US woman is awarded US$1.2 billion in ‘revenge porn’ lawsuit
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A jury in Houston ordered her former boyfriend to pay US$200 million for past and future mental anguish and $1 billion in punitive damages.
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AUSTIN - A Texas woman was awarded US$1.2 billion (S$1.6 billion) in damages last week after she sued her former boyfriend and accused him of sending intimate images of her to her family, friends and co-workers from fake online accounts.
The woman, identified only by the initials D.L. in court documents, sued her former boyfriend, Marques Jamal Jackson, claiming he had psychologically and sexually abused her by distributing so-called revenge porn, a term for sexually explicit photos or videos of someone that are shared without consent.
The couple started dating in 2016 and were living together in Chicago in early 2020 when they began a “long and drawn-out break-up”, according to the lawsuit. D.L. moved to her mother’s house in Texas temporarily, and Jackson began accessing the security system there to spy on her, the lawsuit said.
In October 2021, the couple officially ended their relationship, and D.L. told Jackson that she no longer wanted him to have access to what the lawsuit described as “visual intimate material” of her that she had allowed him to have while they were a couple.
Instead, he posted the images on several social media platforms and websites, including a pornographic website and in a publicly accessible folder on online file-sharing service Dropbox, the lawsuit said.
He identified her in the material, using her name and address, and images of her face.
He created fake social media pages and e-mail accounts to share the material with her family, friends and co-workers, including by sending them a link to the Dropbox folder.
On the social media pages where he had posted the images, he tagged accounts for her employer and for her personal gym.
The lawsuit says this was still happening days before the complaint was filed in April 2022.
In a March 2022 e-mail to D.L. cited in the lawsuit, Jackson said: “You will spend the rest of your life trying and failing to wipe yourself off the Internet.”
Jackson could not be reached for comment. It was not clear if he had a lawyer.
He also did not appear in court on Aug 9, when a jury in Houston ordered him to pay US$200 million for past and future mental anguish and US$1 billion in punitive damages. NYTIMES
