Seventeen women have filed a lawsuit against a “revenge porn” website by the name of Texxxan.com and its web host GoDaddy.com. In addition to them, it includes the “unnamed persons or entities that host the site and all of its subscribing members”. The women making the complaint say their privacy has been violated and they have suffered humiliation at the hands of the site and its users.

An excerpt of the claim:

“…This website is significantly designed to cause severe embarrassment, humiliation, and emotional distress to all of the women plaintiffs, and to all the women victims that are sought to be named as plaintiffs through class-action certification (discussed infra)…”

These “revenge porn” websites are a relatively new phenomenon that have sprung up in the wake of the upswing in the “Amateur porn” fad. The site encourages men to give sexually explicit photographs and videos of women they once had relationships with. The point is to have men who feel they have been wronged by a partner submit these compromising photos and videos to the public in order to humiliate them, i.e. get revenge on them. Some of the other sites which also conduct this are called GFrevenge.com and RevengePorn.net. These sites clearly demonstrate their intent to harm and cause emotional trauma and injury by using the word revenge. This is their purpose.

This is what the plaintiffs have said:

“The plaintiffs seek actual and punitive damages and injunctive relief for breach of privacy, negligence, wrongful appropriation of names of likenesses, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy.”

Defence for the website claims protection through the law.

“No matter how much the lawyers hype their lawsuit in the media, it’s mostly dead on arrival,” Goldman wrote for Forbes.com. “All of the defendants – other than the users actually submitting the revenge porn – are protected by 47 USC 230, the law that says websites aren’t liable for third-party content.”

The intent here is clear; they are attempting to say that they are not responsible for the content posing it as an open forum where anyone can upload anything. Normally that would be a valid claim, similar to what has happened against notorious websites like 4Chan. This is a different case and I do not believe will hold up in a court of law. The website is specifically geared for collecting the photos/video causing the damages. The people who sign up to be members to gain access to the content do so in order to specifically obtain those photos/videos. This is not the case with getting a 4Chan pass, which merely allows you to post more easily. In my eyes they (the site and providers) have no defence at all, what they are doing is completely unconscionable.

I have absolutely no mercy for what these revenge sites do. I hold a very strong anti-pornography stance. They epitomize misogyny; a service dedicated to degrading, humiliating and harming women. It’s not even like a regular porn site where they claim they’re doing business, pretend the women are there by choice and are creating jobs. These women are on that site against their will. These men who upload this content are doing so just to harm women for the very relations that exist between men and women. This is something directed specifically towards the humiliation and harm of women. This could actually be interpreted as worse than regular porn in some regards.

I hope the courts show no mercy for these scumbags. As proud as Danica Patrick is about the success she has had in the male dominated field of competitive racing, I wonder how she’ll feel about being the spokesperson for a webhost (GoDaddy.com) that hosts this terrible misogyny.

Legal source: http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/01/29/54351.htm