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A disgraced reality TV star has been forced to fork out $400,000 after sharing non-consensual revenge porn of his ex to OnlyFans.
Stephen Bear, who starred on the British reality TV show Ex-on-the-Beach, was jailed for 21 months in March after sharing a secret sex tape on OnlyFans.
His ex, fellow reality star Georgia Harrison, had consented to the sex but not to it being filmed — and certainly hadn’t consented to the video being shared online.
Now, Bear, 33, has been ordered to pay Ms Harrison £207,000 (A$396,000) after she took him to the UK’s High Court over the leak, which the presiding judge described as a “gross act of violation”.
It is just £900 more than the amount Ms Harrison, 28, was seeking after she successfully sued him for civil damages, and far outstrips the £2,000 Bear made from sharing the sick clip.
He was also slapped with an injunction preventing him from ever using the footage again, placed on the sex offenders register for 10 years and handed a five-year restraining order banning him from contacting Ms Harrison.
Ms Harrison bravely waived her right to anonymity to speak out against her reality star ex, accusing him of “revenge porn” — also known as image-based abuse.
She said the leak was her “worst nightmare” and left her feeling “violated and used”.
Ms Harrison also revealed she felt “completely and utterly exploited, like he had hung me up naked on a wall for millions of people to see and there was nothing I could do about it”.
She said her life “changed forever” and told how she has lost her “sense of self-respect and personal dignity”.
Speaking to The Sun earlier this year, Ms Harrison said she “nearly died” from the stress of Bear’s treatment of her.
“When it first happened, the physical effects on me were just horrific,” she explained.
“I had acne come up all over my face. I ended up getting a cyst infection — the cyst eventually burst — and I was in hospital from stress.
“They said my kidneys, my pelvis, and multiple organs were infected, and I was going into septic shock.”
Bear had been “completely unrepentant” and refused to apologise to Ms Harrison, the court heard.
Judge Victoria McCloud said Bear had “gaslighted” Ms Harrison by trying to convince her she was responsible for sharing the clip.
“Pornography is generally actually something done consensually. It was consensual sex but it certainly wasn’t consensual filming, and it was deeply violating,” the judge said.
Ms Harrison’s lawyer, Gervase de Wilde, called the case “the most serious single infringement of privacy rights that has ever come before this court by way of a damages claim”.
Bear previously claimed to have made a fortune from OnlyFans and various business ventures, even claiming his talents had made him a millionaire.
But after becoming a convicted criminal, the disgraced star’s life came crashing down around him as it was revealed his lifestyle was worlds away from the lavish image he portrayed online.
Bear owns a modest, three-bedroom end-of-terrace house in Essex in England’s east.
None of his eight companies managed to make a profit and even the Rolls Royce he used to show up in court each day was rented.
— with The Sun
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