A woman was awarded a hefty sum after a Dallas County jury ruled in her favor in a revenge porn suit filed against her blackmailer.
Last week jurors opted unanimously to award Sadaf Khan of Southlake with $450,000 after a rebuffed suitor, Syed Bilal of Richardson, broke into her phone and attempted to coerce her into marriage by threatening to release explicit photos of her that he found there.
“Because Ms. Khan comes from a traditional Pakistani community, which takes a very dim view on extramarital relationships, the threat was very serious,” the lawsuit she filed against Bilal read, according to The Dallas Morning News.
Khan had first met Bilal through her job at an insurance agency, where he was a customer. He began to aggressively pursue a romantic relationship with her in 2020, appearing at her office and home. When this escalated into blackmail using her private images, Khan continued to refuse him.
“I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t pay attention to my children. I had circles under my eyes,” she said. “I didn’t know what was going to happen next.”
Bilal ultimately sent the sexually explicit material from Khan’s phone to her mother in California.
“It was clear that he acted with malice in sending these to my client’s mother because he could not handle rejection,” said attorney Jonathan Wharton, who represented Khan.
The lawsuit filing suggested that the defendant caused further difficulty in Khan’s personal relationships by telling family and friends that they had been married and that she had cheated on him. In fact, as Bilal testified in a hearing before a Tarrant County judge when Khan sought a restraining order against him in late 2021, he already had two wives at the time — one legal and the other “religious.”
Khan told the DMN that she hopes the jury’s ruling in her favor will encourage others facing similar privacy invasions and threats “to speak up and fight back.”
Since 2015, Texas law forbids the distribution of intimate visual material without the depicted individual’s consent. It has opened up a legal course of action for victims of revenge porn, such as Khan. The decision to award her $150,000 for mental anguish and $300,000 for punitive damages is one of the highest sums received by revenge porn plaintiffs so far in the state.
Yet some malefactors need not hack potential victims’ phones to be able to wield sexually explicit material against them. As previously covered in The Dallas Express, advances in artificial technology have resulted in a surge of deepfake nudes and more being generated using real-life children and adults. Campaigners have been calling on lawmakers to create more legal safeguards for those whose likenesses are being used without consent and shared on social media.
In Dallas, police have fielded considerably more reports of blackmailing and extortion compared to the year prior. As of December 17, 44 such incidents had been logged, representing a year-over-year rise of 266.7%, according to the City’s crime analytics dashboard.
The Dallas Police Department has been laboring under a staffing shortage for several years, with only roughly 3,200 officers currently in its ranks. A prior report from the City recommended a force of closer to 4,000 officers to promote public safety.
