A Texas woman was awarded a $1.2 billion settlement this week after a Houston-area jury ruled that she was the victim of revenge porn by one of her former boyfriends.
The woman, identified in the April 2022 lawsuit as D.L., filed the suit in Harris County against her former partner Marques Jamal Jackson.
According to the suit, Jackson took intimate photos of D.L. that he obtained while they were together and posted them on social media and adult websites as a means to “embarrass, harass, torment, humiliate, and publicly shame” her.
The two began seeing each other in 2016, and after starting their relationship, they moved to Chicago, where Jackson had received a job offer, the lawsuit states.
During the relationship, the suit says D.L. was comfortable sharing intimate images of herself with Jackson, but they were not meant for elsewhere.
The pair broke up in October 2021, and D.L. moved back to Texas. Once she did, Jackson began posting her private images online, the lawsuit claims.
Jackson is also accused of tapping into the plaintiff’s mother’s home security system to spy on the woman after they broke up.
The suit also alleges that he would send links to her friends and family to the sites where the intimate images had been uploaded.
According to court documents, the last message Jackson sent to D.L. was a threat that she would never live this down.
“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,” he sent, court documents say.
A statement from the plaintiff’s attorney, Bradford J. Gilde of Gilde Law Firm, shared that the settlement awarded by the jury offers a symbolic win for those who are a victim of “imaged-based sexual abuse.”
The statement goes on to say that “revenge porn” is used to cause “a combination of psychological abuse, domestic violence, and sexual abuse.”
“While a judgment in this case is unlikely to be recovered, the compensatory verdict gives D.L. back her good name,” Gilde said. “The punitive verdict also is the jury’s plea to raise awareness of this tech-fueled national epidemic.”
There have been efforts in recent years to stop what happened to D.L. from ever happening to anyone. In every state except for Massachusetts and South Carolina, laws have been passed to ban revenge porn.
As for D.L., Gilde praised her “courage in fighting back” against what happened to her.
“We hope the staggering amount of this verdict sends a message of deterrence and prevents others from this engaging in this despicable activity,” he said.
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