Eleanor Leedham comments on Stephen Bear’s sentencing in The Guardian

Legal Director Eleanor Leedham has commented in The Guardian on reality star Stephen Bear’s sentencing to 21 months in prison for sharing an intimate video of his ex-girlfriend and argues for the government to use the online safety bill to prevent further harmful incidences of intimate image abuse.

Eleanor’s comments were published in The Guardian, 3 March 2023, and can be read here, and in The Irish Times and Show News.

Eleanor, commenting on the significance of the ruling, said: “the tech-enabled threat of image-based abuse shared via WhatsApp and OnlyFans, such as in the case of Mr Bear, is often connected to domestic abuse, coercive control, and damage to mental health and even suicide.”

She added that many public sites, including OnlyFans, had “inadequate checks and processes to prevent the upload of illegal images” and urged the government to use the online safety bill to force adult websites “to clean up their act”.