An online peer support group for people overcoming addiction to pornography has filed a lawsuit against the authors of a paper critical of the group, as well as the publisher Taylor & Francis, in an attempt to get the article retracted.
The 2023 study, published in Deviant Behavior, found the Reddit channel for the group NoFap had a higher rate of posts containing violent language compared with two similar subreddits.
Study coauthors Nicole Prause, a bioinformatics programmer with the University of California, Los Angeles, and clinical psychologist David Ley are named defendants in the lawsuit, filed December 30. NoFap and the group’s founder, Alexander Rhodes, are plaintiffs in the suit, which alleges the authors manipulated the data to make the subreddit seem uniquely violent.
The suit says Taylor & Francis, which publishes Deviant Behavior, “aided and abetted” the authors in a “disinformation campaign” by publishing the paper. It also accuses the publisher of intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy and racketeering, along with eight other claims.
Over a year before filing its lawsuit, NoFap asked Taylor & Francis to pay $20 million to avoid being named as codefendant, according to emails Retraction Watch has seen.
At the end of January, the two authors, along with Taylor & Francis and the other defendants — which include UCLA and the pornography website Pornhub — filed motions to dismiss the suit. At publication time, the judge for the case had not yet ruled on the motions.
This is not the first legal battle between Prause and Rhodes. In 2019, Rhodes filed a defamation lawsuit against Prause, which they settled in 2021. The terms included a non-disparagement agreement specifying Prause could not make any “negative or offensive statement” about Rhodes, “his websites or products or services, companies or organizations owned by him,” according to the settlement. Although the settlement was sealed, the full agreement was submitted as a supplement in the 2025 suit.
Prause’s motion to dismiss for the new lawsuit states it covers many of the same claims from the 2019 suit. Meanwhile, NoFap claims in the new lawsuit that five other papers Prause has written that name the group violated the previous non-disparagement agreement.
Two of the research papers appeared in the Sage journals Sexualities and Journal of Psychosexual Health, two in Springer Nature’s International Journal of Impotence Research and one, a meeting abstract, appeared in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, published by Oxford University Press. The articles were published online between the end of 2022 and October 2023.
NoFap requested Taylor & Francis retract the paper in November 2023, according to a series of emails the group forwarded to us. When asked who we could attribute statements and correspondence to, NoFap declined to give a name, citing a need to maintain anonymity of the group members.
According to the emails, Taylor & Francis responded on Dec. 8, 2023, stating they were looking into the matter. On Feb. 12, 2024, the publisher sent a letter to the group, affirming the paper had undergone double-blind peer review and received the proper ethics approval from UCLA.
“Regarding the data sampling, the authors’ methodology and explanations for cleansing their data set was reviewed by the Editors and found to be in line with the journal’s expectations,” the letter reads.
Taylor & Francis also hired a “third-party defamation expert” to review the article and were “comfortable with its content,” they wrote.
The group also claimed the authors didn’t disclose several relevant conflicts of interest with the research. Among these were Prause’s past encounters with Rhodes, which included the 2019 lawsuit, and Prause accusing Rhodes of attempted murder. The suit also accuses the authors of collaborating with and receiving financial compensation from pornographic websites and adult industry organizations, like PornHub and the Free Speech Coalition, to “sway the public narrative about problematic pornography use.”
In response, Taylor & Francis corrected the article in February 2024, updating the disclosure statement to add a sentence about Ley’s consulting work with the Sexual Health Alliance, a sex therapy educational organization where he currently serves on the board.
“This concludes our investigation and actions for this article, unless new evidence should be forthcoming,” the publisher said in their letter to the NoFap group.
NoFap’s lawyer informed the publisher on Aug. 22, 2024, that NoFap was planning to name Taylor & Francis as a codefendant in a lawsuit against Pornhub, according to a letter NoFap sent us. The letter stated Rhodes and NoFap were demanding the retraction of the article and a published apology by the publisher, as well as a compensation of $20 million, if the publisher “would like to avoid the expense and burden of litigation.”
Prause told us the issues raised about conflicts of interest and data integrity were addressed while the paper was under review at the journal.
“There are [American Psychological Association] requirements for how to disclose conflicts of interest,” Prause told us, which she said she had fulfilled.
She also denied connections with xHamster, Pornhub and the Free Speech Coalition, and said Rhodes “just fabricated some of it in the hopes that something might stick or sound bad.”
The lawsuit accuses Prause of creating her own violent posts in the subreddit, and claims the authors manipulated data to exacerbate the difference in violent posts between the control group and r/NoFap, making the latter seem more violent.
When we asked what she thought about the allegations of data falsification, she said: “That’s fraudulent. Full stop.”
Prause told us the authors “were completely confident and remain completely confident” in the data.
The study data included 421 violent posts across the three subreddits, 397 of which came from r/NoFap. The lawsuit alleged the authors included a “whopping 156” posts with violent content that had been deleted from r/NoFap prior to the study. However, Prause told us she wouldn’t have been able to access deleted posts with the software she used.
She also pointed to a line from the study: “As these data were made public in the [Open Science Framework] database, r/NoFap began deleting the posts. Carefully preserve data when studying r/NoFap,” the authors wrote.
The paper has been cited five times, including once by its correction, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science.
Rhodes told us the main aim of the lawsuit was to call out instances of Prause’s failure to abide by the non-disparagement agreement, including publishing several articles that name NoFap directly.
The Deviant Behavior paper was an “egregious violation of the contract,” Rhodes said, and called it “mind-boggling” the publisher didn’t retract it. “We thought [Taylor & Francis] made an error” when it was published, he said.
Rhodes told us the other five papers were primarily included in the suit as examples of Prause violating the terms of the settlement, and he would be happy if the papers were corrected to remove NoFap, as he felt this would satisfy the non-disparagement agreement.
The authors “should probably make some amendments to remove any contract breaching statements,” he said.
An unnamed representative for NoFap told us the lawsuit is a “last resort measure.”
“The lawsuit is not to litigate science (there is nothing scientific about the Taylor & Francis paper), but to enforce contractual non-disparagement obligations and to stop a coordinated campaign of harassment and disinformation that has harmed our website and dozens of other targets,” NoFap wrote.
The motion to dismiss filed by Taylor & Francis said the publisher “did nothing more than publish a scholarly article in one of its academic journals.” In addition to refuting each of the claims made against them, the motion argues Taylor & Francis is “immune from liability,” since the claims made against them are based on “protected public expression.”
The publisher declined further comment on the suit or the paper.
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