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Case Intel:

• Attorneys fighting OnlyFans cited 11 completely fictional court cases in their legal briefs, thanks to AI tools that apparently have a vivid imagination
• Lead counsel threw his co-counsel under the bus, blaming a "family crisis" for the AI mishap that's now public record
• OnlyFans wants the case moved to England, and these fake citations might just give them the ammunition they need

By Samuel Lopez — USA Herald

LOS ANGELES, CA — August 21, 2025, 5:45 PM — Sometimes the most advanced technology produces the most basic problems. Attorneys suing OnlyFans learned this the hard way Thursday when they had to sheepishly tell a federal judge they'd be asking permission to fix court filings stuffed with AI-generated fake citations.

The plaintiffs in a proposed class action lawsuit told U.S. District Court Judge Fred W. Slaughter that they're ready to clean up their mess "as soon as possible" after OnlyFans parent company Fenix International Ltd. called them out for citing 11 completely made-up court cases among 18 total citations in a recent brief.

Here's what makes this particularly awkward: this isn't the lawyers' first rodeo with phantom citations. According to Fenix, this marks the third time in just over a month that the same legal team has submitted "false, AI-generated law" to the court. At some point, you'd think they'd learn to fact-check their robot research assistant.

The Case Behind the Chaos

The underlying lawsuit reads like a digital-age soap opera. Five anonymous OnlyFans subscribers (identified only by initials N.Z., R.M., B.L., S.M., and A.L.) claim the platform scammed them into thinking they were chatting with actual content creators when they were really talking to professional impersonators. They're alleging this constitutes racketeering under federal RICO laws—the same statutes typically used against organized crime families.

OnlyFans has been trying to kill the case since December, arguing that subscribers agreed to take any disputes to courts in England and Wales when they clicked "agree" on the platform's terms of service. After Judge Slaughter initially denied their motion to dismiss, the company asked for reconsideration based on a July 2025 California Supreme Court ruling that made it easier to enforce foreign forum-selection clauses.

That's when things went sideways for the plaintiffs' lawyers.

When AI Becomes "Artificially Inaccurate"

The citation catastrophe unfolded in an August 11 opposition brief where lawyers from the prestigious firm Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro attempted to argue why the case should stay in California federal court. According to a declaration filed by Skadden Arps associate Or-el Vaknin (representing OnlyFans), he discovered "multiple examples of quoted language that does not appear in the cases cited by plaintiffs."

When Vaknin ran the exact quoted language through Westlaw—the legal profession's gold-standard research database—he found zero results. That's lawyer-speak for "these quotes don't exist anywhere in the real world."