A Texas woman was awarded $1.2 billion in damages last week after she sued her former boyfriend and accused him of sending intimate images of her to her family, friends and co-workers from fake online accounts.
The woman, who is identified only by the initials D.L. in court documents, 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 that are shared without consent.
The couple started dating in 2016 and were living together in Chicago in early 2020 when they began a “long and drawn-out break up,” according to the lawsuit. D.L. temporarily moved to her mother’s house in Texas and Mr. Jackson began accessing the security system there to spy on her, the lawsuit said.
In October 2021, the couple officially ended their relationship and D.L. told Mr. Jackson that she no longer wanted him to have access to what the lawsuit described as “visual intimate material” of her that she had allowed him to have while they were a couple.
Instead, he posted the images on several social media platforms and websites, including a pornographic website, and in a publicly accessible folder on the online file-sharing service Dropbox, the lawsuit said. He identified her in the material, using her name and address, and images of her face. He created fake social media pages and email accounts to share the material with her family, friends and co-workers, including by sending them a link to the Dropbox folder. On the social media pages where he had posted the images, he tagged accounts for her employer and for her personal gym.
The lawsuit says that this was still happening days before the complaint was filed in April 2022.
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 told her loan officer that she had submitted a fraudulent loan application, the lawsuit said.
In a March 2022 email to D.L. cited in the lawsuit, Mr. Jackson said, “You will spend the rest of your life trying and failing to wipe yourself off the internet.”
Mr. Jackson could not be reached for comment. It was not clear if he had a lawyer.
He also did not appear in court on Wednesday, when a jury in Houston ordered him to pay $200 million for past and future mental anguish and $1 billion in punitive damages.
This hopefully serves as an effective deterrent to any potential sickos out there.
How exactly is it a deterrent?
I mean, the guy clear doesn’t have or will ever have $1.2 Billion or anything even close. So clear he won’t actually be paying almost all of this. It’s like threatening to take something away you don’t have in the firstplace?
So what is the actual punishment then?
They can take a chunk of every penny he earns for the rest of his life.
What if he is already poor and just getting by. You literally might just be taking pennies from him.
I guess it’s a form of punishment that favours the poor for a change?
He’ll just work at a bar for cash under the table and tips.
Right? Like, that’s just how many people get by anyway. That seems like a shitty punishment.
When I did garnishments, sometimes I would calculate literal pennies for their checks.
They would get more interest in what they owed than they paid those weeks.
Although he may not be able to pay 1.2 bil in damages, he surely can and will give away a lot of his paycheck to her. It’s like alimony turned up to eleven.
And that is it? Like you don’t go to prison for failing to pay your fines?
So he basically got sentenced to living on minimum wage for life? That doesn’t sound that bad and certainly makes the 1.2 billion number quite pointless.
@theKalash @foggianism
Since he essentially threatened her with harrassment for life I’d say it’s a fair trade.
He fucked around and found out.
Is it though?
From what I understand he now just has to live at like the existential minimum. Sure that suck … but there is plenty of people are already living on that and they didn’t do anything. How is that fair?
Also, if he actually just accepts his faith now and only earns enough money to just get by with as little as possible, he couldn’t pay anything at all.
What is wrong with prison? I thought you Americans loved putting people on there, why not this guy?
He’s also now infamous just like he threatened to make his ex. Every time anyone Googles him, this is what will come up. It is kind of fitting in that way.
As for why not prison, it’s hard to put people in jail for something like this. I assume that’s the reason why this went to civil court rather than the criminal court.
@theKalash
He posted their private sex photos on Dropbox and sent links to her friends, family and employer.
The hell he deserves anything less than living in poverty for a very long time.
You seriously see nothing wrong with forcing people into poverty as the only punishment when you have actual people living in poverty? How do you not see how fucked up that is?
Like, what if he was already dead poor? What would be the punishment then?
Also, if that really is the only punishemnt … that basically just means the middle class get 1 free crime before they are downgraded to the lowest poor tier.
@theKalash
You’d rather the state spend millions in tax dollars keeping the guy in jail instead?