Two men have been convicted this week in separate criminal cases that revealed they had posted explicit content on OnlyFans without the full consent of the women whose images were uploaded.
In the first case, Alexander Tang, ۳۷, took and uploaded ۴۷ intimate images and four videos of a woman to OnlyFans, without her consent, and was paid money for the material he posted to the website.
In the second case, a court heard how Dean Holmes, ۴۳, had coerced a woman to open an OnlyFans account to make money. He pleaded guilty to assault and controlling and coercive behaviour at the start of the trial on Monday, but denied charges of rape. He was found guilty of rape on Thursday at the end of a four-day trial.
The cases follow warnings from several domestic violence charities that some women have been compelled to create content to upload to the site.
In its ۲۰۲۶ annual report, Women’s Aid said the most common new form of tech-facilitated abuse its frontline teams were assisting with involved “young women being coerced to set up an OnlyFans account to generate income for their abusive partners”. The Revenge Porn Helpline also said it had handled reports from women who had been coerced into creating content for OnlyFans and similar platforms.
During Holmes’s rape trial, Bolton crown court heard that he had isolated his victim from her family and friends and coerced her to open an OnlyFans account. Mark Kellet, prosecuting, said: “She said he put pressure on her to start making money on OnlyFans, a website where people pay for intimate content. She said that he pushed her into that. She would upload pictures of herself and the defendant would use the account to engage in text conversations with the men.”
The court heard that Holmes had set the account up in her name and operated it from his phone. She had initially posted pictures of herself in a bikini, but he told her she needed to upload much more explicit content.
She later told him that she felt ashamed after these images had been circulated on the site. She messaged him to say: “I can’t show my face after putting myself out there showing everything … I can’t go back to work cos people will know and people seen me advertising myself.” Holmes is due to be sentenced on ۲۵ September.
Tang pleaded guilty to one count of voyeurism and was given a ۲۶-week suspended prison sentence on Wednesday. His victim discovered what had happened after being contacted by several men who thought they had been speaking to her on social media and dating apps; she had no idea she was on these sites. She later discovered the profiles had images of her, some naked, taken without her permission or knowledge.
When she realised that the pictures had also been posted on OnlyFans, she contacted Northumbria police. Their investigations confirmed that Tang had been selling these non-consensual images, with the money going straight into his bank account. Tang had managed to take a photograph of the woman’s ID to create an OnlyFans account. The company later removed the images during a routine content moderation check.
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In a statement she read out to the court at Tang’s sentencing hearing, his victim said: “I cannot get the images, the videos, or the degrading captions and comments associated with them out of my mind. Knowing that intimate images and videos of me were uploaded to dozens of websites, reposted and shared by strangers, is something I struggle with every day.”
Alex Pattinson, the investigating officer, said: “I am horrified by Alexander Tang’s crime, which is a clear violation of this woman’s expectation of privacy. No one should ever experience what this woman has gone through – and to then learn Tang was profiting from his deceitful offending must have been devastating.”
An OnlyFans spokesperson said: “OnlyFans has a zero tolerance policy for illegal content and invests heavily in measures to prevent our platform being abused in this way, including strict onboarding processes, payment controls and ongoing account moderation. We work closely with law enforcement and are proud of the work we do to support investigations and help secure convictions.”
Refuge, the UK’s largest domestic abuse charity, said its staff had supported a number of survivors “with cases which involve the weaponisation of OnlyFans by perpetrators”.
Speaking earlier this summer about the charity’s concerns generally (rather than in relation to these two convictions) Emma Pickering, who leads Refuge’s tech-facilitated abuse and economic empowerment team, said: “While OnlyFans already requires creators to submit proof of consent at the point of upload, for survivors to be properly protected from harm it is essential that this is robustly implemented and monitored.”
