On April 21st, 1999, only one day after the mass shooting at Columbine High School, the owners of shock site rotten.com registered the domain "trenchcoat.org," capitalizing on the furor surrounding the Trenchcoat Mafia, a group wrongfully associated with the perpetrators. The site, whose original incarnation was online for less than a week, claimed to be a "supercenter for trenchcoat-wearing tactical urban assault enthusiasts" and contained numerous outrageous and inflammatory statements. The site, along with countless others made in the same spirit, attracted immediate attention and controversy.
After attempting to sell the domain on Ebay as a publicity stunt, the webmasters of trenchcoat.org updated the site to contain selections of the messages they had received from its readers. While most of the messages were negative, some also contained what might be seen today as prefigurations of the "Columbiner" phenomenon, with many expressing sympathy and even admiration for the perpetrators. As such, the site is an important document not only in the cultural legacy of the shooting, but in the wider development of "edgelord" content online.
Trenchcoat.org remained online in its "all hate mail" form until around 2017, wholly unchanged save for the addition of links to other sites in the Rotten network. Rotten.com proper maintained a page detailing a legal threat made against the site by Burlington Coat Factory, who had been linked in the original incarnation of trenchcoat.org under a "WHO TO SUE" heading. While the original incarnation of trenchcoat.org appeared to be taken offline after about five days, it remained online as a "hidden," unlinked page on the site until its closure. While the entire trenchcoat.org site is saved on the Wayback Machine, I have grown increasingly suspicious of the Internet Archive's practices, which have seen many websites suddenly expunged after years of availability. As such, in the interest of preservation, I am hosting an archive here.
Trenchcoat.org was a work of parody, and no part of its contents should be taken sincerely or seriously. The actions of the Columbine perpetrators are despicable, and in no way should my archival of this page be taken as a sign of support for them or any of their admirers. The actions of Rotten.com were also fairly despicable, but at least they didn't murder anybody.
View the original version of the homepage (final revision).
View the "hate mail" version of the homepage.
Download the complete archive (307.8 kb)
reader discretion is advised.
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Please send hate mail to this address. I have no plans to publish it.