An Influencer Filmed a Stranger's Skirt for Clout. It Just Cost Him $20,000

A man with more than 100,000 Instagram followers who filmed himself lifting a stranger into the air outside a nightclub, exposing her underwear on camera, has been ordered to pay $20,000 for posting the footage without her consent. A B.C. tribunal decided the clips counted as intimate images even though the man said he was just chasing views.

According to CTV News, the woman, identified only as Z.D. under a publication ban, said she was drunk when Sherif Elbishlawi approached her outside a club and asked to lift her up while a friend filmed. She said yes, but once the recording revealed her underwear and the view beneath her skirt, she requested that Elbishlawi keep it offline. He ignored her, and the footage went up on his Instagram and Facebook accounts anyway.

The details of what happened next are what pushed the damages higher. When Z.D. asked him to take the videos down, local reporting says he either ignored her or asked her to meet in person, telling her "I don't do favours for strangers." Meta removed the videos twice, and he reposted them. By then, they had been up for a few days and seen by 30,000 to 40,000 people. Elbishlawi argued Z.D. had consented and that he did not know the clips counted as intimate images, but tribunal member Megan Montgomery rejected that, noting he knew Meta had already pulled them down.

Montgomery found Elbishlawi was driven by a hunt for attention. "It appears [Elbishlawi] used the videos to gain social media exposure," she wrote, adding that she found "the possibly exploitive nature of this conduct troubling." She landed on $10,000 in compensatory damages, then tacked on $10,000 more in aggravated and punitive damages, specifically for reposting the clips after removal and for dangling their deletion in exchange for a meeting. Her conclusion was blunt: his conduct was "deserving of rebuke and markedly departs from ordinary standards of decent behaviour." Z.D. had asked for $35,000, and the tribunal noted the videos were less explicit than the revenge-porn cases it usually sees, which is why it stopped short of the full amount.

The decision was issued under B.C.'s Intimate Images Protection Act enacted in January 2024, which allows individuals to bring their case to the Civil Resolution Tribunal rather than pursuing it in court. The tribunal does not require you to prove harm, only that the image is an intimate image of you and that it was shared without your consent. Crucially, consent can be revoked at any time, which means a "yes" in the moment outside a club is not a permanent release. Once Z.D. said stop, every repost was a fresh problem. The province has leaned into this hard, raising the tribunal's damages ceiling from $5,000 to $75,000 earlier this year, a jump that the attorney general framed as a warning that non-consensual sharing "carries serious consequences." B.C. even hit X with a $100,000 penalty in a separate case last September.

The tribunal was careful to say Elbishlawi's behavior was not criminal voyeurism. Canada's voyeurism law under Section 162 depends on a reasonable expectation of privacy and, usually, secret recording for a sexual purpose. Z.D. knew she was being filmed, so that door was mostly closed. What the civil route does is sidestep the "were you sneaky about it" question entirely and focus on distribution and consent. Street shooters and content creators have long relied on the idea that anything visible in public is fair game. But the moment your footage exposes someone's body and they tell you to take it down, "I was making content" is no longer a shield. It reads, to a tribunal, as motive.

Elbishlawi's page still features dozens of these lift-up clips, some with up-skirt frames used as thumbnails, and Montgomery noted it was possible the videos of Z.D. remained on a paywalled, OnlyFans-style page he promotes.