Earlier this year, board members of the APAG Union filed a lawsuit against Onlyfans when it was revealed they may have been involved in a conspiracy with Instagram that inadvertently placed porn stars on a terrorist watch list.
The lawsuit claims that OnlyFans was working with Instagram insiders in an attempt to hurt industry rivals.
Unnamed Meta employees were accused this February in an ongoing lawsuit of working under the table to secretly aid OnlyFans by getting its competitors “blacklisted” online. The suit was filed in a San Francisco federal court by a group of adult online entertainers who’ve alleged Meta employees had added their accounts and others linked to OnlyFans competitors to databases companies internationally use to identify malware and content linked to terrorism.
Last week, an attorney for the entertainers introduced what they claimed were copies of wire transfers provided by an anonymous tipster. The alleged transfers were used in court to support previously made claims that three Meta executives had taken payments from an OnlyFans intermediary, which shared a physical address with another OnlyFans-affiliated entity.
In addition to Clegg and Mendelsohn, a third employee, Cristian Perrella, was identified in Tuesday’s filing. (A Meta employee with the same name is currently employed as a Facebook trust and safety director, according to a LinkedIn page.)
The wire transfer documents, according to the plaintiffs, point to funds going to two trust accounts in the Philippines under Meta executives’ names. A third account, the documents say, was opened in the name of a “high-ranking Facebook executive’s young son.”
Meta denied the claims to the press. In court, however, its lawyers are less focused on the veracity of the allegations, denying instead that Meta would be liable either way.
OnlyFans, meanwhile, has repeatedly called the allegations “meritless,” a legal term of art referring to claims that aren’t actionable in court, which is not to say untrue.
Meta further argued that, even if true, any decisions to penalize OnlyFans’ competitors would have been protected by the company’s First Amendment rights, and the limited liability protections offered by Section 320 of the Communications Decency Act.
But here’s where it gets even more interesting.
Lawyers representing OnlyFans’ parent company, Fenix Internet, LLC, said in a subsequent filing Wednesday that it had exposed the identities of Meta’s executives by mistake. The names of the employees were “inadvertently unredacted,” it said while asking the court to delete the document. (In its own motion, Meta referred to the executives as the “John Does” and redacted several whole paragraphs referencing the execs.)
Nick Clegg, Meta’s vice president of global affairs, and Nicola Mendelsohn, vice president of Meta’s global business team, were identified as the former “John Does.”
We’ll keep you updated as more information as the case becomes available.
- You can follow the APAG Union on Twitter at @apagunion.