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.
I mean we do multiple life sentences or life + so many years so I don't see why the same logic wouldn't apply when the penalty is monetary. It's a super high number to ensure he's paying the rest of his life, even if he suddenly comes into a bunch of money. It's intended as a warning.
I mean how much money can you put on the price of someone's life, safety, or missed future potential earnings? I think it was just a huge number to "ruin the rest of his life" as he attempted to do.
For example, the McDonald's coffee lawsuit. The coffee was so hot it melted that lady's skin together. And this was an ongoing issue that McDonald's had been warned of several times and didn't listen. So while the lady was just trying to get her medical costs covered, the jury awarded an additional $2.7m in punitive damages because McDonald's didn't listen. Punitive damages are literally money as punishment.
Yes, I get that. Still I find it a very strange, even macabre. I made the point in a couple of other comments, but got no useful replies so far.
It seems to me this guy was basically convicted to living at "minimum wage" or at least some minimum that can't be taken from him, so he can cover his basic needs.
So he is convicted to being poor. Nothing else. But, like there is actual poor people with a very similar standard of living, that did nothing wrong. It just doesn't seem fair. How shitty must it be, as a poor person, that your neighbour is there only because he was convited to have your shitty live?
Also, what if he was already super poor before that and he won't come into any fortune. What money are you even gonna take from him? Does that mean if you're already poor you can just publish revengeporn, because what are they gonna take from you?
Like, if you're poor ... what is the "warning"? That they make sure you gonna be poor forever? Chances are that would be the case anyway.
Also, what incentive does this guy now have to actually contribute to society by doing anything more than the minimum he needs to afford?
Would the situation be any materially different if he had been convicted for $100.000, short of winning the lottery or inheriting a large sum? The fact that he made it his mission to ruin an ex's life then didn't show up to court tells me he's not exactly the kind to have a legal high-paying job. Regardless of the exact monetary amount the consequences would have been the exact same, the difference is purely symbolic.
The American Justice System is broken, yes, but this particular case is hardly the best example of it. As an outsider looking in, I find it more troubling that you still have the death penalty, the whole "plead guilty or don't get fair representation from your public defender" thing, over-incarceration, for-profit prisons, etc.
I don't disagree. Income inequality is an overarching issue in the US. As is charging monetary damages that will never be paid out. My mom was injured in a car accident by someone driving under the influence, and she had to cover all her medical bills out of pocket despite winning in court because the dude wasn't even working and had no money to garnish.
I was more talking about how it fits in with the current system, as flawed as it may be. I don't have a good solution aside from overhauling the massive income inequality in this country. People working minimum wage jobs (which are usually jobs we need for society to function!) should not be living the same lifestyle as this dude.
So why no Prison for this dude? Like, I don't want to sound like the typical anti-US European, but you send so many people to prison! The most in the world, by capita.
He deserves a couple of years and she deserves a reasonable amount of money that this guy can actually cough up. And then maybe things can move on.
Then again, from popular media I'm made to believe that US prisons are actually quite horrid, so maybe you don't deserve that easily.
I just have the cynical feeling this guy actually got off lightly and the big number is just there to make for big media coverage with no real meaning.
Speaking as a poor person who learned why he is poor like me: fuck this guy. He deserved it. Literally tried to ruin her life and you expect us to feel bad he got punished for it? Like please.