YouTube star wins landmark damages over revenge porn
A WOMAN has won damages in a landmark case against an ex-boyfriend who put revenge pornography of her on to the internet.
Actress and singer Chrissy Chambers celebrated victory after the spurned lover uploaded films of them having sex to a pornographic website.
In the first civil case of its kind brought in England and Wales, the 26-year-old American sued her UK-based ex-partner for harassment, breach of confidence and misuse of private information at London’s High Court.
She acted after being told the Crown Prosecution Service was refusing to bring crimiher nal charges against the man who for legal reasons can only be identified as DCR.
The amount of compensation has not been disclosed, but lawyers for Miss Chambers described the sum as substantial.
Thousands of people have had their lives ruined by ex-partners uploading explicit images – either obtained consensually or stolen – of them on to the internet.
Miss Chambers operates a successful YouTube platform aimed mainly at teenage girls with her partner Bria Kam, who accepted her marriage proposal on the steps of the court yesterday. The channels on which they show comedy sketches, songs and vlogs have a million subscribers.
Before Miss Chambers came out as gay, she had a nine-month relationship with a British man when she was 18.
Judge Sir David Eady was told that towards the end of the relationship he filmed seven videos of them having sex without her knowledge or informed consent at her home in Atlanta, Georgia, in September 2009.
Two years after they broke up he uploaded six of them to the free porn site Redtube. The titles of three of the films contained Miss Chambers’s full name, and two gave age at the time of filming. The videos have since been shared on more than 35 different porn sites and seen hundreds of thousands of times.
Miss Chambers was alerted to the films in June 2013 and immediately contacted the site to have them removed. But by then she had had messages from countless YouTube users who wrongly believed she had been intentionally involved in pornography and who no longer wished to view her content.
In 2015, ministers in the UK introduced a specific criminal offence of ‘revenge porn’ under which jilted lovers who posted pornographic films or images on websites faced up to two years in jail.
But because the videos of Miss Chambers were uploaded in 2011, it meant the criminal law did not apply. She brought the civil case in March 2016 and settled out of court in December 2017.
Her victory after a four-year legal battle was made public yesterday when a statement of the settlement was read in open court. Outside court she said the legal precedent was a severe warning that those who seek to extort and harm with revenge porn cannot do so with impunity and will be held accountable.
As well as damages, Miss Chambers has won copyright of the videos allowing her to pursue any websites that host them.
‘Without her knowledge’