YouTube star Chrissy Chambers won “substantial” damages in a civil case against her ex-boyfriend after he posted intimate “revenge porn” videos of the two online without permission.
Chambers is one half of the popular “singing duo/lesbian couple” YouTube channel, BriaAndChrissy, which she runs with her partner Bria Kam.
According to CNET, Chambers “won compensation in the first civil case of its kind in England and Wales,” after she “sued a former boyfriend over posting videos of their sexual activity to the internet without her consent — known as ‘revenge porn’ — after authorities opted not to pursue a criminal case.”
Though posting revenge porn has been illegal in the United Kingdom since 2015, and is illegal in numerous US states, Chambers struggled to get the attention of law enforcement.
The Telegraph reports that she “went to the police in Atlanta, but was told there was nothing they could do as the videos had been uploaded in the UK.”
“She contacted British police, but was told the incident had happened in America, so they could not help,” they claimed.
The YouTube star was then forced to crowdfund the money to pursue a legal case.
Though Chambers won damages, the illegal revenge porn videos remain on the most popular porn websites, with no sign of removal.
Her ex-boyfriend has not been identified, being referred to as DCR in reports.
“‘Ms. Chambers had a romantic relationship with DCR from 2008 to 2009,’ counsel Alex Marzec said. She told the judge, Sir David Eady, that in September 2009, DCR recorded video of them engaging in sexual activity at her home in Atlanta, Georgia – without Ms. Chambers’s knowledge or consent,” Metro reported. “In December 2011 and January 2012, DCR uploaded six films to a profile on pornographic website Redtube.com without her knowledge.”
“The titles of three of the films contained Ms. Chambers’s full name and two of them contained her age at the time of filming – 18. In June 2013, Ms. Chambers was made aware of the films and immediately contacted the website to have them removed,” they explained. “By then, the films had been online for 19 months, and Ms. Chambers received numerous comments and messages from YouTube users who wrongly believed she had been intentionally involved in pornography and who no longer wished to view her YouTube videos.”
After she won the compensation, Chambers proposed to her girlfriend, and declared that the ruling “should serve as a severe warning to those who seek to extort and harm with revenge porn: you cannot do this with impunity, and you will be held accountable for your actions.”
“To every victim of this insidious kind of attack, I am here to say: You can fight back, and win,” she proclaimed. “You will heal and move on — and you will not have to take those steps alone.”
Revenge Porn is a growing concern, as previously reported by Breitbart Tech.
In April, Facebook introduced an anti-revenge porn feature to their platform, creating a system to detect and block known illegal images. However, a May report indicated that the social network was “flooded” with cases of revenge porn and sextortion, with nearly 54,000 cases of the crime reported in just a month; 33 of which involved children.
Earlier this year, lawyer Daniel Szalkiewicz criticized social networks, and in particular Facebook, for having “broken” revenge porn policies.
“The service providers turn around and say ‘yes we removed the images,’ but what they don’t do is remove the accounts,” Szalkiewicz proclaimed. “Let’s say someone created a fake Facebook account using my name, and they put my naked photographs up there. I report the naked photographs to Facebook, Facebook will take down the photographs, but they leave the fake account with my name up there.”
“Facebook is very difficult as well because they don’t provide you with a direct line of communication like Google Legal does,” he continued. “They make you sign on to the service, and then they make you report one of three things. If you’ve ever actually looked through the process, it’s very complicated and difficult.”
In one case, Tumblr allegedly took three weeks to get a sexually explicit video of a seventeen-year-old girl removed.
“What you find is that clients obviously don’t look at these websites; they don’t know whether somebody puts their photograph up online,” explained Szalkiewicz. “The way they find out is suddenly their inboxes are flooded with Facebook friend requests, flooded with Instagram requests, saying ‘we saw your photograph, do you want to be friends?’ And obviously, a lot of perverts are requesting a lot of additional information from them, and trying to essentially hit on them.”
Charlie Nash covers technology and LGBT for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington, or like his page at Facebook.
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