Under Four Minutes: GoDaddy Took Down the Sites Targeting My Child. Michigan Law Enforcement Couldn’t in a Year.

For a year, websites built on my name and my minor child’s name stayed up while I reported them. When GoDaddy’s Digital Crimes Unit finally got involved, both sites went dark in less than four minutes. I should never have been the one who had to make that happen.

I want to start with the time stamps, because they are the whole story.

At 1:19 PM on Friday, October 16, GoDaddy’s Digital Crimes Unit reached out to me. At 1:22 PM, GoDaddy sent a letter confirming that the content on two websites, one built on my name and one built on my minor child’s name, had been removed. I checked my email at 1:23 and it was done. Both domains now return a 404 error.

Three minutes. After a year.

For twelve months, those sites sat online while I reported the harassment and threats that came with them to Michigan law enforcement. Nothing came down. No one preserved anything. No one sent the registrar a single piece of legal process that I am aware of. The sites came down because I learned how the registrar’s own system works and used it. I did what law enforcement could not do to protect my children.

Which leads to the question this piece is really about: what happens to the children whose parents do not know how to do any of this? I investigate for a living. I do legal research, I work with digital evidence, and I know how corporate escalation channels are built and where the doors are. I know what a registrar is, what a preservation demand does, and that ICANN runs a request system most people have never heard of. With every one of those advantages, it still took me a year to protect my family. A parent working two jobs, a parent who has never opened a terms of service agreement, a parent who walks into a police station, is told it is a civil matter, and believes it, may never get an answer at all. Their child’s name stays up. Right now, how well a child is protected online depends on how much their parent happens to know about domain registrars, federal preservation law, and corporate abuse queues. That is not a protection system. That is luck.

A Year of Reports

I am keeping the details of the harassment at a high level, deliberately. The people responsible read what I publish, and I am not handing them a map. What matters here is the shape of it: websites carrying my name and my child’s name, used as part of a sustained pattern of targeting a mother and her minor child, alongside threats.

The paper trail starts well before the takedown. On December 5, 2025, I spent most of a day trading emails with an attorney involved in the dispute who was trying to negotiate a “global resolution” as he called it.

He told me he had exchanged messages with his client, the the person behind the harassment, and that this person was “interested in peace.” As a show of good faith, he wrote, he had asked that person to delete a recent online post, and the person agreed. He also put websites at the center of the deal: “One of the big issues are the websites. Those need to come down.” The sites he meant were ones he wrongly believed I ran, sites I had nothing to do with, and he called their removal “the key” to making any agreement “work.”

That afternoon I put the other side of it in writing. I told him the person he was negotiating for had registered websites in my name and my child’s name on nothing more than a bad hunch, and I described the threats, the publication of my children’s photographs, and the harmful and false accusations against my family.

By the end of that day, the attorney had shown he could get that person to take material down when he asked, had made websites the centerpiece of the negotiation, and had been told in writing that the domains carrying my child’s name were part of the same dispute. Those domains stayed up for ten more months. This entire email exchange sat on court record for an entire year.

Then it reached open court. First without any meaningful answers in February, and then later this year, the domains built on my name and my child’s name were described as part of a “prisoner’s exchange.” They were attributed to a party in litigation and floated as something to trade for other websites I was accused of creating. I did not create those sites. I do not own them, I have never had any part in them, and I did not know they existed until I was accused of them and needlessly harassed over them. I have sent ICANN RDRS requests to find out who owns those domains now, too.

These domains were never unexplained harassment by some unknown person on the internet. On the record, they were known, they were discussed, and they were treated as negotiable assets by people involved in active litigation.

A website carrying my name and a minor child’s name was put on the table as a bargaining chip, in a courtroom, to settle a dispute about sites that were never mine. A child’s identity should never be anyone’s leverage.

I am also not naming the agencies I reported to. Every time I identify an office publicly, someone goes around me to that office and muddies the record. So I will say it this way: I reported this to Michigan law enforcement more than once over the course of a year. They were worse than useless. I brought documentation. I explained that the content sat on a commercial registrar and host that publishes an abuse process and a subpoena policy and says it will cooperate with lawful requests. Nothing happened.

Michigan law enforcement is, to be kind, digitally incompetent. I do not say that lightly, and I do not say it about any one officer in particular. I say it about the overall system that, a year into a documented online harassment campaign against a child, could not or would not do what one mother with a laptop did on her own to protect her children.

What Actually Worked

None of the tools that got these sites down belongs to law enforcement. All of them were available to law enforcement, and to anyone else willing to learn how they work.

The terms of service

Every registrar and host runs on contracts. Anyone who buys a domain or builds a site through GoDaddy agrees to its Universal Terms of Service, and every domain registrant also makes promises under ICANN’s Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy. Those registrations ran against both from the day they were purchased. And whoever bought them did not walk away. They renewed both domains this year, which under ICANN’s policy means making the same promises a second time, while a child’s name sat on one of the sites. That is not a one-time lapse. That is the same choice made twice, a year apart.

Here is what the documents actually say, and where this conduct lands.

Notice what Section 5 does not say. It never uses the words harassment, stalking, or impersonation. A complaint that just says “this person is harassing me” has nowhere to land in that document, and a first-line reviewer sorting by policy will close it, which is exactly what happened on October 13. GoDaddy acted after I translated the conduct into the categories its own contract uses: illegal use under Michigan law, a violation of privacy and publicity rights, abusive activity, and false representations to the registry. A company’s abuse queue is built to sort complaints by policy. A complaint that names the policy gets sorted.

ICANN’s Registration Data Request Service

Since privacy laws pushed most domain ownership records out of public view, the person behind a website is usually hidden. ICANN, the nonprofit that coordinates the domain system, launched the Registration Data Request Service in November 2023 as a free, single ticketing system for requesting nonpublic registration data from participating registrars. It does not guarantee anyone will hand over data. What it does is put a standardized, documented request in front of the registrar, with an automated alert, from someone with a stated legitimate interest. Law enforcement is one of the groups the service was built for. I used it myself.

Elected officials

I also contacted my elected officials. A complaint from a constituent that has reached a legislator’s office lands differently on a corporate desk than one more ticket in a queue. I do not know exactly which piece moved the matter upstairs. I know that the formal complaint, the RDRS requests, and the officials were all in motion when the Digital Crimes Unit called.

Under Four Minutes

The confirmation letter is short. GoDaddy acknowledged that my complaint described harassment, unauthorized use of personal information, and potential impersonation, and said those questions belong to law enforcement and the courts. Then it said it had removed the site templates previously displayed on both domains, and that both now show a 404 message.

Read that letter next to the year that preceded it. A private company’s crimes unit, working from a complaint written by the person being targeted, took a page about a child off the internet in about three minutes once the matter reached the right desk. In the same letter, the company recommended that I report the conduct to local law enforcement and the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. I had been doing exactly that for a year.

The registrations themselves still exist. Getting a domain transferred or cancelled usually takes a UDRP complaint or a court order, which is a separate fight. But the pages are gone, and a child’s name no longer resolves to them.

Why “Digitally Incompetent” Is the Right Phrase

The law is not the problem. Michigan made it a crime more than two decades ago to post a message through the internet without a victim’s consent, intending to make that person feel terrorized, frightened, intimidated, threatened, or harassed, when the conduct causes that harm. MCL 750.411s reaches anyone who posts from Michigan, causes conduct in Michigan, or knows the victim lives here. It becomes a felony with aggravating facts such as a credible threat. The stalking statute, MCL 750.411h, sits right next to it.

The federal tools are not the problem either. Under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(f), a government agency can require a provider to preserve records for 90 days, renewable for another 90, with a letter. GoDaddy publishes a subpoena policy and says in its own form responses that it cooperates with lawful requests. A detective with an email account could have frozen the evidence in an afternoon.

And this was not a case that required unmasking an anonymous stranger. A December 2025 email chain put the domains, and who I believed registered them, in writing in the middle of a negotiation. A 2026 court record showed them being treated as something to trade. Investigators did not need to find out who knew about these sites. The paper trail already said so. What Michigan is missing is the competence to use any of it. In my experience, online harassment reports get routed as civil disputes, or as something for the victim to sort out with a website, or as a matter for some other agency. The FBI’s IC3 now receives almost 3,000 complaints a day, and a federal intake portal is not a local response. A report that never becomes a preservation letter is a report that lets the evidence expire.

What Fixing It Would Actually Require

First, every county in Michigan needs a designated digital crimes contact, either in the sheriff’s office or through a Michigan State Police regional unit, who takes online harassment reports and knows what a registrar, a host, and a platform are. A report about a website built on a child’s name should never be told it is civil.

Second, preservation should be automatic. When an agency takes a report involving online content, it should send a § 2703(f) preservation letter to the provider within days, as a matter of written policy, so the evidence still exists if a prosecutor ever wants it.

Third, MCOLES should make online harassment and digital evidence part of basic and continuing training: how to read a WHOIS or RDAP record, how to use RDRS, how to serve a provider, and what MCL 750.411s actually requires.

Fourth, a victim who files a report should receive a case number and a written disposition. If an agency decides not to act, the person being targeted deserves to know why, in writing, so they can take it somewhere else.

Fifth, registrars should not need a crimes-unit escalation to act on abuse involving a minor. Reports that name a child should go straight to a trained reviewer, and ICANN should set response-time expectations for RDRS requests.

Why This Matters

No child’s safety should depend on whether their parent knows what a registrar is. A parent whose child’s name has been turned into a weapon online should be able to walk into a police station and leave with someone who knows what to do next.

I should not have had to fight this hard for accountability. It took me a year to get what took GoDaddy three minutes, and the only reason it happened at all is that I refused to stop. If you are dealing with something like this, preserve everything, put it in the company’s own language, and keep a record of every report you make and every answer you do not get. And if your report went nowhere, I want to see the record. Send it through Clutch Intel.