An investigation by the Reuters agency revealed a series of cases in which a group of victims is denouncing the publication of private videos without their consent on OnlyFans, where they would be sold.
This material, which included explicit acts, was published by users of the platform without the permission of those involveds, causing emotional and psychological damage to the victims, since some of them had been abused.
One of the cases documented by the agency is that of Adreiona Prater, an 18-year-old girl, who claims that a video of her appeared on OnlyFans and other websites after she allowed her ex-boyfriend to record an intimate encounter. Although she asked him to delete it, the man did not listen to her and uploaded it on several platforms without her consent, causing her to be harassed and threatened.
“I felt so scared,” Prater told Reuters. “I installed a home security system, changed my phone number and called the police.”
This case, along with others documented, highlights the lack of effective protections on the site to prevent the publication of non-consensual content. Although the platform claims to have security measures in place, The investigation found that some inappropriate material continues to be shared and disseminated without consequences for those responsible.
Jennifer Aviles, another victim, recounted how she discovered the presence of explicit videos of her on OnlyFans through her ex-boyfriend’s Twitter posts. Despite previously requesting that the images be removed following their breakup.
The emotional impact of these incidents is one of the most notable consequences of this situation. Taysha Blase, another victim, described feeling distraught and vulnerable after discovering that intimate videos of her had been shared on the platform without her knowledge.
“For months, I felt distressed and uncomfortable in public, wondering who could have seen me on OnlyFans. For me, it was as if I no longer had control over the privacy of my own body,” she said.
According to Reuters, an adequate response from OnlyFans to complaints from victims has been lacking. Despite the efforts of affected people to remove the material, many were met with insufficient or no responses from the company.
“I contacted OnlyFans to complain about the video and provide them with the name of my attacker’s account. The company responded by saying the video would be removed if it was confirmed to be non-consensual, but I never heard from them again,” Prater said.
In response to these allegations, an OnlyFans spokesperson spoke during the investigation. “We take all reports of this type seriously. Our moderators deactivated the account in April 2022, more than a year after Prater’s deletion request.”
However, cases are not limited to situations in which an ex-partner uploads a video that was recorded during the relationship.
One of them is that of a woman identified as Sammy, 21, who claims that a video of abuse she suffered in April 2022 was uploaded to the page. She says that in an apartment in Miami two men abused her and that everything was recorded with a cell phone that she saw on a piece of furniture. Two months later, on June 20, the recording appeared on Only Fans.
The investigation includes at least 128 cases collected by different United States security agencies, which were reported by both women and men between January 2019 and November 2023.
If you doubt, this whole situation poses many challenges for applications like OnlyFans and the control they can have over non-consensual content that is uploaded to the platform, which has a policy that requests proof of consent to publish intimate content. But they seem to have been insufficient in the 128 cases reported.
