Ms. Toups (Photo: Twitter)

John S. Morgan, the lawyer helping victims of revenge porn site Texxxan.com launch a class action suit against the site and its host GoDaddy.com, announced today that two more women have signed on to the claim. Unlike Hollie Toups, the 32-year-old Beaumont, Texas resident who came forward in order to encourage others to confront their struggles with revenge porn, these two victims are allegedly underage. New allegations of child pornography further muddle the already complex case--the most aggressive legal action taken against revenge porn thus far.

The release says that the women have filed an amended cause of action against Hunter Thomas Taylor, the 24-year-old proprietor of Texxxan.com, as well as his parents, whose Internet connection (and occasionally their credit card) was used to maintain the site. The claim also names Austin Ray Ponthieu, whom Mr. Morgan described as the site administrator.

Mr. Morgan said he has found at least two underage victims whose photos were uploaded to the site. The victims have signed onto the suit along with their parents. Mr. Morgan is working with the FBI to report the instances of underage pornography that he says he's encountered while building the case. "I'm a civil lawyer," he told Betabeat. "We enjoy the opportunity to work with law enforcement because this is such an important issue, but ultimately the FBI makes its own decision on how it handles criminal investigations. My indications are that the FBI is taking this very, very seriously and is going to do a very thorough and excellent job prosecuting people for underage photos."

The case will be pursued under state law instead of federal law, as the victims and proprietors are all located in Texas. Mr. Morgan argues that uploading and hosting photos on the site without subjects' permission is "invasion of privacy, unauthorized use of name or likeness and what we call negligence or gross negligence: that their actions were completely negligent because they didn't think about the ramifications."

Mr. Morgan also said he is going to continue to add defendants to the case. "I'm going to try to start listing the people who have uploaded the photos as defendants and start listing the subscribers once we attain that information," he said.

According to Mr. Morgan, Mr. Taylor lives with his parents in Orange, Texas, and was the anonymous "James Smith" who called in to the Anderson Live two week ago in a segment about revenge porn. Little other information is known about Mr. Taylor.

Ms. Toups, however, said that she knows Mr. Ponthieu, whom Mr. Morgan said was the Texxxan.com web administrator. "Austin used to date a friend of mine so that's how I met him," Ms. Toups told Betabeat. "He's been around me and that makes it a little bit more disturbing." Ms. Toups said she lives about a 15 minute drive from where both Mr. Ponthieu and Mr. Taylor reside in Orange, Texas. "The only thing that separates us is a body of water and a bridge," she added. "I talked to some of the other girls and you just assume it's some creep that lives far away."

Ms. Toups and the other women involved in the Texxxan.com suit have served as a lightning rod for the controversy, encouraging other women to discuss their struggles with revenge porn. Last week, two women in Colorado spoke out against Craig Brittain, the founder of the website Is Anybody Down.

"It's kind of like the beginning of a healing process because for so long of course they've been hiding and kind of controlling our lives from the shadows," Ms. Toups said. "To be able to know who it is, it's kind of like forcing them to be held accountable for their actions. I know people have said before that we made the choice to take the photos and to deal with it. Well, they made this choice, so now they have to deal with the consequences."

Below is the press release and the updated claim. We emailed an address for Texxxan.com and calls to a listing for a home number for Mr. Taylor were unanswered.

Texxxan.com Lawsuit - Press Release and Amended Complaint by Adam Steinbaugh

Ms. Toups being filmed for a video news segment about her experience with revenge porn. (Photo: Instagram/h0lliewood)

“I don’t think that society really realizes how rampant it is,” Sarah, a victim of revenge porn, told Betabeat in a feature we wrote last month about the effort to put a stop to sites that take intimate photos of women and publish them without their permission. "And right now," she added, "there’s not a lot that victims can do about it.”

Last week, however, several women--some affiliated with Sarah's organization, End Revenge Porn--joined a class action lawsuit with the hopes of taking down a prominent revenge porn website.

Hollie Toups, a 32-year-old resident of Beaumont, Texas, has publicly come forward to discuss her painful experience with revenge porn in an effort to encourage other victims to do the same. Ms. Toups is now one of at least 23 women who have signed on to a class action lawsuit that seeks to prosecute the owners of Texxxan.com and its hosting company GoDaddy for invasion of privacy and mental anguish. Texxxan.com hosts intimate photos of women living in Texas that have been submitted without their consent.

"I live in an extremely small town and the website was flooded with people that I knew," Ms. Toups said. "Those of us on there go to the grocery store and everybody recognizes you. Not everybody says something, but you get a lot of like, 'Hey, do I know you?' or, 'I recognize you from somewhere.' But then you also get people that will just come out and say it."

Like many victims of revenge porn sites, Ms. Toups told Betabeat that some of her photos appear to have been uploaded by an ex-boyfriend, while others she says she never sent to anyone and may have been lifted from her phone or computer. The photos had been uploaded along with a link to her Facebook profile and real name, so she received harassing messages for weeks after her photos surfaced on the site.

"GoDaddy is profiting off of it," said John S. Morgan, Ms. Toups' lawyer. "The reality of it is at some level this issue of revenge porn has to become a public discussion and a legislative discussion and it raises issues of corporate responsibility. Why would an organization like GoDaddy want to give its name to this type of website?" (We assume Mr. Morgan hasn't seen GoDaddy's ads.) GoDaddy told us, "We don't comment on pending litigation."

Considering the numerous repercussions that keep many victims silent, Ms. Toups' decision to join the lawsuit under her real name is brave. Many revenge porn victims--including Sarah--are forced to remain anonymous or else face the wrath of vengeful exes who find renewed motivation to post their pictures on porn websites. Because of the intimate nature of the photos, many women are also embarrassed to publicly admit that they were victims, and others are afraid of cyberbullying from the passionate fandoms revenge porn proprietors attract.

Ms. Toups said she was "in a straight panic" for days after discovering the photos, and emailed the site's owner to try to get them taken down. "They replied and said they would be happy to remove the pictures for me if I would enter my credit card information," she said. "I went from being depressed and embarrassed to being really pissed off."

Texxxan.com isn't the only website allegedly engaging in this sort of blackmail enterprise. Other revenge porn sites also benefit both from posting photos and removing them. Is Anybody Down, a copycat site of Hunter Moore's infamous Is Anyone Up, has a relationship with a third-party website called Takedown Hammer that will scrub your photos from Is Anybody Down, but only for a fee.

Is Anybody Down features ads for Takedown Hammer across its site, and a link called “Get Me Off This Site!” takes you to a post about Takedown Hammer’s success in removing its clients’ photos from Is Anybody Down. Takedown Hammer claims to be operated by a New York-based lawyer named David Blade, III, but no such name appears in the New York State Unified Court System’s attorney database.

Nevada-based lawyer Marc Randazza, who is representing Bullyville founder James McGibley in a defamation suit against the revenge porn proprietor Hunter Moore, has conversed extensively with the profiteers of Is Anybody Down. After studying the IP addresses associated with the computers of Is Anybody Down’s owner Craig Brittain and the owner of Takedown Hammer, he told Betabeat that the two sites are definitely both run by the same person.

“I have clear and convincing evidence that the exact same IP address is being used by both emails from the Takedown Hammer and Is Anybody Up,” Mr. Randazza said.

Ms. Toups (Photo: Twitter)

Ms. Toups is unfortunately well-acquainted with this new form of digital extortion, but initially struggled to find a lawyer willing to represent her. Many revenge porn victims want to sue, but only anonymously, which makes it much more difficult to launch a successful class action suit.

After several lawyers turned her down, Ms. Toups found John S. Morgan, an attorney in Southeast Texas. With the help of Mr. Morgan and Sarah, Ms. Toups reached out to victims in her area to see if they would be interested in joining the suit. The class action suit petition was filed in Orange County, Texas on Friday.

"To anyone affected by this, I stress to you, you are not alone! It’s not your fault, and you did nothing wrong!" Ms. Toups wrote in a statement representing the women involved in the suit. "You don’t have to face this alone anymore.I know the emotions you’re feeling and what you’ve been going through, and don’t have to feel ashamed! Hold your head high."

"I think 99 percent of victims get told no [by lawyers] so they give up," Ms. Toups said by phone. "I apparently was born with a hardheaded trait that came in handy for once, and I refused to accept the fact that there was nothing that could be done."

Many proprietors of revenge porn websites claim they are protected under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which states that websites are not liable for content submitted by users. Mr. Morgan argues that because these sites knowingly post photos without the subject's consent, and advertise their sites as such, they aren't protected by this law. He also noted that because Texxxan.com only posts the photos of women living in Texas, he is pursuing the case under state law instead of federal law.

Mr. Morgan also intends to sue all those who signed up for a subscription on Texxxan.com, paying a monthly fee to get access to more personal information of the women in the photos. After news of the suit broke, Texxxan.com became viewable only to its members.

As for Ms. Toups, who's studying criminal justice and currently works for the state as a mentor for kids, she's decided to turn her experience into a vehicle for her to positively impact the lives of other victims.

"Hollie reached out to me to see how she could help with the cause," Sarah told Betabeat. "I'm working closely with her and the woman behind Women Against Revenge Porn to reach out to victims, letting them know about our petition and our sites." (Sarah said that any lawyers interested in helping victims can submit their contact info via the Legal Contacts page on End Revenge Porn.)

"I've been trying to figure out why this happened," Ms. Toups said. "Maybe it happened to me so I could help someone. Several of the girls that I’ve been in contact with have been suicidal and I feel like if I had reached them sooner they would not even have attempted that. I’m one of the older ones--most of them are younger--so I felt somebody has to start it. And I knew that once I did even the ones who were scared would end up coming out."

Ms. Toups said that since going public on a local Texas TV station on Thursday night, other girls have contacted Mr. Morgan hoping to join the suit.

Despite mounting pressure from revenge porn victims, hackers and lawmakers, the web's most notorious revenge porn entrepreneur, Hunter Moore, is still at it. Last Friday, Mr. Moore tweeted that his TV show had been picked up, though declined to say for which network.

Class Action Suit Against GoDaddy.com and Texxxan.com