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.”
