A woman who refers to herself as an Alaska adult content creator for OnlyFans in some places and a “whore” in others has written to the Alaska House Labor and Commerce Committee to ask members to not pass House Bill 254, a proposed law to prevent the publishing or distribution or pornography to minors.
The bill will be heard in the Labor and Commerce Committee on Monday. That committee is chaired by Rep. Jesse Sumner and vice-chaired by Rep. Justin Ruffridge, both Republicans.
The issue comes at a time when a teacher at Dimond High School is alleged to be providing content to an OnlyFans site that shows him engaged in hard-core activities. The firestorm around teacher Fletch Fletcher started when the X/Twitter account known as @LibsofTikTok posted video and still shots of a person alleged to be the language arts teacher in one of Alaska’s largest high schools.
Mattie Yukon, who presents herself as an adult content producer, says in her letter to the Alaska Legislature that she uses her earnings from OnlyFans and Fansly to “support my subsistence lifestyle that was taught to me by my parents.”
She says if she lost this income, “I would replace it by traveling to engage in in person sex work in Fairbanks or Anchorage where serial killers like Brian Steven Smith target sex workers.”
In other words, if House Bill 254 passes, she might lose income, and so the bill hurts her bottom line.
“I only sell my content on OnlyFans and Fansly, which provide age verification services, but I have found my content being sold on various Discord servers and uploaded to tube sites. In some cases the people selling the adult content they stole from me impersonate me. It is almost impossible to get this content removed from Discord servers and police won’t even take reports about people stealing and reselling my content because they say they don’t know if the thief is located in their jurisdiction. I am confident that I could never be charged with the crime of distributing porn to minors, but the burden of proof is much lower in civil court,” she writes to the Legislature.
In other words, what happens to her content after she produces it is out of her control.
“I should not face civil liability for men stealing my content, and you should not allow Representative Vance to use the Legislature to join in men like Brian Steven Smith’s attacks on sex workers,” she says.
On her social media she says that “Once the Life Below Zero ppl came out to test shoot me but they had a morality clause against whores so I’m on OF instead.”
Also opposing the child protection bill is a group of Alaska sex workers, who wrote to the committee, and also used the name of the recently convicted serial killer to make their case:
“The Community United for Safety and Protection (CUSP) is a group of current and former sex workers, sex trafficking survivors, and allies working towards safety and protection for everybody in Alaska’s sex industries. We are outraged that the legislature has allowed Vance’s ongoing war on sex workers during the very public trial of Brian Steven Smith, a serial killer suspected of killing far more sex workers and Alaska Native women than the two he was recently convicted of,” they write.
“HB254 would create a civil liability for adult content creators if a minor accesses our materials. It is already a serious state and federal crime to send pornography to a minor, but the lower standard of evidence in civil courts risks this bill being used against sex workers who did not send content to a minor,” they write.
The sex workers group says that platforms do the age verification for them, “or if we sell independently we require an ID and matching face video. Once someone has accessed our adult content, we can not control whether that person shows it to a minor or resells it.”
These sex workers also raise the Mattie Yukon concern — that there are people who are using their content and posting on other servers without paying them, a theft of their intellectual content.
“There are men who buy our content and then pose as us on discord servers and sell it at a reduced price. “Why isn’t the Legislature doing anything to stop these men who steal and resell our content or the serial killers who target us? Why are you spending time on Vance’s ridiculous war on sex workers?”
The letter is signed by Terra Burns, Maxine Doogan, Amber Nickerson, and Kat McElroy.
The National Decency Coalition has a different perspective. In their letter supporting the legislation, they write:
“We support HB 254 by Representative Vance that requires online pornographers to comply with reasonable age-verification requirements. In just two years, eight states have passed this bill, and it has overcome each court challenge that it has faced in Louisiana, Utah, and Texas. When the bill first passed in Louisiana, a spokesperson from pornhub told CNN that since the Louisiana law went into effect, traffic from that state had fallen 80%. Today, pornhub has shut down service completely in Louisiana and each state that passes this law.
“Today, children generally have instant access to online pornography all the time. Even when a parent safeguards all devices in connection with their child, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 1 in 10 pornography sites still remain accessible. According to Pew Research, only 39% of parents actually use filtering/blocking software, which leaves 61% of children exposed. Additionally, it’s inevitable that a child will have a friend with an unprotected device, which is also a common form of exposure- peer to peer. This is a crisis, and it’s evidenced by 18 states in the U.S., since 2016, declaring pornography as creating a public health crisis or hazard in their state,” the group says.
In fact, it seems many children in Anchorage have been exposed to images from the OnlyFans account said to belong to the teacher at Dimond. Parents report to Must Read Alaska that their children have shown them the images that are believed to be of Fletcher.
“Like the online sale of alcohol, nicotine, and vaping, and online gambling, it’s time for online pornographers to bear the reasonable burden of ensuring children aren’t gaining access to harmful material. We support this proven effort to protect children from online pornography, and urge legislators in Alaska to vote in support,” the pro-decency group says in support.
