A California federal district court has awarded a woman, identified as Jane Doe, who alleged a man named David K. Elam II posted private photos of her online, $6.45 million in damages, Jezebel reports. It is the second-largest payout ever awarded in a revenge porn case not involving a famous person, making it a strong precedent for future cases of nonconsensual porn in the United States. Read on below for more.
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Default decision; the relationship. The default, state-level decision was issued against the defendant after he failed to show up in court, according to Jezebel. Back in 2012, Elam and the woman started dating in Los Angeles. After some time together, Elam moved to Virginia, and the two suddenly found themselves in a long-distance relationship.
The breakup. While in a long-distance relationship, Doe regularly sent Elam “sexually explicit photos and videos of herself,” according to the Times. Eventually, the two decided to call it quits. This is around the time when things turned really sour.
The breakup; the dating profile. Per the Times: “After their breakup in May 2013, Elam called the woman and ‘threatened to ruin her life,’ she alleged in her complaint. He then used suggestive photographs of her to create a profile on online dating site OkCupid, distributing her phone number and address while encouraging users to send sexual images of themselves, the complaint said.”
The messages. In response to the profile, Doe received dozens upon dozens of messages, including one from a man who said he was on his way to her house. Elam also allegedly uploaded explicit photos and videos of her “on several pornography websites and another dating website,” according to the Times.
The copyrighting of breasts. While Elam was creating all these profiles, Doe was copyrighting her breasts. (Yes, this is something you can legally do.) As Jezebel notes, this “was before California’s law criminalizing nonconsensual porn took effect in early 2014.”
The best defense. At the time, Doe’s best defense was sending “her nude photos to the United States Copyright Office to have them copyrighted so she could send cease-and-desist letters to the websites who posted them,” the New York Post reports. At one point, she even filed a lawsuit against Elam, though it was eventually dropped as there is no federal law criminalizing the matter.
The decision.The recent decision was permitted in part by California’s recent revenge porn law. “The award covers $3 million in both compensatory and punitive damages, as well as $450,000 in damages for spreading copyrighted images,” according to the Times.
The representation. Jezebel reports: “Doe was represented by The Cyber Civil Rights Legal Project (CCRLP), which provides pro-bono representation in cases like this one. This ruling follows an $8.9 million verdict last year in another nonconsensual porn case that was similarly brought by CCRLP; it was the largest settlement in a non-celebrity case of its kind.”
The “groundbreaking” aspect. Speaking to Jezebel, Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland and advocate of victims of revenge porn, called the state-level decision “groundbreaking.” While it’s rare for victims to have the funds needed to sue their harassers, Citron explained that Doe’s pro-bono case helps solidify “that there can be serious financial consequences to perpetrators.”
The catch. Also speaking to Jezebel, Mary Anna Franks, a policy director at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, noted that though the state-level decision is certainly “inspiring,” there is a catch. Namely, that there needs to be better legal options for other victims like Doe.
The proposed law. What Franks is referring to, of course, is the proposed federal law criminalizing nonconsensual porn. “That bill, however, comes with a host of issues that concern civil liberties activists and privacy experts, including broad censorship that could apply to everything from cute baby bath-time photos on Facebook to amateur porn blogs to news publications like this one,” reports Jezebel.
The factors at play. Franks went on to highlight that Doe’s case was only successful because of how different it was. “The victim in this case owned the copyright in her images, had the benefit of extraordinary legal representation, and was able to point to extensive, dramatic evidence of a years-long campaign of sustained sexual terrorism,” she explained to Jezebel. “These factors will not all be present in many nonconsensual pornography cases.”
The criminal action. “We never relied on the outcome of the criminal action,” K&L Gates partner Seth Gold, who pursued the case under the firm’s Cyber Civil Rights Legal Project, told CNN. “… Revenge porn is a very serious violation of someone’s rights and can lead to very serious injuries that are worthy of being redressed—and in a more general sense, people can not ignore the judicial process.”
Hunter Moore. Federal prosecutors in California had previously apprehended revenge porn kingpin Hunter Moore for running a website that featured explicit photos of individuals submitted by others. Moore would then charge the victims massive fees to take the images down. Per Gizmodo: “But as Mic noted in 2014, Moore operated the site in accordance with federal laws that hold sites not responsible for user-generated content—a provision that makes sites like Reddit or Twitter possible. California law did not hold redistributors of revenge porn legally responsible, limiting the legal avenues available to charge him.”
Hunter Moore. Moore — who regularly referred to himself as a “professional life ruiner — was only nailed on federal charges which claimed he paid another individual to hack into another’s computer to obtain blackmail material. In 2015, Moore was sentenced to two and a half years behind bars and three years of supervised release.
Source: rebelcircus
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