

Max recently fulfilled his self-proclaimed lifelong ambition of having sexual intercourse with a midget and in August 2006 with a male-to-female pre-op transsexual. Tucker has also speculated that one of the women he has slept with may have been a post-operative transsexual.

Max runs Rudius Media, "a company dedicated to finding, editing, publishing, and publicizing new and original content by unknown or under-promoted artists and writers." Billed as, "an alternative publishing outlet for those artists and writers who cannot find a voice within the current homogenized corporate entertainment culture," Rudius Media's charter sites included The Tard Blog, The Bunny Blog, Coloring Book Land, Drunkasaurusrex.com, Stokie Jaye's Slow Children at Play and, most notably, fellow New York Times Best Selling Authors Robert Greene's Power, Seduction and War and Mark Ebner's Hollywood, Interrupted.

In the courtroom

In May 2003, Max's ex-girlfriend Katy Johnson, who had won pageants to become Miss Vermont 1999 and Miss Vermont USA 2001, sued him for posting the sordid details of their relationship on his website, claiming it was an invasion of her privacy. As a result, Palm Beach, Fifteenth Circuit Judge Diana Lewis, issued a ruling ordering Max to immediately remove the story from his site. Subsequently, after substantial legal wrangling that included an amicus curiae brief by the American Civil Liberties Union, the case was dismissed.

In March 2006, Max was sued by Anthony DiMeo III for causing him "both emotional and commercial harm" after a Tucker Max messageboard thread mocked DiMeo's disastrous New Year's Eve party. The case was notable in that DiMeo sued Max not only for defamation, but for allowing the anonymous publication of annoying or threatening posts on his messageboard, allegedly in violation of the 2005 Violence Against Women Act. The case had wide-ranging implications on the future of Internet discourse. On May 26, 2006, Federal Judge Stewart Dalzell granted Max's motion to dismiss DiMeo's case. In a ruling which soundly reaffirmed the court's protection of speech on the Internet, Dalzell wrote in conclusion:

As we noted the last time we discussed the CDA, some of the dialog on the Internet surely tests the limits of conventional discourse. Speech on the Internet can be unfiltered, unpolished, and uncoventional, even emotionally charged, sexually explicit, and vulgar -- in a word, "indecent" in many communities. But we should expect such speech to occur in a medium in which citizens from all walks of life have a voice.

There is no question that tuckermax.com could be a poster child for the vulgarity we had in mind in 1996. But as we added then, "[w]e should also protect the autonomy that such a medium confers to ordinary people as well as media magnates." Here we do so by protecting the coarse conversation that, it appears, never ends on tuckermax.com.

On June 23, 2006, it was reported on Tucker Max's message board that DiMeo had filed an appeal. This was later confirmed by Tucker Max.

In the mainstream

In June 2003, Max appeared in MTV's "Sex2K" episode on Internet dating. During the approximately 15-minute segment, Max tells of his website, its successes and failures, and goes on dates with several women.

Max was featured in many college and daily papers across the eastern United States while on a 23-stop, 32-day book tour during the spring of 2006 promoting I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell. During the tour, he claims to have sold over 1,600 books, signed over 2,200, and "hooked up" (had sex with) with no fewer than 31 women while consuming an average of upwards of 10 alcoholic drinks per day.

Max made a prominent appearance in the mainstream media when he was featured on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Style section on April 16, 2006, in an article entitled "Dude, Here's My Book" by Warren St. John. The article hailed Max, Robert Hamburger (author of Real Ultimate Power), Maddox, and Frank Kelly Rich as the vanguards of a new genre of literature known as "fratire," which, according to St. John, "combine[s] a fraternity house-style celebration of masculinity with a mocking attitude toward social convention, traditional male roles and aspirations of power and authority." Ironically, none of the listed authors were ever in a fraternity, and Max instead suggested "Dick Lit" — a term mentioned in a 2004 Amazon.com book review — but the term was unusable in the Times.

On May 9, 2006, Max, Maddox and blogger DrunkasaurusRex premiered a two hour test show live on Maxim Radio on Sirius Satellite Radio. The show consisted of the three telling stories and discussing topics commonly found in their work (such as women, sex, alcohol, and pop culture) as well as taking questions from listeners.

On June 27, 2006, Max appeared on the Opie and Anthony show on XM Satellite Radio. After telling his "Tucker Tries Butt-Sex" story, Max claimed that the tape of the incident was destroyed. He was also unable to produce a police report for a supposed collision with a donut shop. Opie and Anthony then led an unsuspecting Max into believing that his headphones had broken. While Max's headphones were off, Anthony told the audience that he believed Max was lying. The interview ended with Max being called a liar and compared to author James Frey. When leaving the studio, Opie threw his book at a window, meanwhile Jim Norton tore the same book to pieces. Max left the building, allegedly giving show producer Erik "E-Rock" Nagel the middle finger. Max has since removed all mentions of this appearance on his website and message boards, and refuses to publicly acknowledge the incident occurred.

Publishers Weekly announced on September 25th, 2006 that Jeremie Ruby-Strauss at Simon Spotlight (an imprint of Simon and Schuster) had acquired the rights for Assholes Finish First with the intent to publish the book in January 2008. Max claims to have received a $300,000 advance for the book.

Bibliography

• Assholes Finish First (2007) ISBN
• I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell (2006) ISBN 0-8065-2728-5
• Belligerence and Debauchery: The Tucker Max Stories (2003) ISBN 1-4116-0062-2
• The Definitive Book of Pick-Up Lines (2001) ISBN 0-595-17671-2

External links

• TuckerMax.com
• RudiusMedia.com
• "College graduate Tucker Max sued for Web site content", from Chicago Maroon online edition, May 16, 2003
• "Tucker Max responds to former Miss Vermont dropping charges", PRWeb press release, July 24, 2003.
• "Someone Talked" Annoy.com account of Johnson's lawsuit vs. Max.
• "Tyranny of the Rat Rat Race in Not Yet Final--Genius of Tucker Max." UCR Highlander/RyanClarkHoliday.com
• A trip into the weird netherworld of Tucker Max from February 9, 2006, News & Observer.
• "Convicted girls sought sex online" from the December 24, 2005, Toronto Star.
• Tucker Max is a Douchebag Blog critical of Tucker Max.