Facebook, eBay oppose lawsuit against website that led to models being ‘sexually exploited’
ModelMayhem.com introduced models to ‘agents’ who drugged and raped them before uploading images to porn site called Nastiest Nymphos.
She was a 22-year old aspiring model from Brooklyn. Searching for a way to crack into the industry, she turned to ModelMayhem.com, a website that connects freelance models to casting agents, photographers and others in the business. She flew down to Miami to meet the agent she had met online and, upon her arrival, he drugged and raped her. Her brutal assault was filmed and posted on the porn website Miami’s Nastiest Nymphos. She awoke bruised and disoriented in a motel room with no knowledge of how she got there.
The horrific story was not an isolated incident. Previous cases showed that around 100 women were drugged, assaulted and filmed by the two rapists behind Miami’s Nastiest Nymphos. The men have been arrested and sentenced to 12 consecutive life terms.
Now, the woman – identified only as Jane Doe No. 14 in her lawsuit– is looking to sue ModelMayhem.com for failure to warn users of potential rapists on their website. A court ruling last week granted her the right to move forward with the trial, a decision which brings up questions of whether websites can be held legally accountable for sexual assaults that happen to their users in the offline world.
Websites such as ModelMayhem.com are typically shielded from cases like this by the Communications Decency Act (CDA), a law that protects websites from liability for its users. The idea is that these sites are platforms only: to sue a website such as Craigslist for an assault that happened as a result of a real-world meeting is like suing a phone book publisher if an assailant used the yellow pages to look up a person’s location. The CDA has protected websites and apps such as Facebook, Craigslist, Uber, AirBnB and OkCupid from legal repercussions, even as, in the case of some of these services, reports of assaults have continued to crop up.
When Jane Doe first appealed the case last year, it seemed unlikely that the judge would allow her to continue with the lawsuit because of the CDA, and more specifically, Section 230 of the law, which frees websites from such liability. Big name websites eBay, Facebook and Tumblr urged the court not to allow Jane Doe’s lawsuit to go through on account for the chilling effect it might have on other internet businesses.
