Storage Wars’ Brandi Passante sues over fake porn video
Brandi Passante and partner Jarrod Schulz are the “Young Guns” on the A&E hit reality show Storage Wars, but despite the show’s huge success, Brandi has managed to keep her personal life very private. So, imagine her surprise when she received a tweet from notorious internet “stalker porn” king Hunter Moore’s “Is Anyone Up” Twitter account that read “Love the pics” with a link to pornographic images and a video purporting to be Brandi Passante! As you would imagine, Brandi was shocked and has since filed a lawsuit against Moore U.S. District Court in Central California.
“Passante looked at the referenced website and was horrified, hurt and ashamed to see images of someone portraying her in pornographic video and associated images,” the suit reads. “Passante never made any such video, has never had any contact with Mr. Moore and did not send him sexual images. Moore fabricated the video for the purpose of trading on Passante’s fame and celebrity to draw traffic to his site.”
The images were originally published on Hunter Moore’s Tumblr account and then the video was posted to Fleshbot.com. As if the fake video wasn’t bad enough, the suit claims that when visitors clicked “play” on the video it began downloading a virus!
The lawsuit goes on to say Brandi Passante has “experienced anxiety, loss of sleep and physical illness” because of the experience. She also claims her professional reputation has been damaged and Moore is capitalizing on her name and likeness by selling merchandise.
From Yahoo:
Alleging false designation of origin, dilution by tarnishment, defamation, commercial disparagement, commercial fraud and other offenses, Passante is seeking all available damages, plus attorney’s fees, and a judgment to impound and destroy and computers, servers or other equipment owned by Moore that contains the pictures and videos.
On Friday, a U.S. District Judge issued a temporary restraining order demanding that the video and pictures be removed from any of Moore’s sites, and barring Moore or anyone associated with him from publishing them.
In a Gawker profile on Moore he was quoted as saying, “I’m not a virgin to cease and desists. — I get about a million a day. I don’t give a f—. I’m never going to stop.”
As of the time of this post it appears that the images are still on Moore’s Tumblr account and there is a still a brief clip on Fleshbot, though it’s not clear if it is the same one that originally caused the stir.
