Jana was in the business of making women feel sexy. She ran a successful beauty salon in Slovakia, but suddenly, COVID-19 struck. Forced to close her salon’s doors, Jana found herself like so many: locked down, at home, bored. So instead of helping others tap into their sex appeal, she began exploring her own—and created a profile on OnlyFans under the moniker TinkaSlovakia.
An Instagram-like website where people have to pay to see a creator’s photos and videos, OnlyFans exploded in popularity among sex workers during the pandemic, when many had to start working online instead of meeting clients in person. Although there’s a spectrum of content ranging from cooking tutorials to exercise videos, it’s the explicit content that has made the platform widely popular. The site has been celebrated for giving sex workers control over who buys their content, and at what price.
At first, Jana was one of the site’s success stories: The money she made from her fans meant she could close down her salon. She quite liked shooting photos and videos for a growing fan base—until one day, she found photos and videos of her being shared on Telegram.
Jana had never meant for the material to end up anywhere other than on OnlyFans; clearly, someone had stolen her images and shared them without her consent. Suddenly, explicit photos and videos of her were being spread and resold like wildfire alongside abusive material: upskirting videos and photos of sleeping, naked women.
“I almost vomited when I found out,” she said.
Though they seem secure behind a paywall, swiping content creators’ explicit photos and videos from subscription-based platforms such as OnlyFans, Patreon, and Fansly is relatively easy. People can download third-party apps for the task, and if those don’t work, a few basic coding tutorials can teach them how to surpass anti-theft technology. These images and videos then proliferate across the internet, on niche forums, Reddit threads, Discord servers, and Telegram groups with tens of thousands of participants.
Today, a growing legal consensus considers this activity to be sexual abuse. A handful of European countries, such as France and Denmark, have passed legislation against it in some form. And last year, a landmark European Union directive was passed that specifically criminalized image-based sexual abuse, requiring all member states to follow suit in their national laws. Yet advocates warn that these laws are poised to achieve little for the demographic most affected by these “leaks,” as perpetrators call it—explicit content creators. For while the EU is often at the forefront of progress when it comes to tackling sexual abuse, this turns out to mean little when sex workers are the victims.
“An OnlyFans creator is entitled to the same protection as someone whose boyfriend or girlfriend has passed on their nudes to somebody else,” said Miriam Michaelsen, a Danish lawyer and expert in digital violence and harassment whose clients include OnlyFans creators. “But in real life, that’s not what happens.”
Activists and experts say that stigmatizing attitudes among police and a lack of legal clarity in key areas make it extremely difficult for sex workers to seek justice for this form of sexual abuse—to the point where it is often easier for them to get content taken down by seeking a copyright infringement claim.
While this approach can produce results, the catch is that the case is considered closed once the content has been removed. The fact that the sex worker has been subject to sexual abuse is never addressed. The result is a user base that feels emboldened to steal and share sex workers’ images and videos with impunity.
Jana contacted the user who published her content on Telegram and asked him to take it down. Instead, he mocked her request in the group. Another user told him there’s only one way to deal with these kinds of “problem girls”: teach them a lesson by stealing all their content from OnlyFans.
“This is an organized group of sick, disgusting people,” Jana said angrily. “They collect us like Pokémon cards.”
Jana is far from alone in her experience. We spoke to 32 erotic content creators across Europe; some consider themselves sex workers, while others see themselves as content creators or models. Twenty-three of them have had their images and videos stolen and shared without their consent. They told us that the leaks happen daily.
“Pretty much everything I put up gets leaked,” sighed Gitte, an OnlyFans model from Denmark.
Jonathan Smyth, the chief technology officer of Ceartas DMCA – an official safety partner of OnlyFans – estimated that 50 percent to 70 percent of paid OnlyFans content is getting stolen and redistributed without permission. There are more than 4 million creators on the platform.
According to OnlyFans’s accountability reports, the company sends out around 1,000 copyright infringement notices every month on behalf of its creators, and it has an anti-screenshot technology in place. However, content creators on the platform accuse the company, which claims it wants to be “the safest online platform,” of not implementing more effective anti-theft technology or more aggressively pursuing content thieves. While they appreciate the copyright infringement notices and efforts through affiliates like Ceartas, they feel abandoned in their struggle against a form of theft whose impact goes beyond economics.
Danish OnlyFans creator Charlotte told us that leaks left her feeling “violated.”
“It forced me to tell the people closest to me about what I was doing on OnlyFans before I was ready, because I thought that one day, they might come across my content,” she explained.
Czech erotic model Linda said she felt “paralyzed” by the leaks.
“One thing was the level of economic damage I had to endure: I was losing money,” she said. “The other was the loss of trust in my paying followers. I couldn’t shoot or film for six months.”
Image-based sexual abuse is not limited to erotic content creators and sex workers. We found hundreds of groups devoted to sharing nudes from hacked devices, deepfakes, and a shocking amount of illegal content—including child sexual abuse, incest, and rape. But sex workers are one of the most heavily affected demographics.
Across the EU, sexual abuse is robustly criminalized, with multiple sets of anti-sex abuse laws that each of its countries needs to follow. These include the Victims’ Rights Directive, passed in 2012, and a directive combating child sex abuse, passed in 2011.
The directive passed last year, which explicitly criminalized image-based sexual abuse under a set of laws targeting violence against women, was a logical step forward for the regional bloc. According to lawyers such as Jacqueline Sittig from the German Women Lawyers Association, erotic content creators and sex workers whose photos and videos are stolen, distributed, and sold without consent can be victims of image-based sexualized violence.
“Their content is shared across public and semi-private networks—often beyond their control,” Sittig explained. “The power dynamics marked by disregard for the victims’ consent are particularly characteristic. This may violate a variety of rights, such as the right to sexual self-determination, the right to one’s own image and freedom of occupation.”
With this latest directive—which member states must adopt into national law by 2027—the EU is ahead of much of the rest of the world. In the U.S., for example, different states define “intimate image” in different ways, and stolen commercial pornographic content often doesn’t count as image-based sexual abuse.
In contrast, the EU’s 2024 directive defines image-based sexual abuse as any explicit content shared without consent, meaning content created by sex workers should be treated the same as images stolen from anyone else.
But activists and legal experts warn that despite what the laws might say on paper, sex workers seeking redress from the justice system will still face an uphill battle, if history serves as a guide.
For starters, while the directive explicitly declares that content stolen from sex workers consists of sexual abuse, the extent to which this is illegal depends on whether the act has caused “serious harm.” This puts erotic content creators looking to press their case in a tough position, given the long-standing attitude, including among legislators, that sexual violence is somehow less of a problem when it happens to sex workers.
In Denmark, for instance, non-consensual sharing of intimate images or videos is a criminal offense; since 2018, the government has increased the severity of penalties. But if it happens to a sex worker or erotic content creator, judges might decide to acquit.
“An erotic content creator’s images getting leaked won’t be seen as harmful, because he or she had already exposed themselves,” said Ask Hesby Holm, the director of a Danish nongovernmental organization focused on human rights in the digital space. “The creator could try to file a criminal report, but the judge would probably conclude that the only harm done is financial.”
Meanwhile, police in Europe, as elsewhere, are prone to blaming sex workers for the violence they experience, or feel that they deserve it. Sex workers in the EU experience so much police harassment that they view officers as a threat, not as people who will help them.
“I have seen quite a few situations where victims—my clients—have filed a case with the police, and they closed it because the material comes from OnlyFans,” said Michaelsen, the Danish lawyer.
Jana found a false account with her name and profile picture on Facebook, Instagram, the Slovak chat website Pokec, and on dating apps like Badoo and Tinder. She didn’t know who created those profiles or what else that person was doing with her photos, videos, and private information.
“I’ve had enough,” Jana wrote to us one morning. “I’m going to the police today.”
She went to her local station to file a complaint against a man who stole her content. The officers there did “everything they could to avoid having to accept it,” she said. They told her that they wouldn’t find the perpetrator—even though she knew his username on both Telegram and OnlyFans.
She got angry and said that she might as well file a complaint against Telegram’s owner.
“He’s already in prison. What more do you want?” the police officer dismissively replied, referring to Telegram founder Pavel Durov’s arrest in France over allegations of enabling money laundering and drug trafficking on his app.
Sex workers have often found that filing copyright claims can be a more productive way to get content taken down. Even then, many refuse to go to police.
Instead, they opt for a cheaper route to potential justice: paying specialist companies to remove stolen content for them. Estonia-based Rulta charges creators between $109 and $324 a month to scan the internet for stolen content, get search engine results removed, report copyright infringements, and use legal muscle to force websites hosting leaks to take the content down.
But in the long term, relying on copyright law to tackle image-based sexual abuse runs the risk of emboldening perpetrators—effectively, it penalizes abuse with a slap on the wrist.
This creates a cat-and-mouse game, where for each company that tracks and takes down leaks, others exist to systematically distribute and redistribute these images. The most long-standing ones tend to comply with takedown requests as a way to avoid lawsuits—and perhaps resurface stolen material after a short period.
Pursuing a copyright infringement approach makes things worse. In Denmark, for example, if you know that the photos and videos you have are nonconsensual, you are criminally liable for them even if you get rid of them later down the line. But that changes when perpetrators get accused of violating copyright instead of committing image-based sexual abuse. All companies that trade in erotic content have to do is remove the pieces of content in question to avoid criminal charges. They’re free to then keep on perpetrating image-based sexual abuse—ironically, as long as they follow copyright law.
Today, these chronic leaks have left Jana chronically anxious and insecure.
“The other day, my neighbor told me that he masturbated to photos of mine he found on X. At one point, I was afraid to leave the house because of him,” Jana said.
Vania Maia contributed to the reporting in this story.
This investigation was supported by Journalismfund Europe.
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