[Update, Friday, 4:40 p.m (PST): Updated with comment by OnlyFans spokesperson.]
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — The law firm that recently filed two conspiracy lawsuits against OnlyFans, its owner and Instagram parent company Meta filed on Wednesday a third class action lawsuit, this one on behalf of JustFor.fans and a class comprising all other adult platforms.
Attorney David Azar of Beverly Hills firm Milberg Coleman Bryson Grossman filed the lawsuit at the main Silicon Valley venue, the San Mateo County Superior Court in California.
As XBIZ reported, earlier this week Azar filed another class action suit on behalf of APAG board members Alana Evans, Kelly Pierce and Ruby, the first three of a class involving all adult performers and content creators.
Azar is also one of the lawyers representing FanCentro in its related action against OnlyFans filed in November.
All three lawsuits make similar allegations, calling OnlyFans ”a corrupt business” which gained “an enormous advantage over its competitors by wrongfully manipulating behind-the-scenes databases and in the process harming small, sole-proprietor-owned businesses who rely on social media to earn a living.”
Like the FanCentro lawsuit and the APAG board members' lawsuit, the JFF complaint claims that “up until the fourth quarter of 2018, the online adult entertainment industry was a vibrant, competitive market of [adult entertainment] platforms — large and small — including Plaintiff’s business JFF,” but after “the controlling interest in [OnlyFans billing company] Fenix changed ownership with [Leonid] Radvinsky acquiring 100% of the company, [models] that had [only] ever worked with competitors of OnlyFans suddenly began to experience a drop-off in traffic and user engagement on social media platforms (with the effects first appearing for some [models], and then seeming to expand to others over several months, consistent with more [models] being targeted).”
JFF's lawyers defined the class allegedly affected by the conspiracy as “all Adult Entertainment Platforms that suffered economic injury (i) because they were falsely designated as a Dangerous Individual or Organization ('DIO') under any past or present version of Meta’s DIO policy, or that of Facebook or Instagram or any of their predecessor or subsidiary entities or technologies; or (ii) because of any scheme, plan or contrivance through the misuse of automated systems, unrelated to the selection, editing, or removal by Facebook, Instagram or Meta of particular user-created content, in order to give preferential treatment or otherwise benefit OnlyFans over other competitors of OnlyFans, or (iii) because of any scheme, plan or contrivance through the misuse of automated systems, unrelated to the selection, editing or removal by Facebook, Instagram or Meta of particular user-created content, in order to cause any competitor of OnlyFans, or content providers to OnlyFans’ competitors, to experience negative treatment on their platforms not experienced by OnlyFans.”
An authorized spokesperson for OnlyFans told XBIZ, "We are not aware of any evidence which supports the allegations in these complaints. OnlyFans, Facebook, Meta and the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism have publicly stated that these allegations have no merit."
