Sammy remembers nearly every detail of the night in April 2022 when she says two men raped her.
The Miami apartment, stark and empty, where it happened. The loud music as she screamed and told them to stop. The fear and the pain, the overwhelming sense of powerlessness.
Sammy, recalling the night in an interview, also remembers seeing a phone perched on a dresser and thinking: Am I being filmed?
Two months later, on June 30, an edited recording of Sammy’s alleged assault was posted on OnlyFans, a website where people can create porn and charge for it. The video was marketed by one of her alleged assailants as “train” sex, jargon for multiple men having sex with one woman, according to screenshots obtained by Reuters.
One of Sammy’s alleged rapists sold a video of the incident on OnlyFans.“Train” sex is jargon for multiple men having sex with one woman.
“The full train video is here guys,” he said on OnlyFans. “Who wants it?”
OnlyFans is an adults-only website where anyone – celebrities, porn stars, cash-strapped moms and aspiring influencers – can sell sexually explicit videos of themselves. Top earners make millions of dollars a year. Created in 2016, OnlyFans now boasts almost 240 million users and has achieved mainstream fame. Beyoncé namechecked it in a song lyric. Rapper Iggy Azalea said it had brought her a small fortune.
But other people have reaped pain, not profit. They describe lives upended after sexually explicit content featuring them was posted and sold on OnlyFans without their consent. Some videos, like Sammy’s, involve alleged sexual assault. Law enforcement has struggled to monitor such nonconsensual pornography on the website, while victims often have limited legal recourse.
OnlyFans says it is building “the safest social media platform in the world.” But a Reuters investigation identified 128 cases in which women and men complained to U.S. law enforcement agencies that sexual content featuring them ended up on OnlyFans without their permission – and was often sold for profit – between January 2019 and November 2023.
Under public records laws, Reuters sought documents on cases involving OnlyFans from more than 250 of the largest law enforcement agencies in the United States – the platform’s biggest market. Fifty-six of them produced records in which people complained of explicit, nonconsensual posts on OnlyFans. Reuters also interviewed police officers, prosecutors, legal experts and nine people who said their sexual images appeared without their consent.
Most of the 128 police complaints were lodged by women against men who were former sex partners. They often said the content was produced consensually but was posted without their permission – or even their knowledge. In about 40% of the complaints, the videos also appeared on other popular social media sites, usually as snippets to promote lengthier and more explicit material for sale on OnlyFans.
The cases highlight how technology has transformed modern relationships and the porn industry. Today, anyone with a cellphone and an internet connection can make and distribute sexual videos and images. Filming and sharing these is now an accepted part of many intimate encounters – so long as it’s a lovers’ secret. Posting those videos online, however, can feel like a major betrayal. It can also be illegal.
Some women said their unwanted appearance on OnlyFans had nearly destroyed their lives.
“A whole company has made money off of my biggest trauma,” said Sammy, 21, in her first public comments on the case. She requested that her full name be withheld.
In Texas, a woman described being forced to install a home security system after being harassed by stalkers who saw an OnlyFans video of her that went viral. A Nebraska woman said she struggled to go out in public, terrified that people might recognize her from a sex video her ex-boyfriend was selling on OnlyFans for $15. An Illinois woman said she learned that naked images of herself were circulating from her teenage daughter, who saw them online.
In response to a detailed account of Reuters’ findings, an OnlyFans spokesperson said that “in the few examples where bad actors have misused our platform,” OnlyFans “removed the content swiftly, banned the user and actively supported investigations and prosecutions.”
Sammy, a college student from Florida, has filed the first lawsuit under U.S. federal sex-trafficking laws against OnlyFans.
The spokesperson said OnlyFans had reviewed the cases of Sammy and others described in this report and found that those accounts were deleted either by OnlyFans moderators or the creators themselves. Those deletions sometimes occurred a year or longer after women complained to police, a Reuters review of police records and account information from OnlyFans found.
The spokesperson didn’t elaborate on the cases but said OnlyFans tightened its consent verification procedures in late 2022. The company requires “proof of identification and consent from all individuals featured in any explicit content uploaded to our platform, and we moderate all uploaded content,” she said.
She declined to respond to questions about how explicit content of non-consenting adults could have ended up on the site when OnlyFans says it moderates everything.
Combining social media glamor and the business of sex, OnlyFans casts itself as a new breed of adult website. Most big porn sites offer content for free and make money mainly from advertising. At OnlyFans, revenue is generated by its 3.2 million creators, most of them amateurs. They sell content to their subscribers, or “fans,” usually for a monthly fee of between $4.99 and $50. One-off sales of videos and images through the site’s direct-messaging function can be even more lucrative.
The terms are attractive for OnlyFans creators: They keep 80% of their fans’ payments. For OnlyFans, which takes the rest, it’s a goldmine. According to the most recent filing by its British parent company, Fenix International, OnlyFans’ pre-tax profit in 2022 reached $525 million – almost a hundred-fold increase in just three years. Revenue expanded at least twenty-fold to more than $1 billion.
OnlyFans doesn’t know how many of its creators are making “adult content,” the spokesperson has said. The platform says it also features sports, music and other non-explicit material.
Beyond the United States, OnlyFans has also seen explosive growth – along with allegations of abuse against celebrities and other content creators.
In Australia, a Queensland man faces trial after being accused of filming himself raping his unconscious girlfriend in 2021 and uploading the video to OnlyFans, according to court records. The man hasn’t entered a plea, a court official said. In Thailand, a married couple was arrested in October on suspicion of drugging and raping four women and a 17-year-old girl, then selling videos of the acts on OnlyFans, Thai police said. The couple hasn’t entered a plea but denied the rape charges, police said.
In Romania, former kickboxer Andrew Tate is awaiting trial on rape and sex-trafficking charges connected to running an operation that allegedly forced women to create porn for OnlyFans, said Romanian prosecutors. Tate denies the charges.
In Britain, Stephen Bear, a former reality show contestant, was sentenced in March 2022 to 21 months in jail after posting a sex video of his ex-girlfriend on OnlyFans without her permission. Bear, who denied all charges, was released in January after serving half his sentence. He didn’t respond to a request for comment. Reuters documented another 17 cases in Britain in which people had complained to UK authorities of nonconsensual porn appearing on OnlyFans, according to public records obtained from the country’s police forces.
Despite the attention generated by high-profile cases, law enforcement officials say the sheer size of OnlyFans and the paywalls surrounding its individual creators have made it nearly impossible to monitor systematically. OnlyFans is largely a black box to outsiders, much less accessible than social media sites like Instagram, X and Facebook.
The paywall “absolutely, unequivocally adds a barrier,” said Joseph Scaramucci, a deputy sheriff in Texas who formerly worked on a U.S. Department of Homeland Security anti-human trafficking task force. Some law enforcement agencies won’t subscribe to OnlyFans accounts due to budgetary constraints, he said.
There are other reasons perpetrators of nonconsensual porn aren’t held to account, Reuters found. Some people were reluctant to press charges against former lovers. Police often lack expertise in gathering technical evidence of cyber-crimes or view the cases as low-priority misdemeanors. Women can be hesitant to share explicit images with male police and prosecutors.
No federal law specifically criminalizes nonconsensual porn. It has been prosecuted under federal anti-trafficking statutes in at least three cases – none of which involved OnlyFans. Complaints typically are handled by local authorities enforcing a patchwork of state laws, and they usually focus on individuals who post abusive content, not on the sites that host it.
OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair has said that “100 percent” of content is reviewed by human moderators aided by artificial intelligence. But the cases documented by Reuters, including the video of Sammy’s alleged rape, point to significant gaps in this system.
“The victim is clearly saying no” in the video, said Todd Falzone, a lawyer for Sammy. “So if they were really moderating that video, they would have seen and heard that.”
Her alleged assailants, Michelson Romelus and Bendjy Charles, face charges of sexual battery and distributing obscene material. They have pleaded not guilty.
Separately, in federal court in Florida, Sammy is suing the two men – and OnlyFans. Her lawsuit is the first to take on the platform itself under a federal sex-trafficking law that prohibits companies from financially benefiting from commercial sex abuses, according to a Reuters review of court filings and interviews with legal experts.
Sammy’s sex-trafficking claim is part of a growing number of lawsuits by people who accuse social media sites of profiting from abusive sexual content. The suits could signal a reckoning for OnlyFans and others in the industry, said five lawyers who specialize in porn and sex-trafficking cases.
“The legal landscape has shifted,” said Julie Dahlstrom, a human trafficking expert at Boston University School of Law. “You’ve seen judges interpreting trafficking laws more expansively,” and “lawyers and survivors understanding that they can bring those cases.”
NO FACE, NO CASE
For some people, the shock of seeing their naked images on OnlyFans was followed by a futile fight for justice.
Amanda Dicrosta’s battle began in Florida in February 2022, when she walked into the Tampa Police Department to file a sexual cyber-harassment complaint against her ex-boyfriend, Mike McFarland, a former player for the National Football League’s Indianapolis Colts. “I was just hoping that they would take me seriously,” she said.
The two had dated for about a year and then split up. McFarland afterward posted videos of them having sex on his OnlyFans and Twitter accounts without her permission, she told police.
Dicrosta, 28, told police that McFarland recorded some of the sex videos without her knowledge or consent. She knew other videos existed but said the couple had an understanding that those were private.
When Dicrosta first learned in June 2020 that McFarland, 32, had posted the videos on OnlyFans, she confronted him, and he initially took down the videos, she wrote in a sworn police statement. But in August 2021, when she revisited McFarland’s OnlyFans account, she discovered not just those videos but also new ones recorded without her knowledge, she told police.
When she saw videos of her advertised on OnlyFans for $5 each, she felt sick. McFarland had “exposed my entire body for $5,” Dicrosta told Reuters. “I can’t even buy a full meal at McDonald’s for $5.”
Dicrosta said she contacted McFarland again. This time, he refused to take down the videos, she told police.
On Twitter, McFarland posted snippets of the videos with links to his OnlyFans account, according to screenshots Dicrosta provided to Reuters and police. Another ex-boyfriend recognized her body in the videos and shared them with friends, some of whom assumed she was now in the business of “doing porn,” she said.
McFarland told police that Dicrosta knew the recordings would be posted on OnlyFans and Twitter. “It was with her consent,” he told Reuters. “I have nothing to lie about.”
X, as Twitter has been renamed, declined to comment on Dicrosta’s case but said it works to limit sensitive adult content from being shared.
After consulting with the state attorney’s office, police told Dicrosta the case couldn’t be prosecuted. The videos showed her private parts, underwear and a bathing suit – but not her face. For the case to proceed in court, the police report said, the videos had to include information that more specifically identified her.
Police closed Discrosta’s case in July 2022 and told her they’d reopen it if she located any such videos.
“I felt hopeless,” she said. “Do I just need to strip naked and show you my naked body for you to believe me? What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to prove to you that this is me?”
To violate Florida law, explicit images shared nonconsensually must contain “personal identification information,” such as unique physical attributes.
Mary Anne Franks, a professor at the George Washington University Law School in Washington D.C., studies the issue of nonconsensual porn and is familiar with Florida’s law. After reviewing Dicrosta’s case at Reuters’ request, she said the case could have been prosecuted because there was enough context of Dicrosta in the video to allow someone – in this case, a former boyfriend – to recognize her.
The case speaks to a broader problem, Franks said: Not all police departments are familiar with the nuances of laws on nonconsensual porn, especially as some laws are relatively new.
A Tampa police spokesperson said that detectives “dedicated over five months to the investigation,” but the evidence did “not meet the criteria to establish a criminal violation.”
Dicrosta felt angry and let down. She thought about the “personal identification information” demanded by Florida law and came up with another way to protect herself in case a sexual partner secretly filmed her in the future.
She walked into a tattoo parlor and had the words “not yours” etched on her backside.
BARRIERS TO PROSECUTION
Dicrosta’s experience illustrates the long odds of holding people who post nonconsensual porn to account.
Of the 128 U.S. cases Reuters documented, only 28 ended in an arrest and eight resulted in any sort of criminal conviction. Three people went to jail – two for 48 hours each.
Police closed 90 of the cases, including nine for lack of evidence, 12 because investigative leads were exhausted, and 10 because the accusers decided not to pursue charges. The other 38 remained open, including 15 cases marked as “inactive.”
Police documented some cases for “informational purposes only” when the accusers didn’t want to pursue charges but wanted a record of the incident.
Forty-eight states, Washington D.C., Guam and Puerto Rico have criminalized nonconsensual porn in the past two decades. But many laws have loopholes or are weakly enforced, according to lawyers, academics and victim advocates. Repeated efforts by the U.S. Congress to pass federal laws that criminalize nonconsensual porn have failed, largely due to objections by free-speech advocates.
Thirty-eight states classify the sharing of nonconsensual porn as misdemeanors, a low-priority crime for some police departments. Some investigators blame the victims for allowing themselves to be filmed, said Franks, the law professor.
“There’s not much sympathy for victims to begin with,” she said.
Many of the state laws now used to fight nonconsensual porn are designed to combat “revenge porn,” in which someone posts explicit images to retaliate against a former partner. But in the OnlyFans cases documented by Reuters, the motive often isn’t just retribution. It’s money.
That’s a barrier to prosecutions in some jurisdictions.
In Florida’s Okaloosa County, a man contacted the sheriff’s office in September 2022 after discovering his ex-girlfriend posted a sex video of them on OnlyFans without his permission. Under Florida law, however, the video must be published with intent to cause “substantial emotional distress.”
“Although the victim expressed emotional distress, the intent of the suspect was financial gain, and therefore the elements of this crime have not been met,” the investigating detective said in the case report, which redacted the man’s name.
Police dropped the case.
‘IT NEVER ENDS’
Many OnlyFans creators rely on other social media to promote their content to potential subscribers. Some videos on OnlyFans are published or leaked on other porn sites. And some are disseminated so widely that victims are powerless to stop them.
Adreiona Prater said she was caught in a viral nightmare.
Prater was 18 when a sex video of her appeared on OnlyFans and other websites. She was attending junior college, studying criminal justice, in Tyler, Texas, in July 2019, when she met and briefly dated Anthony Reshon Scott, then 20.
Prater said she reluctantly allowed Scott to record them having sex but afterward asked him to delete the video. Scott assured her he did, she told police.
In February 2020, Prater discovered the video on Pornhub, another big porn site, and contacted Tyler police. She said she dropped the case after Scott promised to take the video down, but later discovered it on OnlyFans. She watched helplessly as it took off on social media.
On Oct. 6, 2020, a clip appeared on Scott’s Twitter account, revealing her face and naked body, police records show. The caption read, “Check out my onlyfans with over 200+ girls,” and provided a link to Scott’s OnlyFans page. An eight-minute version was also posted to Reddit by an anonymous user, watermarked with the address of Scott’s OnlyFans account.
In comments under the Reddit post, someone identified Prater by posting her social media information, according to screenshots she shared with police. On Instagram, one person asked her: “That was you in that onlyfans vid?”
After being harassed by online stalkers, Prater said she installed a home security system, changed her phone number and called police again, this time in Arlington, Texas, where she’d recently moved.
“I just felt so scared,” she said.
An Arlington police detective investigating Prater’s report ran into a problem: the OnlyFans paywall. It required a $5 monthly subscription fee. “So I was unable to view the contents,” Detective Jacklyn Donalson wrote in a case report.
Donalson told Reuters she knew from experience that it would be tough to convince her superiors to pay for a porn subscription, especially when there was no guarantee it would provide usable evidence.
“Like all government agencies, our resources are finite,” said Tim Ciesco, spokesperson for the Arlington Police Department. “We have to be strategic about the way we disperse them.”
The case might have stalled there. Without a subscription, there’s almost no public information on OnlyFans accounts available to investigators. Some seek subpoenas to force OnlyFans to disclose account information, but that involves persuading a court that it’s relevant to an investigation.
In Prater’s case, however, Donalson said she ultimately was able to document enough evidence of a crime without Scott’s OnlyFans information because the video appeared on other platforms, including Twitter.
Spokespeople for Reddit and X didn’t comment on Prater’s case but said their platforms strictly prohibit nonconsensual porn. Pornhub operator Aylo said it “expeditiously” removed the video when it learned about it.
In August 2021, a Tarrant County grand jury indicted Scott for violating Texas’ “revenge porn” law, a felony. The jury cited his Twitter post that advertised his OnlyFans page.
In a conversation that Prater recorded and submitted to police, Scott told her he would pay her to drop the charges, according to the recording, which Reuters reviewed. This time, Prater refused.
Scott pleaded guilty in June 2022 to publishing intimate visual material without Prater’s consent, and received three years of community supervision, akin to probation. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Scott said in an interview. “I want to leave it at that.”
As police investigated her case, Prater wrote to OnlyFans on Feb. 23, 2021, to complain about the video and give them the name of Scott’s OnlyFans account. The company replied the next day, saying the video would be removed if confirmed to be nonconsensual, according to a screenshot of the message that Prater shared with Reuters.
“We take all reports of this nature extremely seriously,” a help desk representative wrote to her.
Prater said she never heard from OnlyFans again.
According to OnlyFans, the complaint contained “no actionable information.” The company did not elaborate but told Reuters its moderators deactivated the account in April 2022 – more than a year after Prater’s takedown request.
Versions of the sex video remain online, the OnlyFans watermark still visible.
“I still get harassed about it to this day,” Prater said. “It never ends.”
’MY HEART DROPPED. IT WAS ME’
The surge of pornography unleashed by OnlyFans and other websites in the smartphone era is reminiscent of the “Golden Age of Porn,” a period in the 1970s and 1980s when another technological advance – home video players – brought porn to a much wider audience.
As the porn market expands, turbo-charged by social media, so does the challenge of verifying consent.
OnlyFans’ terms of service say creators must have documents to prove the age, identity and consent of other people who appear in their content, unless OnlyFans has already vetted those people as creators too. But multiple creators said in interviews that they have uploaded porn featuring others without providing that proof.
The OnlyFans spokesperson said the company strengthened procedures in late 2022 to require proof of consent before creators could post content on the platform. Yet Reuters found more than a dozen cases filed with U.S. law enforcement agencies in 2023 in which people alleged that explicit videos or images were posted without their consent.
In addition, of the nine people Reuters interviewed who said they were victims of nonconsensual porn, all said they were never asked for documents.
“Even if you have content moderation rules that are fairly clear against nonconsensual intimate images, those rules are abused regularly,” said Danielle Citron, a University of Virginia School of Law professor who has studied online abuse on porn platforms.
While CEO Keily Blair pledges that OnlyFans monitors 100% of content, the terms of service say the company has no obligation to do so: “We are not responsible for reviewing or moderating Content.”
The company spokesperson didn’t address the apparent inconsistency but said: “We know the legal identity of all our creators and work closely with law enforcement around the world. This approach means OnlyFans is an extremely hostile environment for anyone” seeking to share nonconsensual sexual content, she said.
Some women said they were only able to confirm suspicions or rumors of their appearance on OnlyFans by buying access to images or videos of themselves.
Jennifer Aviles told police she initially heard about the explicit videos of herself from her 15-year-old daughter. The teen discovered Twitter posts by Aviles’ ex-boyfriend, William Lewis, that advertised his OnlyFans account with images of her face and body.
“I got my only fans set up if y’all want to see some really GOOD STUFF,” Lewis tweeted on Oct. 18, 2020.
“I looked at it and my heart dropped. It was me,” Aviles, 40, of Woodstock, Illinois, recalled in an interview.
Aviles knew that explicit images and videos had been taken during their eight-year relationship. “I enjoyed being recorded, then watching afterwards,” she said. “I think it’s why most people consent to do intimate videos.”
But she told police that she had asked Lewis to delete the images after they broke up. “Being vulnerable like that involves a lot of trust. Little did I know years later it would haunt me.”
Wanting to know exactly what Lewis had posted of her on his OnlyFans page, she paid for a $50 monthly subscription to his account, she said. She discovered photos and videos of her naked body and of her engaged in sexual acts with Lewis.
Aviles called the Woodstock Police Department.
On Aug. 29, 2021, a detective brought Lewis, 41, to the police station for questioning. During the videotaped interview, which Reuters reviewed, Lewis initially denied posting explicit material of Aviles on OnlyFans or Twitter. Then he said he couldn’t remember. Then he broke down in tears. “I’m hoping this doesn’t ruin the rest of my life,” he said.
In May 2022, Lewis pleaded guilty to one count of nonconsensual dissemination of a sexual image – a felony. He received 24 months of probation.
“I am remorseful,” Lewis told Reuters. “I do feel bad about putting it out there into the universe.”
OnlyFans confirmed it responded to a police inquiry about Aviles’ case in March 2021 and that the account had been deleted the previous November. X didn’t comment on the case but says it bans non-consensual nudity on the platform.
Far from giving consent, 11 women and five men involved in the cases reviewed by Reuters told police they had no idea that images featured on OnlyFans even existed until after they had been posted. Each said the videos had been recorded without their knowledge.
Taysha Blase, 29, was among them.
The Nebraska woman said she had subscribed to her ex-boyfriend’s OnlyFans account out of curiosity. What she found distressed her. Her ex, Vincent Tran, 31, sent out a notification in July 2021 offering his OnlyFans subscribers a 47-second sex video of a “PAWG,” or Phat Ass White Girl, for $15.
The video showed a distinctive tattoo. Blase said it was hers.
The next morning, Blase contacted the Omaha Police Department. She told Reuters she also submitted an online complaint to OnlyFans about Tran’s account but never received a response. According to OnlyFans, “no actionable information” was provided to the platform at that time.
About a month later, Blase said, she heard from the police that her case would be forwarded to the domestic violence unit. By that time, Tran had taken down the video, but Blase still wanted him charged, fearing the post could resurface, she said.
For months, Blase said, she felt distraught and uncomfortable in public, wondering who might have seen her on OnlyFans. “For all I know,” she said, “that person may now know what the most intimate parts of my body look like, and there’s nothing that I can do about it.”
On Dec. 12, 2023 – more than two years after Blase reported the incident to police, and nearly four months after Reuters first inquired about the case – an arrest warrant was issued for Tran. It alleged he recorded and distributed an intimate video of Blase without her consent – felonies in Nebraska.
Tran remains at large. Reuters reached him by telephone, however, and asked about the case.
“That’s something I don’t want to talk about,” he said.
‘WHEN I HAVE SEX…I ALWAYS FILM IT’
One alleged victim of nonconsensual porn is setting her sights on OnlyFans itself: Sammy, the college student.
Her lawsuit, filed in November 2022 in federal court in southern Florida, isn’t just about her alleged rape, but also about who profited from it.
It’s the first of its kind against OnlyFans and tests whether the website is liable under federal statutes designed to protect people from companies that “knowingly” benefit from sex trafficking – defined as commercial sex produced under “force, fraud, or coercion.”
“Those types of claims require that there be a financial benefit to the platform,” said Carrie Goldberg, a New York lawyer specializing in nonconsensual porn cases. “There’s really no easier platform to prove that for than OnlyFans,” she said, because the website takes a 20% cut of every transaction.
Sammy’s lawsuit cites violations of the same sex-trafficking laws used in a high-profile case against Pornhub. In 2021, its parent company, MindGeek, settled a sex-trafficking lawsuit brought by 50 women who accused the site of hosting nonconsensual porn and sought $100 million in damages.
The parent company – now called Aylo Holdings – said it has comprehensive safety measures to eradicate illegal material.
Sammy’s case, if successful, could bring similar attention to OnlyFans and its effectiveness in policing millions of creators, four legal experts told Reuters. It could also spur more lawsuits, they said.
OnlyFans did not comment on the experts’ assessments.
In a court filing, OnlyFans’ U.S. subsidiary, Fenix Internet, said it will seek to have Sammy’s sex-trafficking case dismissed, citing free-speech protections that shield social media platforms and other websites from liability for content posted by users. If the two men did post the video, they would have violated OnlyFans’ terms of service, the company said.
Sammy’s lawsuit against OnlyFans is on hold pending the outcome of the criminal case against the men, Romelus and Charles.
Reuters couldn’t access the video of Sammy’s alleged rape posted on OnlyFans, which her attorney said lasted about 10 minutes. Instead, reporters viewed screenshots and listened to parts of the recording played by Miami-Dade detectives while questioning Romelus and Charles. They also pieced together Sammy’s story from other law enforcement records and interviews with her.
It was spring break in 2022, when Sammy, a music production student and aspiring singer, met Charles, 24, on a dating app. He invited her to a party at his apartment, she told police and Reuters.
She was excited when Charles picked her up that night with Romelus, 27, in the passenger seat. But when the three arrived at the apartment, no one else was there. After some drinks and dancing, the men grew sexually aggressive, she said.
Their behavior culminated in an attack in the bedroom, where Sammy said she was stripped, slapped, raped and sodomized – all while a phone recorded her from atop a dresser.
“I was disoriented, shocked, scared,” she told Reuters. “I was just overwhelmed with how powerless I felt.”
She gathered her clothes and tried to take refuge in the living room, she said, but was again raped there. She said Romelus stood over her, holding his phone close to his head. At the time, Sammy thought he was on FaceTime, talking to someone, and shielded her face with her hands.
In fact, police said, Romelus was recording.
Afterward, the men took her to the workplace of her friend, Chris Philbert. As he drove her home, she broke down, punching the dashboard and swearing, Sammy and Philbert said in interviews. She opened the car door and tried to hurl herself onto the highway, because it felt “like the moment I’m supposed to die,” Sammy said. Her friend pulled her back in. “It was bad,” Philbert said. “It was just a terrible situation.”
Later, she checked herself into a hospital, where she called police.
Meanwhile, Philbert, after learning from Sammy that she might have been filmed, found Romelus’ OnlyFans page. Using OnlyFans’ messaging function, he said he was interested in buying a video of three people having sex, according to screenshots of his chats with Romelus provided to Reuters by the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s office.
On June 30, Romelus sold Philbert the video for $20, the screenshots showed. “More good videos coming my boy,” he told Philbert.
Philbert shared the video with investigators, and on July 26, 2022, Miami-Dade police arrested Romelus and Charles. They both denied they had raped Sammy. “Nobody forced her,” Romelus said in a video-recorded interview with two detectives, which Reuters reviewed.
The detectives played the OnlyFans video for Romelus on a phone. “In the video she says, ‘No, stop.’ Did you hear her?” Detective Nicole Wells said to Romelus. “She’s pushing you off.”
Romelus said he thought she was protesting because he was penetrating her too deeply. She knew she was being recorded and consented, he added. “When I have sex with somebody I always film it.”
When the detectives played the video for Charles, he said he couldn’t hear Sammy saying no and didn’t know the video had been posted on OnlyFans.
It’s unclear how long OnlyFans hosted the video or how many customers viewed it. Eleven days after it was posted, a lawyer for Sammy emailed police and said she was seeking to have it removed from the site “ASAP,” according to Miami-Dade Police Department records. The video has since been removed.
According to OnlyFans, it deactivated the account on July 29, 2022 – three days after Romelus’ arrest. OnlyFans didn’t comment further on the case.
The OnlyFans video remains key evidence against the defendants, who are out on bond and due to stand trial later this year. Charles declined to comment, as did the public defender’s office representing Romelus.
The detectives questioned Romelus for an hour on the day of his arrest, then left him alone in the interview room.
A camera in the room continued to record.
He sank his head into his hands and spoke quietly to himself. The man who had filmed Sammy seemed unaware he was now being filmed himself.
“I should have never posted that video,” Romelus said. “I’m so stupid.”
(Reuters)