LOS ANGELES — All claims made by a Jane Doe plaintiff against several adult studios, in a lawsuit sponsored by religiously motivated anti-porn lobby NCOSE — formerly “Morality in Media” — were dismissed last month, court records show.
On Aug. 19, the Jane Doe plaintiff and defendants Diabolic Video Productions Inc., Black Ice LTD, Zero Tolerance Entertainment Inc. and Third Degree Films filed a joint motion to dismiss all of the claims “with prejudice,” meaning they cannot be refiled.
Typically, these types of joint motions are the result of a deal or settlement having been reached out of court, legal experts told XBIZ.
San Diego judge Michael M. Anello granted the joint dismissal motion in an Aug. 24 order.
As XBIZ reported, in March 2021, in an unusual decision, Anello ruled that, although the contracts signed by a former performer were valid, the arbitration agreements that were part of them should be disregarded and the lawsuit could move forward.
A Lawsuit Much Ballyhooed by NCOSE
According to the complaint Doe filed with the aid of anti-porn lobby NCOSE, she briefly worked in the adult industry around 2009-2010. At the time, she alleges, she was represented by someone named Cissy Steele, aka Cissy Gerald, a person claiming to be an adult modeling agent.
Doe claimed that her relationship with Steele, who is cited a main co-defendant, would fall under the definition of “human trafficking.”
The complaint also named a number of adult studios and sites active a decade ago as co-defendants on the basis that they distributed scenes allegedly featuring the Jane Doe.
The lawsuit was promoted worldwide by NCOSE as a landmark moment in the anti-porn crusade the group has been waging since the early 1960s. In September 2020, NCOSE issued a press statement headlined “NCOSE Law Center Files First Ever Anti-Trafficking Lawsuit Against Pornography Producers on Behalf of Survivor.” The item was picked up by mainstream outlets and also disseminated by NCOSE’s fellow War on Porn advocacy groups.
The suit alleged that the studios “were instrumental in knowingly aiding, abetting, facilitating and participating in Steele’s sex trafficking scheme, while knowing, or in reckless disregard of the fact, that she would use means of force, fraud, and/or coercion to force Jane Doe into engaging in commercial sex acts in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act (‘TVPRA’).”
“Our clients had nothing to do with the alleged sex trafficking that occurred over a decade ago,” the studios’ attorney Jonathan Brown, of Buffalo, New York law firm Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria, told XBIZ at the time of the March 2021 ruling.
