The B.C. woman alleges the man she had known since 2013 posted images of her, including of when she was underage, that he had obtained through their social media friendships
A B.C. woman is suing a former high school classmate who she alleges edited her image into pornographic photos and then posted them to a website to encourage other users to denigrate her.
The woman alleges the man she had known since 2013 posted images of her, including of when she was underage, that he had obtained through their social media friendships, according to a lawsuit filed in B.C. Supreme Court.
The photos were obtained without her knowledge and both undoctored and doctored posts were made without her consent, the lawsuit says.
The woman alleges her image was included among 2,000 photos of girls and women that someone using the name DarkSoul214 posted to or left up on the website over seven years, between 2017 and 2023.
Experts say this type of gender-based violence is becoming “incredibly common” as it gets easier for offenders to do with the increasing number of readily available artificial-intelligence tools.
Editing images of people’s faces onto bodies in photos “has been happening for a long time, but it can now be done so convincingly,” said Moira Aikenhead, a UBC professor.
A year-old B.C. law called the Intimate Images Protection Act allows victims to more easily file a claim in the civil resolution tribunal to force people to take down the images and to seek damages of up to $5,000. It was written to include AI generated or doctored images, she said.
Victims can, as the woman in this case did, sue a person in a higher court where higher damages are possible.
Aikenhead said such image editing hasn’t been tested in an criminal case, so it’s not clear whether criminal law applies “if it’s not an actual picture of you involved in the nude or engaged in sex.”
Postmedia has chosen not to identify either the woman or the man she is suing.
The woman said in the lawsuit that they met in Grade 10 in Alberta and friended each other on social media and that they were always “platonic friends with no sexual or romantic history.”
She moved to Vancouver to attend UBC in 2016, and he moved to B.C. the following year and they maintained their friendship.
In January 2023, the woman used a web-based tool that says it helps people discover where and how their images are used online, and found some, both photo-edited and not, uploaded to a pornographic site, the lawsuit alleged.
Her photos were posted by DarkSoul214 “to solicit sexual, defamatory and violent remarks” from users and the comments included “threats of rape and death,” the lawsuit alleged.
Some of the images had been digitally edited to make it appear she was taking part in pornographic scenes and several of them were of her “when she was under the age of 18,” the lawsuit alleged.
She said she found out the next day her friend was DarkSoul214, it said.
“Multiple residents of British Columbia read each of the above posts,” it said, adding, “These posts were intended to lower the reputation of the plaintiff.”
She’s suing for infliction of mental suffering, defamation, harassment and violation. She is asking the courts to order the man to stop broadcasting the images and seeking damages to cover pain and suffering, medical expenses, future wage loss and earning capacity and future care, according to the lawsuit.
Aikenhead said hearing about such cases can help spread the message of how “extremely harmful” it is to the victims to learn their “bodies are being displayed in this way that they did not consent to.”
“There’s such a vast quantity of this online.”
It becomes normalized to the point users may think, “it couldn’t be criminal because so many people are doing it. What really gets lost is that these are real people or real women,” she said. “They completely lose sight of the humanity of the victims.”
In a survey last year, workers at women’s shelters reported that 98 per cent of the people they supported said they were victims of threats by text or the online posting of their photos without consent, according to Rhiannon Wong, B.C. project manager for Text Safety Canada.
At the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, “we encounter and seek removal of thousands of these types of images every day,” said research director Jacques Marcoux.
None of the allegations have been proved in court.
A message left with the man on his Facebook page wasn’t returned, nor did a law firm connected to the woman’s claim return a request for comment.