Former Beauty Queen Wins Lawsuit Against Porn Groups

CHARLESTON, WV (AP) -- A former Miss West Virginia has won a $7.2 million verdict against nine Internet companies and individuals who tried to sell pornographic videos they falsely claimed featured her.

A jury in U.S. District Court in Clarksburg on Wednesday ordered each defendant to pay Allison Williams $800,000 for damaging the 2003 beauty queen's reputation and invading her privacy.

"This had been a very long fight for her so this was a great victory for her,'' her attorney, Parween Mascari, said Thursday.

The videos, which surfaced in the fall of 2004, show a woman the Internet porn producers falsely claimed to be Williams engaged in sex in the back of a television news truck.

Williams, now 27, discovered the defamatory videos during her first semester of law school at West Virginia University while searching the Internet for a favorable newspaper article about herself to save for her scrapbook, Mascari said.

Williams has since graduated from law school and now works for a shipping company in Vienna, Va., while she prepares to pass the bar, Mascari said.

"I struggled every single day to maintain my law school studies, in the face of incredible stress and anxiety,'' Williams said in a prepared statement. "Still, I refused to allow these pornographers to control my dream to graduate from law school and realize my goals.''