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Jane Doe Recounts Fallout From Porn Video Posted Online

Turning to alcohol to cope with being recognized by people in her small town after appearing in a porn video, Jane Doe 16 testified Tuesday about the fallout from the video she said was never supposed to be posted online.

SAN DIEGO (CN) – Turning to alcohol to cope with being recognized by people in her small town after appearing in a porn video, Jane Doe 16 testified Tuesday about the fallout from the video she said was never supposed to be posted online.

Doe said she was a 19-year-old college sophomore in 2014 when she drank several rum and cokes before filming a porn video in a San Diego hotel room. She said she was told the video would go straight to DVD and be sold in New Zealand but found out the following year it had been posted to some of the most trafficked websites in the world.

“I felt shocked. I felt very confused. I never expected it to go online, it had happened eight to nine months earlier,” Doe said.

Doe is one of several anonymous women who have testified in a months-long bench trial in San Diego Superior Court Judge Kevin Enright’s courtroom. Twenty-two women accuse the owners and operators of GirlsDoPorn of duping them into filming porn videos with promises the videos would never go online and would be sold to a private collector or released on DVD overseas.

She said once the video went viral in spring 2015, people in her town found out about it. A person from her high school even made a website featuring only her video, prompting her to take action to get it removed, she testified.

Doe’s three sisters were emailed links to the video and a sister-in-law received a link in an email sent to her work at a middle school, Doe said.

Doe said she had never heard of GirlsDoPorn until she saw her video posted on the free website PornHub.

In an email exhibit shown in court, Doe wrote to the person who recruited her to appear in the film: “When I filmed with your company I was under the impression it would be paid for only, not posted on free websites.”

PornHub took the video down at the request of Doe’s boyfriend and sent the website a photo of her with the date to corroborate the video was posted without her consent. But the film was reposted to the website shortly after, Doe said.

After the video came out, Doe said she was ostracized by her friends and received harassing messages on social media.

When an elderly man who lived at an assisted living facility across the street from her work said he recognized her, Doe said she began to fear for her safety.

“I said, ‘That wasn’t me,’ but you could tell he knew it was me,” Doe said.

“I couldn’t take this wide variety of people who had seen me naked and I wanted to leave,” she added.

Doe said she became anxious, depressed and dependent on alcohol. She joined the military to try and get away from her town but was injured and discharged several months later.

She was arrested for a DUI after buying alcohol from a liquor store while driving home to calm an anxiety attack. Later, she was hospitalized for two weeks following an intentional overdose on prescription medication.

It took multiple stints in inpatient and outpatient treatment before she felt she could tell a psychiatrist in 2018 what had happened, Doe told her attorney Cara Van Dorn on re-direct examination.

“I had a hard time believing someone would sympathize with me and see my side of the story,” Doe said.

“It stayed inside and festered for years and I lost almost my life because I didn’t feel I could talk about it,” she added.

On cross-examination, GirlsDoPorn attorney Aaron Sadock showed a videotaped interview Doe did prior to filming the porn video and asked her to point out how she knew she was intoxicated from multiple drinks she’d been given by the makeup artist prior to filming.

Doe noted the way she was rocking back and forth, squeezing her leg with one of her hands, and said the fluctuation in her voice “is not how I normally talk,” and that her eyes looked glazed over.

“It felt like I was watching somebody else. It looked like me but didn’t act like me,” Doe said.

The trial is expected to continue for several more weeks.

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Categories / Civil Rights, Entertainment, Media, Technology, Trials

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