Posted on 01/24/2013 11:06:04 AM PST by Responsibility2nd
FORT WORTH (CBS 11 NEWS) – Sexy pictures, taken for private purposes, are finding their way online.
The website, described as a revenge porn site, is posting explicit photos submitted by men seeking revenge on their ex-girlfriends.
But a group of Texas women may get the last laugh, after filing a lawsuit against the site.
Hollie Toups, 32, says she “stopped breathing for awhile” when she found semi-nude pictures of herself on the site. Toups went from being a modest teacher’s aide in Beaumont to an unintended porn star, after an ex-boyfriend posted explicit photos along with personal information.
“I was at a store one day and somebody was like hey you’re the girl from that website,” says Toups.
Toups and 25 other women are suing the website and its owner, who has a fictitious address in Richardson.
“I am very confident I will find that person,” says John S. Morgan, plaintiff’s attorney. “It really touched my heart the amount of emotional devastation every one of these women have suffered.”
The lawsuit comes after the women say the website refused to remove the photos unless they paid a fee.
“I thought that was outrageous that they had to gall to ask me to do that,” says Toups.
It’s not hard to track down unsuspecting women who had nude and sexually explicit photos through Facebook and other social media.
CBS 11 News found dozens of women in North Texas on the site, and one who says her father alerted her she was a revenge porn victim.
“It was humiliating I didn’t want to go anywhere I started questioning people’s politeness was it genuine how are you doing or was it in the back of your mind I saw you on that site,” says Toups.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages.
Local attorney Victor Johnson says the lawsuit could be difficult to pursue if website’s operator can prove its a bulletin board and that they have no control over the content.
Waxing nostalgic?
Psssst — over heer — you wan to donload feelthy picture, senior?
So when the pictures were taken, was she being a porn star or a modest teacher's aide?
Sorry, but everybody should know by now that if there are nekkid photos of you, they'll wind up on the Internet. Except of me... There are bidding wars to keep nekkid photos of me from being seen, and they just won't let me post them!
Mark
The legal issue isn’t so much copyright as it is invasion of privacy. The website can’t commercially exploit her image without her permission. Same reason Girls Gone Wild lost its case - they weren’t getting model releases from the girls.
If you are stupid enough to hand out nude (or semi-nude) photos of yourself, you are too stupid to be a teacher.
Yeah - I read that and thought AAAWWWWKWAAAAARDDD!
I don’t know why you people stick up for these women. Women need to get what’s coming to them! Look at the percentage of people that put the Bu__hole back in office, women! They need to pay what’s coming to them!!!
Okay, after looking at the complaint I see the tort is under “Texas law.” Apparently there’s no statute or it would have been listed.
INVASION OF PRIVACY
A common law right to privacy exists under Texas law. Billings v. Atkinson, 489 S.W.2d 858, 860 (Tex.1973). The Texas Constitution guarantees the sanctity of the home and person from unreasonable intrusion. Texas State Employees Union v. Texas Department of Mental Health & Mental Retardation, 746 S.W.2d 203, 205 (Tex.1987).
The elements of a claim for invasion of privacy are
(1) The defendant intentionally intruded on the plaintiff’s solitude, seclusion, or private affairs; and
(2) The intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person.
Valenzuela v. Aquino, 853 S.W.2d 512, 513 (Tex.1993).
When assessing the offensive nature of the invasion, courts have required that the intrusion be unreasonable, unjustified, or unwarranted. Billings v. Atkinson, 489 S.W.2d 858, 860 (Tex.1973).
The issue as i see it is that there’s no intrusion as the property at issue wasn’t the girl’s property.
Again, I may be wrong
Have you seen bathing suits gals wear?
any stupid woman that has pictures taken of her like that deserves what she gets...yuk...
Dingdingdiing! We have a winner! My thought exactly.
Bad news: you don’t have to be stupid and post nekkid pictures to have this kind of trouble. All you have to do is have a perfectly normal, decent picture of yourself get into the hands of a vengeful person. With Photoshop and other programs, it’s the work of two minutes for him to swap your head onto the body of a porn actress.
A friend of mine had a fully-clad photo taken of her in youth with her cousin. The print was scanned by her brother and uploaded onto his (perfectly normal, non-sexy) FB page. From there, bad guys in a foreign country stole the image, put it in an image database, and sold it to a company that wanted a generic picture of a healthy American girl to market their fraudulent diet drink. There’s nothing she can do. This was an innocent picture taken 25 years ago and she didn’t even post it on her own Facebook page.
Things are getting ugly.
Save the "posing" for husbands, for whom one does have way more, shall we say "control" over and the "penalties" far more serious.
Other solution, skip the posing and just enjoy the relationship.
site is down. I went to check on it to make sure that this horrible site was removed.
Except none of these were photoshopped. These women took nude and semi-nude self-portraits for the pleasure of their boyfriends, which wound up online when the relationships soured.
Boy, I knew the “woman is always a victim” thing had gone far, but GOD’S HOLY TROUSERS this takes the cake.
You take off your clothes and allow some man who is not your husband to photograph you, WHAT THE F*** DO YOU THINK IS GOING TO HAPPEN?
A lawsuit? A LAWSUIT???
Doesn’t anyone get embarrassed anymore by their own stupidity?
Sheesh!
I understand that. I’m just saying that it can happen to anybody and you don’t have to be stupid or have improper pictures of yourself taken in order to be displayed on the internet in ways you don’t want. This is particularly true if you use Facebook or Pinterest. You can find yourself being used in far more unsavory ways than my friend is.
It has nothing to do with the conduct of the girl or the former boyfriend, which I am certainly not defending. But a pornographer has no right to exploit her image without her permission.
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