California 'revenge porn' trial gets under way in San Diego

By Marty Graham SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - The trial of a California man accused of running a so-called "revenge porn" website, featuring nude pictures of women often posted by jilted ex-lovers, began in San Diego on Friday in a test of state efforts to clamp down on such sites. Kevin Boellart, 28, was arrested in 2013 shortly after Governor Jerry Brown signed a first-in-the-nation law to target "revenge porn," defined as the posting of private, explicit photos of others on the Internet to humiliate them. Boellart, who has pleaded not guilty, is charged with 31 felonies, including one count of conspiracy, 24 counts of identity theft and six counts of extortion. But he was not charged specifically under the new revenge porn law, which is geared toward penalizing those who post incriminating pictures and not those who operate websites that feature them. Prosecutors have said Boellart's site, which is no longer operational, had featured over 10,000 sexually explicit photos, and that he charged women up to $350 each to remove them. In opening arguments, Deputy Attorney General Tawnya Austin said the site amounted to "21st Century Blackmail." "The purpose of that website is to blackmail women whose private and intimate photos had been published without their permission," Austin said. "Some of the photos came from scorned lovers, some came from hacked emails, some came from stolen cell phones, and some came from victims who didn't know they'd been photographed," she added. The victims ranged from a woman who sent photos to her husband in the Middle East via email and learned during a job search that they had been linked to the networking website LinkedIn, to a 17-year-old girl whose mother tried frantically to get images of her daughter removed. Many whose images ended up on the YouGotPosted.com site eventually paid another website linked to the revenge porn site to have the pictures removed, not realizing it was operated by the same people, Austin said. Defense lawyer Emily Rose-Weber told the jury the facts would not be in dispute, but questioned whether her client had broken the law. "Is it illegal to run a website where bad things happen and you charge a fee to take (photos) down? Is it illegal to hold up a big blank canvas and let people write on it?" Rose-Weber asked. "What is going to be in dispute at the end ... is whether what is distasteful and immoral is illegal." (Editing by Cynthia Johnston and Eric Walsh)