Female footballer among dozens suing Pornhub after videos uploaded without consent
By Tom Sunderland - The Daily Star
Crystal Palace midfielder Leigh Nicol is one of 34 women suing MindGeek, the parent company that owns Pornhub, after videos of them were posted on the video-sharing website without their consent.
Although the legal case has been filed in the United States, Scottish-born Nicol is one of three British women named among the claimants.
Nicol was 18 when she recorded a video of herself having sex in 2014. That video was later stolen as part of an iCloud hack five years later and posted on sites owned by MindGeek without her consent.
Now 25, Nicol told Sky News of her ordeal and the effect it still has on her today: "Even at this point, I look at myself in the mirror and I feel sick because that's no longer private to me.
"Because a large part of the population has seen something that they shouldn't have seen. There's shame, there's embarrassment, there's disgust, sickness, there's doubts that I'm not good enough.
"I feel like no one would ever potentially want to actually be my future husband, because I've got these videos attached to me.”
Pornhub boasts a daily audience of around 130 million users, and Nicol said that when she would get the video taken down from their server, it would merely get uploaded on another site.
The former Scotland under-19 international – who spent part of her development in the academies of Celtic and Arsenal – added: "My question was why and how is this allowed.
"This isn't legal. I haven't put this out there and I'm trending on some of the world's biggest adult websites.”
Nicol previously told Sky Sports she once contemplated suicide and decided to take a year away from football in 2019 to address her mental trauma.
Earlier this year, she shared some of the online abuse she received in the wake of her leaked video and wrote on Twitter: “I keep these to myself, because I don’t want kids on my profiles seeing these & I also don’t want kids not to be able to follow me.
“But, here’s my own personal experiences in the last few days as a small reason why change needs to happen for a safer space.”
It’s alleged that 14 of the 34 women named in the lawsuit – which could amount to 'hundreds of millions of dollars' in damages – were underage at the time they appeared in videos later uploaded without their permission.
Another 14 were said to have been victims of people charged with or convicted of sex crimes at the time they were recorded.
One unnamed claimant in the case said she was trafficked around the United States and took part in the sexual encounters as she was “homeless and very vulnerable” at the time.
Michael Bowe – who represented former U.S. President Donald Trump during the investigation relating to Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 election – is the lawyer leading the case.
MindGeek – which is understood to be worth more than £1.2billion – has said it’s investigating the complaint, and a statement from the company read: "Pornhub has zero tolerance for illegal content and investigates any complaint or allegation made about content on our platforms.
"The fact is, Pornhub has in place the most comprehensive safeguards in user-generated platform history, which include the banning of uploads from unverified users, expanding our moderation processes, and cooperating with dozens of non-profit organisations around the world."
Nicol was part of the Crystal Palace team that finished seventh in the FA Women’s Championship – the second tier of women’s football in England – this past season.
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