Two Porn Academics In Legal Slugfest

When it comes to claims and counterclaims about pornography, Nicole Prause and Donald Hilton have been at near opposite ends of the spectrum, and now they are in a head-to-head legal battle. As an academic, Prause has been skeptical about the prevailing notion that pornography can be thought of as an addiction, in one published paper characterizing the treatment industry as an emperor that has no clothes.  Professionally, she has held positions as “neuroscientist, sexual psychophysiologist, statistician/Data Scientist, and most recently as founder of a sexual biotechnology company,” according to the company’s website. Her opponent Donald Hilton is an adjunct associate professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA) and the author of the he 2009 book He Restoreth My Soul: Understanding and Breaking the Chemical and Spiritual Chains of Pornography Addiction Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. This article from Reason is a skeptical look at both their legal claims, but it’s particularly skeptical regarding Prause’s complaint against Hilton, which was in the form of a sexual harassment claim proffered to the University of Texas, in an attempt to get them to investigate Hilton (they declined). The Reason article quotes First Amendment expert, journalist and  UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh, making the case that Prause’s claim, which invokes a number of things she alleges Hilton said about her, is essentially a defamation case. She has couched it as sexual harassment, Volokh suggests, probably because that’s a type of complaint that universities will look into these days and to skirt what some believe are First Amendment constraints on making  defamation cases in general.