GoDaddy.com is earning a reputation as more than just a place to stock up on domain names. The company hosts Texxxan.com, a revenge porn site targeting–as the name suggests–women from Texas. What the administrators of the site didn’t anticipate? The women are fighting back. En masse.
On January 18th, eleven women filed a class action suit against site and host, demanding all illicit material be taken down immediately from the site which the petition describes as serving “no useful, social or economic purpose,” and instead is “merely a blight upon society and a sick, cowardly enterprise for the specific purpose of inflicting emotional distress and harm upon each and every Plaintiff.” They are petitioning “to recover their actual damages that include their severe mental anguish and emotional distress…humiliation, fear, and other non-economic damages, and also their economic damages.” And even more game-changing is their proposed certification as a class and the extent of the relief they’re seeking — not only for the removal of their own images, but to permanently shut down the site and preventing the owners and contributors from operating anything similar. Will any of this alter the immunity courts typically grant to online service providers who themselves don’t create the material they publish?
The truth, of course, is that these women will never be able to recover the months lost to the fight for their privacy. Nor will they be able to undo the embarrassment stemming from the consumption of this material. Let’s hope that other current revenge porn sites are heeding this story and realizing that ladies are not going to take it sitting down. Next up: GoDaddy.com changes its name to StopDaddy.com.