Defamation & Revenge Porn Victim Awarded $7.25 Million
In December 2015, a Dallas County court awarded Bindu Pariyar a $7.25 million judgment against her ex-husband, Tom Randall Sewell. I served on a pro bono basis as an expert witness on behalf of Pariyar. The lawsuit alleged that following their 2012 divorce, Sewell engaged in a massive “revenge porn” campaign, creating dozens of fake social media profiles and thousands of web pages to distribute nonconsensual pornographic images and videos of Pariyar. Pariyar testified that Sewell had previously manipulated and drugged her to produce the materials. The court’s ruling addressed the immense digital footprint of the harassment, which included thousands of links that appeared prominently in search results for her name.
Expert Testimony and Damages Model
A critical component of the successful verdict was my work in establishing the framework for the damages model used by the court.
I developed a recommendation for damages based on the following:
- Reputation Mitigation Budget: I developed a damages model based on the actual costs required to “repair” Pariyar’s online reputation. This involved calculating the expense of long-term Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content suppression strategies needed to bury the damaging materials.
- Dark Web Discovery: I was suspicious of the scale of the publication of the pornographic materials, because it seemed that multiple people would have had to be involved, and the older age of the defendant suggested he might not have had the technical knowledge necessary to conduct such a large defamation campaign alone. Because of my suspicions that he had hired people in India to conduct the publication of the negative content, I searched on the Dark Web. I discovered that the materials distributed by Sewell had been mirrored and copied onto the Dark Web. Because content on the Dark Web cannot be effectively removed through standard legal or technical requests, I argued that the damage was essentially permanent and required a lifelong strategy of management.
- Lifelong Monitoring and Intervention: Based on the persistence of the material, I included a budget for continuous internet monitoring to last for the remainder of Pariyar’s expected professional life. This budget accounted for ongoing SEO efforts and takedown requests to prevent the negative materials from resurfacing in name-based searches.
Final Court Ruling
When the court decided in Pariyar’s favor, the final $7.25 million award was based on a combination of the reputation mitigation budget I developed and a damages model proposed by her attorney. The latter assessed specific financial penalties against the defendant for each individual video that had been nonconsensually published, recognizing both the technical cost of repair and the inherent violation of the victim’s privacy.
This is one of the most compelling cases I have ever worked on, because of the egregious harm done to the plaintiff and her family. The evidence had shown that her husband had tricked her into moving with him to the United States based on false representations that included that he would help her go to nursing school for her career. However, he manipulated her into breast augmentation surgery in Thailand, and once they moved to the United States, he insisted that “everyone in my house has to make their room and board.” He tried to push her into stripping, and she declined. He then drugged her, and then photographed men having sex with her. When the drugs wore off, he told her that if she did not do as he asked, he would send her photos to everyone in her village in Nepal and tell everyone she was prostituting. This was unfortunately effective, because she did not know U.S. laws, and it would terribly shame her family, making life harder for them. It also would make it nearly impossible for her to return to her village. Based on the sextortion threats, he compelled her to work at strip clubs, and then he compelled her into prostitution.
It is important to know that she did not want the existence he thrust upon her. When she got away from him, she enrolled in school to get a medical technology license. The court evidence showed that she made $1,000 per day stripping and escorting — this was established from the account book she took from her ex-husband. Medical technician school and certifications are not easy, and do not pay as much as she could have made as the sex worker her ex-husband had made her out to be.
For those who grew up in America, it can be hard to understand why she did not simply leave her ex-husband and go to the police. But, she did not know the laws here, and he held her passport as well as threatened to ruin her and her family.
Eventually, she attempted suicide to get out of the situation, and hospital workers began to suspect that she might be a trafficking victim, and helped her escape her abuser. He had threatened to defame her if she left him, and then he followed through with it. It was an extensive defamation campaign. Her village did see the materials, and her father attempted suicide. After she got legal assistance to divorce her husband, they also had him arrested, and obtained a protective order that he was not to post any pictures or videos of her, but he broke the order. The people helping her eventually put her in touch with Kenton Hutcherson, the attorney who handled her defamation lawsuit pro bono, and he contacted me to work pro bono on the case as well.
It was very gratifying to see Bindu Pariyar prevail in her case. It was an instance when a victim of horrific crimes got a real measure of justice.
Postscript
It meant a lot to Pariyar to win the case because it enabled her to take ownership of her own story and to counteract the false image that had been created about her. Once she won the case, she wanted to tell reporters exactly what had happened and how she had not done any of it consensually. She opted to use her real name for the interviews, boldly facing head-on the public scrutiny, because she said she wanted to get her real story out there.
Her ex-husband, and a group of his admirers (likely people similarly disposed to sex-trafficking young women from foreign countries) posted critical comments to news stories and social media posts following the lawsuit, trying to claim that she really did like what she was doing in the pornographic videos and photos, and that she had only sued because she “is a gold-digger.” But, nothing could be further from the truth.
As a postscript to the lawsuit, it is worthwhile to know that she continued with school and got her medical technician certification. Her ex-husband absconded from the country, taking as many of his assets and money with him as he could.
So, Bindu Pariyar got her day in court, reclaimed the story of her life, and it was not at all about greed.
