Former Pittsburgh Anchor Wins Revenge Porn Case
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Back in November of 2017, FTVLive told you that former WPXI Anchor Darieth Chisolm said she was a victim of “revenge porn” by a former boyfriend.
Well, now Chisolm has gotten her revenge.
Chisolm won a protracted two-year legal battle Monday in a revenge porn case against her ex-boyfriend, 53-year-old Donovan Anthony Powell of Kingston, Jamaica. Powell pleaded guilty in St. Andrew and Kingston Parish Court to three counts of malicious communications, admitting to creating a website with explicit photos and videos of Chisolm, and using the content to harass her.
Chisolm said in an interview Tuesday that she first met Powell in the 1980s, when she was 19. In the summer of 2015, the two rekindled their relationship, and by the end of the year she had moved to Jamaica to live with him.
In November 2016, Chisolm ended the relationship, packing up her things and returning to the U.S. after she found Powell to be “controlling and jealous.”
A few months later, she alleges, he called her and threatened her life if she didn’t return to the relationship.
“I continued to reject him and not answer his calls and try to not take the threat seriously.”
On Jan. 12, 2017, Powell began sending Chisolm WhatsApp messages containing nude photos and videos of Chisolm asleep that he took in Jamaica, she said. Over the course of the next several months, he sent her messages threatening to distribute the material and destroy the credibility she had built over her 20-year career as a WPXI anchor.
The Pittsburgh Post Gazette writes that on March 9, 2017, Chisholm said, Powell launched a website that displayed the photos and videos alongside derogatory comments and called her friends and business associates to direct them to the site.
“This was very humiliating and embarrassing and potentially damaging, and I didn't even know what to do about it,” she said. “I didn't know what to call it, I didn't know where to go, how to even begin the steps of getting the content removed from the internet and getting him to stop.”
On Monday, Powell pleaded guilty to three counts of malicious communications under Jamaica’s Cybercrimes Act, a 4-year-old law designed to facilitate the prosecution of computer-based offenses on the island. According to Chisolm, hers is one of only a handful of prosecutions the relatively new law has garnered so far, and is the first case in which an American has successfully brought charges against a perpetrator.
