This article was published on March 22, 2017

Did Trump order a teenager to take down a kitten website?


Did Trump order a teenager to take down a kitten website? Image by: Gage Skidmore / Flickr

One teenager in San Francisco got a letter from the President … and probably not the kind that looks good framed on a wall.

Lucy is an aspiring web developer who wanted to make a cute, simple website to show off on her resume. She made a little site where kitten paws slap the face of Donald Trump. It was called TrumpScratch.com — apparently one of the few “Trump” domain names he forgot to buy.

Credit: NY Daily News

Sounds harmless right? Apparently not everyone thought so. Three weeks after it went live, Lucy allegedly got a Cease & Desist from the President’s lawyers.

Lucy told the Observer she changed the name to KittenFeed.com, but apparently that wasn’t enough. Attempting to visit KittenFeed.com returns a 404 error, and visiting TrumpScratch takes you to a rather NSFW site.

A Trump spokesperson told the Observer, “This is completely false. No such letter was ever sent by us.”

We’re not sure who to believe here. On the one hand, no one would think less of Trump’s lawyers for copping to the letter, so what reason would they have to lie about it?

On the other hand, sending a C&D to a teenager who made a kitten website sounds a lot like something Trump’s people would do.

Ironically, the Observer was until recently being published by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. He stepped down from the role at the beginning of the year.

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