Sex worker takes action on man who ‘thought it was funny’ to allege she had AIDS
A man who wrote fake articles for a parody site made the bogus claim that a sex worker and OnlyFans model had AIDS in an attempt to destroy her livelihood, she claims.
The man, from Dunedin, New Zealand, was granted interim name suppression, but appeared before the Dunedin District Court this afternoon, June 22, after pleading guilty to three charges under the Harmful Digital Communications Act.
His victim, Lisa Lewis, said the torrent of abuse was “the most defaming and slanderous thing anyone’s ever said about me”.
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“I believe he wanted to destroy me and my income,” she added.
“He didn’t destroy me but he did humiliate me.”
The model, who described herself as an “OnlyFans online creator porn actress”, gained notoriety for a bikini-clad pitch invasion during an All Blacks rugby match back in 2006.
The defendant wrote a slew of false articles about Ms Lewis to harm her reputation.
In the first article, written in June 2018, he suggested she had been employed to provide sexual services to elderly war veterans.
In another a year later, the 33-year-old wrote that Ms Lewis was living in a state house while providing commercial sexual services.
The next day, he wrote that Ms Lewis had been arrested and charged by police, attaching a pixelated courtroom photo of a similar-looking woman to dupe readers into thinking it was her.
None of these stories about Ms Lewis were true at all.
“I believe someone else encouraged him to do this. I’d love to know who and why,” said Ms Lewis in court.
Counsel Anne Stevens QC said her client unleashed his campaign of abuse because he "thought it was funny."
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“He drank all the time, he was always drunk and he lost his judgement . . . he thought it was funny,” she said.
The defendant did not recognise the harm he was causing, said Mrs Stevens.
The man had now vowed to stay away from alcohol and social media.
Judge David Robinson sentenced him to three months’ community detention, 12 months’ intensive supervision and 100 hours’ community work.
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