Attorney Matthew R. Arnold answering the question: “What can you sue for in a personal injury case?”
A young woman from Pennsylvania has broken ground by filing a class action suit against more than a dozen men who were found to have viewed explicit images of her as a young girl. The victim of child pornography, Masha Allen, is now using a law that carries her name to try and collect at least $150,000 from each of 14 different men so far.
Masha’s story is an especially tragic one and begins when she was a five-year-old Russian orphan. Masha was adopted by a divorced Pittsburgh millionaire named Matthew Mancuso. Mancuso claimed at the time that he was adopting her to try and make up for the distance he felt between himself and his teenage daughter, when he was actually seeking to adopt a young girl for sexual purposes. Police say Mancuso, a successful engineer in his 40s, repeatedly raped and sexually abused Masha on camera, sometimes during trips to Disney World. More than 200 sexually explicit images of her were posted online and the FBI says they have since been viewed millions of times.
Thankfully the FBI located Masha back in 2003, at age 10. She’s now 20 and testified before Congress about how law enforcement failed her by never checking up on her wellbeing. In response, Congress passed a law that allowed for lawsuits against the sometimes-wealthy individuals who view child pornography. The law notes that victims are injured every time their images are illegally accessed, thus allowing even viewers and not just the actual perpetrators to be held liable.