Woman awarded $1.2 billion in revenge porn case

A US man has been ordered to pay his ex-girlfriend $1.2 billion for sharing her intimate pictures online (Representational image)

A Texas woman has been awarded $1.2 billion after a jury ruled she was the victim of revenge porn. The woman, who went by DL in court documents, accused her ex-boyfriend of sharing her intimate pictures on the internet.

According to NBC News, the woman’s ex-boyfriend, Marques Jamal Jackson, allegedly put the images on several social media sites and sent them to her friends, colleagues and family. Jackson also created a website to house all the explicit photographs - some of which he obtained while they were dating, while others were taken from the woman’s mother’s home security cameras.

DL’s lawyers say that Jackson told her she would spend the rest of her life trying to wipe the images off the internet. In March 2022, he sent her a text message which read, “You will spend the rest of your life trying and failing to wipe yourself off the internet. Everyone you ever meet will hear the story and go looking.”

Jackson and the woman started dating in 2016. In early 2020, they began “a long and drawn out break up,” according to the lawsuit. After they finally broke up in October 2021, Jackson became “delusional and paranoid,” the woman’s lawyers say.

He began to share her explicit photographs and videos on pornography websites after DL told him that he should destroy the images.

Jackson’s targeting went beyond non-consensual sharing of intimate pictures. He also hacked his ex-girlfriend’s Zoom account, stole money from her to pay rent, falsely told an officer she submitted a fraudulent loan application and harassed her using different phone numbers.

A Houston-area jury on August 9 ruled that Jackson should pay DL $1.2 billion in the revenge porn case. This amount includes $1 billion in punitive damages and $200 million in actual damages.

The staggering amount is merely a deterrent, as lawyers already know that Jackson does not have any assets. “[It’s] a deterrence case, not a money case,” said Jacob Schiffer, one of the woman’s lawyers.

“While a judgment in this case is unlikely to be recovered, the compensatory verdict gives DL back her good name,” the woman’s head lawyer, Bradford J Gilde, said in a statement.