Last week, a Texas lady was granted $1.2 billion in damages after suing her ex-boyfriend and accusing him of distributing intimate photographs of her to her family, friends, and coworkers via fake online accounts.
In court documents, the woman, identified only by the initials D.L., sued her former boyfriend, Marques Jamal Jackson, claiming he had psychologically and sexually abused her by distributing so-called revenge porn, a term for sexually explicit photos or videos of someone shared without consent.
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The couple began dating in 2016 and were living together in Chicago in early 2020 when they began a “long and drawn-out breakup,” according to the lawsuit. According to the lawsuit, D.L. temporarily relocated to her mother’s house in Texas, and Mr Jackson began accessing the security system there to spy on her.
The couple officially ended their relationship in October 2021, and D.L. informed Mr Jackson that she no longer wanted him to have access to “visual intimate material” of her that she had permitted him to have while they were a couple.
According to the lawsuit, he instead put the photographs on multiple social media platforms and websites, including a pornographic website, and in a publicly accessible folder on the online file-sharing service Dropbox. He used her name and address, as well as photographs of her face, to identify her in the material.
He set up fake social media and email accounts to share the information with her family, friends, and coworkers, including emailing them a link to the Dropbox folder. He labelled accounts for her company and her personal gym on the social media pages where he shared the photographs.
According to the lawsuit, this was still happening days before the complaint was filed in April 2022.
According to the lawsuit, Mr Jackson also used D.L.’s personal bank account to pay his rent, harassed her with calls and text messages from masked numbers, and informed her loan officer that she had submitted a fake loan application.
Mr Jackson stated in a March 2022 email to D.L. that “you will spend the rest of your life trying and failing to wipe yourself off the internet.” Mr Jackson was unavailable for comment. It was unclear whether he had a lawyer.
He also failed to appear in court on Wednesday, when a Houston jury awarded him $200 million in damages for past and future mental suffering, as well as $1 billion in punitive penalties.
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Brad Gilde, a lawyer for D.L., said that he did not expect the full $1.2 billion to be paid out, but that he hoped it would serve as a deterrent for others.
“The communication from the jury is that if you make it your mission to ruin someone emotionally for the rest of your life, then you are going to be facing a judgment that’s going to ruin you financially for the rest of your life,” he said.
