Crystal Palace soccer star Leigh Nicol is one of four British women suing Pornhub over leaked sexual content that cost Nocol her job. The midfielder had to quit after a clip of her having sex when she was 18 years old was uploaded on Pornhub without her consent and went on to become one of its biggest hits.
Four British women have sued the X-rated site amid claims it aired sex videos without their consent. The four women filed a 179-page lawsuit against Pornhub's parent company, Mindgeek, in California on June 18 — a legal process that was a year in the making, The Sun reported.
Seeking Justice
In 2019, hackers somehow broke into her iCloud account and stole her private content that ended up getting published on Pornhub's website, the suit contends. The images of Nicol date back to 2014, when she was 18 years old. The content had videos and pictures of Nicol having sex. Similar images of three other women too were shared on the X-rated site.
The explicit footage was eventually removed by Pornhub after 'numerous emails', which received 'generic, automated responses', the suit says. However, by that time at least one of the videos trended as one of Pornhub's top three most-popular across the site and was downloaded and re-posted elsewhere.
This resulted in an irreparable damage to her flourishing career. Nicol was compelled to stop playing professional sports for over a year due to the distress caused by the videos, the lawsuit filed in California state court stated.
The lawsuit, where Nicol is mentioned as Jane Doe No. 28, still suffers "significant emotional harm, including anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and panic attacks" over her ordeal. So far 34 women have sued PornHub of which 14 are underage girls when the nonconsensual videos were uploaded on the website.
Traumatic Experience
Another 14 of the women were victims of convicted sex criminals. These women are from different countries ranging from United States the UK, Colombia, Thailand and Canada. The women are not named in the document, and are instead called Jane Doe followed by a number.
Nicol shared a photo of an official statement on Friday regarding the lawsuit and detailed how the traumatic experience still affects her life. "It ruined my life, it kills my personality, it zapped the happiness out of me," Nicol wrote.
The 25-year-old experienced "two years of shame" after the video leak that left her suffering from "depression, anxiety, horrifying thoughts public embarrassment and scars," she wrote.
"I still bear those scars," she wrote. She also said that she's in an ongoing mental-health battle "for the foreseeable future" and wants to be part of the fight to make sure others don't experience what she did.
Nicol, in her Instagram post, added, "Thank you to you all, my family, friends, colleagues, lawyers and you."
That said, the other women too had an equally nightmarish experience following the leaks. Another woman, named Jane Doe No. 2 was blackmailed by now-convicted child sex offender Abdul Hasib Elahi, 26, into sending him sexually explicit photographs and videos when she was just 15 years old. The videos were then shared on sites including Pornhub.
One of the videos Elahi forced Jane Doe No. 2 to film was shared to Snapchat by a classmate. The video was screen recorded and put on Pornhub, with other videos and photos of her appearing on the site that same month.
Elahi was arrested by the NCA in December 2018 but released, after which he was able to continue his offending until August 2020 despite being on bail. He will be sentenced in September after he admitted 157 offences at Birmingham Crown Court earlier this month.
