Posted Jan. 27, 2026
When Alison and her mother died on the same day in August 2024 it got a lot of media attention. A search found stories here in the U.S, in the U.K. and in several other countries around the world.
Along with these stories many of them used photographs, some taken when Alison and her sister were children, and others more recently.
One of those recent photos were two stills that someone lifted from a video I recorded in 2021 for a GoFundMe page of Alison asking for donations for replacement teeth.
These extremely unflattering images - which I would never have licensed for publication - was then screen-grabbed by someone, posted on the Web and used by numerous news outlets to accompany those stories - all without my permission and without any photo credit.
An editor at one of those publications, the Daily Mail, immediately acknowledged the paper’s unauthorized use when contacted and offered payment.
But the management of another British newspaper, the Daily Mirror, which, like most of them, also has a site on the internet, ignored two requests for payment. This after it had run the two photos with four stories in at least three of its publications in the two days after Alison died.
So earlier this month I decided I’d had enough of this wholesale theft of my intellectual property; on January 25. representing myself, I filed a lawsuit in state Supreme Court, New York City against Reach PLC, the company that publishes dozens of newspapers in Britain, including the Mirror, the Daily Express and a celebrity magazine, OK!
In addition to a request for nominal payment for the photos, I also demanding putative damages of at least $25,000.
Punitive damages are intended to be a penalty - the equivalent of a fine - and also to deter others for the same conduct. My hope is that publishers who routinely publish photos without permission will now think twice before stealing something they have no right to print.
My complaint can be read or downloaded from my Dropbox account with this link:
The suit will be served on the defendants next week. They will then have 20 days to file a response.
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