Two top executives at Meta, Facebook’s parent company, and another worker, were allegedly involved in a bribery scandal in an attempt to expand the influence of the porn company OnlyFans.
A recent court filing in a California suit showed that the three people were allegedly taking bribes in an attempt to assist the OnlyFans site in succeeding over others in the business, Gizmodo exclusively reported Wednesday.
The lawsuit claims that Nick Clegg, Meta’s vice president of global policy, and Nicola Mendelsohn, the global business team’s vice president, were the “John Does” in a suit saying they took bribes to help OnlyFans do better than its competitors, according to Gizmodo. The third worker to be named in the Tuesday document is Cristian Perrella. The names were allegedly mistakenly published in the filing by OnlyFan’s owners’ legal team.
Earlier this year, the Meta workers were not named in a lawsuit that claims they tried to get sites that compete with OnlyFans “blacklisted” on the internet. A group of adult entertainers brought the lawsuit and said that Meta workers utilized records that are supposed to be used to inform businesses about risks for another reason — they used the information to downgrade most other adult entertainers, except for those working at OnlyFans.
The filing claims that lawyers for the entities suing OnlyFans and Meta got a confidential tip over email with a document that allegedly revealed wire transfers that OnlyFans’ owner Fenix International Limited sent to Clegg, Perrella, and Mendelsohn. The wires seem to show that the workers took money as a bribe in this scenario.
Fenix pointed to the fact that the tip can’t be corroborated.
“Without the identity of the person who sent the email, it is impossible to assess the believability of the contents of the email,” its motion to dismiss reportedly stated.
“OnlyFans categorically denies all allegations and knows of no evidence which supports them,” an OnlyFans spokesperson told Ars Technica.
Meta has said that the allegations don’t have merit and has moved to dismiss the lawsuit, but also pointed out its Section 230 protection, saying that it can’t take responsibility, even if the lawsuit is successful.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act states that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
“As we make clear in our motion to dismiss, we deny these allegations as they lack facts, merit, or anything that would make them plausible. The allegations are baseless,” a Meta spokesperson said.
OnlyFans has claimed in another document that it “inadvertently” revealed the Meta employees’ identities and requested that the court get rid of the filing.