By Angela Arrabbiato
Special to YNOT
LOS ANGELES – Hello, YNOT readers. My name is Angela. I’m mother of three from the Los Angeles area — and I’m really, really pissed off about porn right now.
To be clear, I’m not pissed off about porn in general, pissed off about how much of it is available on the internet without any sort of restriction on who can access it, or even pissed off about one of my luxury condos recently getting trashed by the AireBed N’ Brkfst user who shot gay porn there, then left tubes of KY and empty condom wrappers lying around all over the place.
No, the porn I’m pissed off about is the porn we discovered when one of my kids fired up the pre-owned PS3 I bought the other day.
Here we are, expecting our son to use his PS3 for good, violent family fun, like Call of Duty: Die Minority Zombies, Die! or Grand Theft Auto: Hesperia, and instead what we get is a bunch of graphic depictions of unspeakable sex acts, many of which were being performed in positions so contorted, you won’t even find them in the 2015 Yoga-enthusiast’s updated version of the Kama Sutra.
Don’t worry. I’m not here to blame any of you for the porn being on there — unless any of you reading this also happen to be the employee officially in charge of wiping the drives of used PS3s sold at the Westfield Culver City Mall location of GamePause.
I’m actually here to ask for advice — advice on how much I should sue for, specifically.
I’ve already decided whom to sue: a list of defendants that includes the former owner of the PS3, the GamePause location where I bought the PS3, GamePause corporate, Sony Entertainment, the State of California, Governor Jerry Brown personally and whomever it is who serves as the robotic female voice in the PlayStation ads (currently named in our lawsuit as “Robo-Jane Doe 1”).
In trying to decide how much to sue for, I’ve been looking at prior cases involving porn, including copyright lawsuits targeting torrent users, copyright cases in which a porn studio has sued a porn tube site, and approximately 3,700 different defamation lawsuit threats published on the GoBoneYourself message board (none of which appears to have resulted in an actual case).
According to my husband, who handled the first detailed review of the porn contents of our used PS3 (after which further, similarly thorough investigations were conducted by our lead attorney, his senior associate, two junior associates and every male paralegal and intern employed by their law firm), there were 13 full-length porn movies with about five scenes each, plus several very amateur photos of a pudgy, naked guy we assume to be the previous owner of the console.
I figure if porn studios can demand from torrent users $150,000 per incident of something pretty innocuous like downloading copyrighted works, I should be able to get about 10 times that much per movie found on the PS3, right? I mean, all the people who illegally download porn are doing is depriving some porn site $20 in subscription fees — or even less if they watched the movie on a paid VOD platform — while the people responsible for porn being on our PS3 have irreversibly traumatized an entire family. My husband, who was especially traumatized, keeps booting up the PS3 over and over again just to confirm the porn is all still there. He’s in utter disbelief over the whole incident.
Anyway, at $1.5 million per movie, this works out to $19.5 million in damages for the videos alone. The pictures, though also hideous, are a bit less disturbing, mostly because the depicted man’s belly overhangs what I’m sure must be a visibly awful little penis. Still, they do continue to litter my mind with unwanted images, so I’ll call them worth $500,000 and round things off to a flat $20 million for the content-related damages. Seems reasonable, right?
Then, of course, there’s all our pain and suffering, the loss of consortium I experienced on the evening of each of my husband’s many subsequent re-investigations of the content on the PS3’s drive, general damages, speculative damages and probably lots of brain damages as well — even though my attorney insists brain damages isn’t a “cognizable legal claim” (whatever that means).
Add all those elements up and I think it’s reasonable to say the total sum I should seek in my lawsuit is in the neighborhood of $700 million, give or take — which could increase to as much as an even $1 billion unless someone can give me a good reason why an old copy of the incredibly lame Mega Man 9 was on this supposedly “wiped-clean” gaming device, as well.
I’m sure some of you porn industry people don’t think a small selection of unsolicited porn videos showing up on a used PS3 is a big deal, but that’s just because you’ve become desensitized to the stuff. If you were a protective, proactive mom like me, you’d appreciate just how serious this whole incident has been for me and my family.
Other critics probably don’t believe I’m really as traumatized as I claim to be and I’m just getting worked up in hopes of scaring the defendants into a big settlement, but I’m here to tell you I’d be just as upset if I thought the lawsuit was only worth a few million bucks.
Anyway, while I’m pretty sure my reasoning is solid and I have a good handle on what I should request in terms of damages, I’m always open to suggestions and new ideas. So, if any of you can think of other damages I should seek or ways to further enhance the ones I’ve already come up with, please let me know.
Just be sure not to email me from any account connected to any porno domain, or I’ll be forced to add you to the list of defendants for harassment — and brain damages, as well, most likely.
Angela Arrabbiato is an irate mother of three in the Los Angeles area.
