Former Miss West Virginia Allison Williams filed suit in U.S. Distrcit Court against 59 defendants that she claims falsely portrayed her having sex in the back of a television news truck.
She is seeking damages and injunctive relief for the distribution and sale of video content claiming to have caught the former beauty queen in explicit sexual acts. Some of the sites being sued also have photographs of her wearing her pageant crown juxtaposed with video content of an unidentified woman, purported to be Williams, engaged in sex acts.
Williams and her legal representatives from the law firm Jackson Kelly PLLC filed a complaint on March 18, nearly a year after the photos and video were discovered on the Internet. A spokeswoman for Williams told XBiz that it took that long for Williams' attorneys to locate and identify all of the defendants who had featured the content on their websites.
The representative explained the process as being extremely arduous given the amount of aliases being used by the adult businesses in question, in addition to dealing with businesses in other countries.
"This has been a nightmare," Williams stated. "The woman in the video is not me. She doesn't even look like me. I have never participated in any pornographic video."
Williams is alleging that many of the photos, which began appearing on the Internet in September, were "doctored" to look like her.
Williams was crowned Miss West Virginia in 2003 and went on to compete in the Miss America pageant. She believes she became a target of several porn sites because of her status as a beauty pageant queen.
Williams is a law student at West Virginia University College of Law where she first discovered the alleged misuse of her likeness on the Internet.
The defendants in the case are located in the United States, Australia, The Netherlands, Belgium, Cayman Islands, Canada and South Africa.