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from www.courthousenews.com – Seventeen women filed a class action against a “revenge porn” website, claiming it let their exes publish humiliating intimate photos and private facts about them without permission.

Lead plaintiff Hollie Toups [pictured] sued the site, Texxxan.com, web host GoDaddy.com, the unnamed persons or entities that host the site and all of its subscribing members, in Orange County District Court, Orange, Texas.

The complaint states: “Godaddy.com hosts the website www.Texxxan.com, which is a ‘revenge porn’ website. This explicit website is dedicated to publishing intimate photos of young women, and also publishing private facts about these women, all of which are done without obtaining permission or authorization from the women who are the victims of this website.

This website is significantly designed to cause severe embarrassment, humiliation, and emotional distress to all of the women plaintiffs, and to all the women victims that are sought to be named as plaintiffs through class-action certification (discussed infra).

“The defendants who own this website, or who contribute to its contents, or who subscribe to this website, are fully aware that they do not have permission from any of the women victims to publish their photographs or their other personal information. As such, the defendants that are currently named and the defendants who shall be identified and joined later are all acting in a deliberately reprehensible manner to participate in activity that they know to be malicious, hurtful and harmful.”

The plaintiffs claim the website serves no useful, social or economic purpose, that it 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.”

The women seek an injunction to shut down the site, but it appears that the unknown administrators of the site have already taken it offline.

In seeking class status, the women say the number of women in Texas who could be targeted by the site is so large that joinder is impossible.

“The very purpose of this website is to target Texas women for malicious revenge pornography,” the complaint states.

The women are represented by John Morgan of Beaumont, who told the Houston Chronicle that he is “going after the revenge porn industry” and “those sickos who post private information of women without their knowledge.”

“The only way to destroy this industry is to go after the people who fund it,” Morgan told the Chronicle.

About half of the women do not know who posted their photos on the site, while the other half suspect their former partners, Morgan said.

At least 13 more women have joined the lawsuit since it was filed, according to the San Antonio Current. Morgan said he expects more women to join.

Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University, is not optimistic about the lawsuit’s chances at success.

“No matter how much the lawyers hype their lawsuit in the media, it’s mostly dead on arrival,” Goldman wrote for Forbes.com.

“All of the defendants – other than the users actually submitting the revenge porn – are protected by 47 USC 230, the law that says websites aren’t liable for third-party content.”

Goldman wrote that the same law explicitly protects website users, and that a recently enacted anti-SLAPP law in Texas was designed to discourage anti-free speech lawsuits such as this one.

“If the courts determine that the revenge porn relates to a ‘matter of public concern’ (not likely, but it is possible), the plaintiffs’ lawyers will be writing checks to the improperly targeted defendants,” Goldman warned.

Describing the class action claim as “weak,” Goldman said the plaintiffs’ best chance is to bring individual suits against the defendants who did them wrong.

“(I)n this particular case, revenge porn plaintiffs often can find the defendants, because (we hope) there’s a limited number of people who have nude depictions of the plaintiff,” Goldman wrote.

The plaintiffs seek actual and punitive damages and injunctive relief for breach of privacy, negligence, wrongful appropriation of names of likenesses, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy.