BOTHELL, Wash. — A Snohomish County woman is suing a company that she said has been using her name and photo to create a fake Facebook persona for close to a year.
Laura Hunter is the winner of the 2016 Ms. World pageant. She’s an actress and owns her own photography business.
But online, nearly 1 million Facebook users are fans of a different Laura Hunter, whose Facebook page for many months used the real person’s photo. On that page, the fake Laura Hunter posts conservative articles that link to the website conservativedailypost.com.
“I guess I want to know why,” Hunter told KIRO 7. She said she hopes the lawsuit will help clear her name and set a precedent for not allowing people’s identities to be used this way.
Hunter described her fake alter-ego, as described by the page: “She lives in Tennessee, she's single, she loves dogs, and she's an avid blogger.”
She said she has never been to Tennessee.
The lawsuit filed in Clark County, Nevada, names Gravitas Advertising Corp. and SCMA Holding Inc. as defendants, along with individuals Michael Powell, Stanly Shilov, Chris Khachaturian and Meng Yang.
KIRO 7 has emailed Gravitas asking for a comment. The website for the company states among its values that it is “not PC: authenticity over politeness.”
The lawsuit was filed Feb. 21. This week, Hunter discovered the page disappeared, after fighting to have it removed for at least six months. But in its place, a new page appeared with the same name and a cartoon avatar instead of her photo. The same cover photo, description, content and followers were there.
“It's worse in my opinion that it was fake news, but realistically, it doesn't matter who it is. If somebody's going to go out and make a bunch of money pretending that they're me, I'm not OK with it, especially if it's something I don't find ethical,” Hunter said.
One article, for example, claimed that all American students at a college were forced to wear hijabs.
Hunter said the page, posting as her, had written troubling comments and often linked to fake news.
“They were racist; they were homophobic; they were things that I am not,” she said.
Hunter said people started recognizing her on the street, and she even lost some customers.
“I just had this like, dread, about the fact that this kept going and going with my name,” she said. She even posted on the fake page to tell them that was not her. She said the fans attacked her and defended the fake Laura Hunter.
Hunter said that in the fall of 2016, she received an email from a person claiming to be from an advertising company in Las Vegas. He asked her to sign a release to allow his client to use her photo.
When she asked him to call her to discuss this, he emailed back later, saying his client had already used her headshot without permission. He asked for more, high-resolution photos. The complaint states he mentioned that he may ask her to sign a contract promising not to sue his client.
Hunter told KIRO 7 she then searched her own name on Google, which showed her this page where she had become the face of a right-wing political website.
After months of contacting Facebook and the owners of the page to have it removed, she said she finally resorted to finding a lawyer.
“I'd like to hopefully set some precedent with this legal case, so people can see that if people are doing this, they could lose everything,” she said.
Hunter is now trying to raise funds for her legal fight; click here for the GoFundMe
page.