Hillary Adams posted a video she made in 2004 of her father beating her with a belt  They say revenge is best served cold. In the case of Hillary Adams, a Texas woman who recently posted a very disturbing video of her father violently beating her, the revenge nearly has freezer burn.  The video of the abuse was made in 2004. Adams posted it last week on YouTube explaining that her father “took a belt to his own teenage daughter as punishment for using the internet to acquire music and games that were unavailable for legal purchase at the time.” Her father is not just your average abusive Texan. William Adams is a public figure, an Aransas County Court-at-Law judge. The video went viral after she posted it to Reddit, a site where users would be especially sympathetic to a judge’s corporal punishment for illegal downloading. Redditors launched a vigilante campaign, posting numbers for local law enforcement and media outlets (as well as pranking the judge by ordering pizzas to his home). From there, the horrific video gained national attention within a day, from blogs as well as local media in Texas. The sheriff’s office is now launching an investigation.  Did I mention that the video is seven years old? Why post it now?  Well, Judge William Adams holds an elected office, and his daughter would prefer he not hold it. “Judge William Adams is not fit to be anywhere near the law system if he can’t even exercise fit judgement as a parent himself,” she writes in the description of her video. “Do not allow this man to ever be re-elected again.”  A viral video of your beating your daughter with a belt has to be even worse for an office-holder than naked photos of what’s below that belt. Someone has already created a “Don’t Re-Elect Judge William Adams” Facebook page, which has attracted thousands of fans. Sorry, Facebookers. Aransas County does have an election coming up next week, but Adams’s term is not up this time around. He’s not up for re-election until three years from now, the county clerk’s office tells me. Of course, the public attention to this could well lead to his stepping down, though he tells a local news affiliate that the incident “happened years ago,” that he “apologized,” and that “it’s not as bad as it looks on tape.”  It does look pretty bad, especially to someone who grew up in a household that frowned even on spanking. (The video makes me wonder if other children who suffer violence at home could use the tool of public shame to help them, or if this one caught on solely because it involved a public figure.)  The power of video here is fairly incredible. Had Hillary Adams, now in her 20s, suddenly stepped forward and said her father beat her as a child, it likely wouldn’t get much traction. But the video places the incident in the here and now, almost making the seven years that have elapsed insignificant. Adams surely couldn’t have imagined that a punishment of his daughter in the privacy of his home could come back to haunt him professionally years later.  Update: Adams is now tweeting that she feels “some regret” for publishing the video and ruining her father.  The delay in publishing the video reminded me of a story I wrote about a year ago that involved a Harvard Law student who discussed in a private e-mail the possibility that intelligence is linked to genetics, and thus race. Her then-friend saved that email (as most of us do), and a year later, when their friendship soured, sent the email out to a few people, including a member of Harvard’s Black Student Association. As with Hillary Adams, the Harvard frenemy knew the right audience to take her smoking gun to in order to ensure it get widespread attention. The e-mail very quickly went viral, and the law student’s name will probably be linked to “racist” in Google search results for the rest of her life.  Of course, as Herman Cain could well attest, it’s always been the case for high-profile people such as presidential candidates to have things from their past come back to haunt them, even without any digital evidence. But that’s because these folks are at the center of tons of media attention. Now, even if you’re not a media figure, the past can come back at you fast and furious if there’s a video, recording, or email that can easily be passed around online.  Hat tip: Yale Law Tech
A video of a Texas judge beating his daughter with a belt has gone viral. Even though it is seven years old, his career is now in peril.