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Almost two dozen women were awarded a sum of $12.7 million in a legal settlement against website GirlsDoPorn on Thursday. According to the judge who granted this, the 22 women didn’t know they were being used to film pornography, ending a months-long trial that began last August in San Diego. 

According to the Associated Press report, all the women, who remain unnamed, filed a lawsuit against the porn website, claiming that the site’s owners “deceived women in financial need” and “took considerable, calculated steps to falsely assure prospective models that their videos will never be posted online.” 

The lawsuit alleged that women were coerced into making sexual videos but had no knowledge that these videos would ever be published or available for online consumption. When the footage did, in fact, end up getting published across “many popular free services,” website owners reportedly hired people to serve as fake “references” and pretended to be models who could “vouch” for the website’s legitimacy to help promote its claims that the videos would never be posted online. 

Several women who testified in the case stated that they accepted money to perform sex on camera to pay for college or medical bills, but the released footage has since damaged their reputations and careers and made many of them the subjects of public harassment. “These guys have ruined [the plaintiffs’] lives and we have to clean this up as much as possible,” said Ed Chapin, attorney for the women involved.

While the settlement means the civil lawsuit has come to a close, the story is far from over. The Department of Justice has charged the GirlsDoPorn’s domain owners and two of their associates with sex trafficking crimes, meaning they will have to defend themselves in a criminal trial where they could face up to life in prison and a $250,000 fine. 

California was one of the first states to explicitly legislate the illegality of nonconsensual pornography. In 2013, former Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law that said people who are convicted of distributing sexual images of exes can face six months of jail time and a $1,000 fine. 

However, the law has some key flaws. Most notably, it only applies when the photographer is also the person accused of distributing the content and images online. The law doesn’t deal with situations in which the photographer is a third party. And, if someone took photos of themselves to share with an intimate partner that are then shared online by either the partner or a third party, the law would likely not offer the victim much legal cover. 

That’s partly what makes the case of former Congresswoman Katie Hill so complicated. Hill resigned from Congress following allegations of her relationship with a campaign worker and nude images being published online without her consent. As a result, the former California Rep. has vowed to fight against this type of exploitation as a part of “revenge porn.” But it’s not clear if her case would even fall under California’s jurisdiction because it depends on where the photos were taken or obtained. 

Back in 2017, California legislators attempted to increase the state’s maximum fine for breaking the aforementioned law in certain cases. But then-governor Brown vetoed the measure, saying that the “current law already provides sufficient criminal and civil liability.”

In any case, the GirlsDoPorn lawsuit is a step in the right direction, particularly as this case continues as a sex-trafficking offense. “This outcome is vindication for the many courageous women victimized by GirlsDoPorn — a fraudulent and reprehensible enterprise that thrived on manipulating inexperienced young women,” Chapin said.

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Mekita Rivas, Khareem Sudlow