Inside The Fight For A Federal Law Against Revenge Porn

In June, Bella Thorne “took [her] power back.”


For the actor, that meant revealing to her almost seven million Twitter followers — and, by extension, The world wide web at large — that someone had hacked her phone and stolen her private pictures. “I feel gross, I feel watched, I feel someone has taken something from me that I only wanted one special person to see,” she wrote in a note that explained how her hacker had been threatening to post the photographs against her will, and had also allegedly sent her private pictures of other celebrities in the process. So, she beat him at his own game and posted the pictures herself. “It’s my decision right now u don’t get to take nevertheless another thing from me,” she added.


The immediate response was overwhelmingly accommodating of Thorne, however some people tried to shame her for taking the pictures to start with. She drowned out the haters by posting screenshots of helpful conversations with Dove Cameron, Zendaya, and Serayah, among other famed companions, and continued to post about the harassment on her Instagram Stories. Not once did she apologize for taking the pictures, and she had no reason to: It’s the person who steals the images who needs to answer to their actions.


For several young people, “nudes” and other private photographs are a normal form of self-expression — so much so that the practice has been immortalized in a storyline on Netflix's Sex Education, and in a monologue delivered by Zendaya on HBO's Euphoria. Thanks to the rise of digital cameras, smartphones, texting, email, and apps like Snapchat, taking and sharing private photographs has become more and more normalized. Eighty-eight percent of respondents to a 2015 survey mentioned they had sexted at least once; 96 percent of these people viewed sexting as a regular way to express themselves in a given relationship. Whether it’s healthy or destructive depends on the people involved, and experts warn to only send private photographs to someone you trust implicitly.


Because therein lies danger: you can’t control whether the other person shares those pictures without your consent, or if someone else collects them through a method like hacking, or adding photographs to a database or messageboard, as was the case when it was discovered in 2017 that Marines and other service members were swapping revenge porn pictures. One study posits that nearly 10 million Americans have had their photographs shared without their consent, though it’s hard to gauge a solid number given the shame that still proliferates the experience. And if your photographs are turned into revenge porn, the legal options you could take to fight back are limited and can feel overwhelming.


Today, 46 states and Washington, D.C. have laws banning revenge porn, which is the result of maliciously sharing private pictures that aren't your own, usually by a former sexual partner and without the consent of the person in the image. The scope of those laws varies significantly across state lines: Some states classify it as a misdemeanor, while others treat it as a felony, and jail time can span from 90 days to six years. The existing laws are being updated as technology advances, too; Virginia has banned revenge porn since 2014, and lawmakers recently expanded that law to include “deepfake” porn, or work that has been digitally adjusted to simulate nude or otherwise uncensored images without the victim’s consent.


certainly, there really are still a number of reasons why someone would pick not to report an assault or other sex crime — up to and including the experience of subjecting yourself to the law enforcement process. And if a victim wanted to report a crime to the police, they’d have to navigate an intricate web of jurisdictions — as the law would have been damaged depending on where the attacker was while they posted the photographs, not where the victim was at the time of discovery.


As Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer in New York City whose practice specializes in helping victims of sexual harassment and assault, tells MTV News, “Especially as soon as the offender has posted [revenge porn photos] under the guise of anonymity, we’ll have local police mention, ‘Well, we don’t know where was once he posted them.’” While Internet anonymity can make it complicated to ascertain a perpetrator’s identity, researchers found that most them of these who post revenge porn pictures are males. In a 2016 Brookings report that studied 80 separate sextortion cases, every perpetrator was male. “There’s often a lot of back and forth from local precincts about which one has the particular jurisdiction to prosecute it,” she adds.


Public retaliation has also largely targeted the victims, and not the perpetrators, in an assortment of ways that include the slut-shaming Thorne faced. (Crucially, people of all genders have announced being victims, though the APA noted in 2014 that male victims are more likely to report their violation to authorities than female victims.) “The majority of people suffer extreme emotional distress plus it changes their relationships with family member and friends,” Goldberg says. “They’re just constantly worried about the fact that anybody on The world wide web can visualize their genitals, and it’s a horrible feeling.”


Some attackers also target victims at their work; Goldberg acknowledges that some of her clientele have been fired as a backward result of their being violated. If someone is fired from their job because of a revenge-porn attack, she recommends they sue their former employer: “I feel it’s gender-based discrimination,” she explains. Her firm also routinely works with customers employers so that victims feel supported while in and right following the ordeal.


Goldberg opened her practice immediately after an ex targeted her; in the method of seeking justice, she realized how tough it is for victims to navigate the various legal systems at play. Nevertheless while some lawyers or legal support groups distribute pro bono help to victims, and Goldberg notes that legal action “can be really transformative and healing in the event you do it right,” she also stresses that victims shouldn’t feel pressured to take any action they don’t feel comfortable with.


“Bella Thorne took a courageous step forward, and I think it’s bold and respectable for her to have done that,” she explains. “I don’t think that victims should feel they require to do that if their privacy is being threatened. It’s the correct decision for some people, nevertheless it’s not going to be for everybody.”


While a federal law could help support victims, there isn’t really one on the books. Clearer-cut federal laws counter blackmail and extortion, and copyright ownership for selfies are usually serve as grounds to have a photo removed from a website, however the federal law most frequently invoked for digital revenge porn is section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.


The CDA was passed in 1996, years before the advent of social-media behemoths like Facebook and Twitter, and doesn’t do much to help victims of revenge porn — as a substitute, this law protects the platforms, dictating that the social media sites aren’t at fault for any revenge porn posted on their platforms. So in the event you aspire to scrub a photo from The world wide web forever, getting the apps to take action are usually need a lawyer like Goldberg, and also a lot of litigation.


In May, California Congresswoman Jackie Speier and New York Congressman John Katko introduced the SHIELD Act in the Home of Representatives, which would make it against the law to "knowingly issue private intimate visual depictions with reckless don't think about for the individual’s lack of consent to the distribution;" California Senator and presidential hopeful Kamala Harris is planning on introducing companion legislation in the Senate. The bill is a continuation of the Intimate Privacy Protection Act, which Rep. Speier introduced in 2016 immediately after she “became aware of unbelievably painful stories of females in particular who not only lost their privacy nevertheless had their day-to-day lives impacted in terms of employment and relationships,” she tells MTV News; the session closed before the bill was voted on.


According to Speier, lawmakers have been “slow to regulate an area that has become rife with an excellent deal of violation,” though she doesn’t necessarily believe there really is a correlation between a failure to act and the fact that revenge porn overwhelmingly affects ladies and other minority groups, like LGBTQ+ people. “I think it has more to do with the fact that we have a lot of Luddites in Congress,” she says. “But there’s growing recognition of the necessary for [legislation], and we need to take a step to act.”


Nevertheless even the most comprehensive legislation is only one aspect of the fight against digital harassment. (The 2016 bill procured pushback from the ACLU which claimed criminalizing such action without consideration of intent would be a violation of free speech.) And Speier is heartened by the knowledge that several survivors, like Goldberg, view advocacy as “a way of paying it forward. Several of those have already been painfully impacted by the non-consensual distribution of their photographs, and so they don’t want it to happen to anyone else,” she adds. Actor Amber Heard joined Speier in introducing the SHIELD Act to Congress; she was violated in the same 2014 attack in which Lawrence was targeted.


“My stolen and manipulated photographs are still online to this day, posted again and again with sexually uncensored and humiliating and degrading headlines about my body, about myself,” Heard mentioned in May, per the Washington Post. “I continue to be harassed, stalked, and humiliated by the theft of these images.”


In part because of these activists, and also several cultural conversations — including the pictures stolen from Jennifer Lawrence and hundreds of other Hollywood stars in 2014; a similar, more targeted attack made against Leslie Jones; and the fallout from the allegations against Harvey Weinstein that served as kindling for Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement to reach global consciousness — we’ve seen an overwhelming societal shift towards both normalizing sexting and transferring the culpability for a crime to where it belongs.


“I think with regard to non-consensual porn, there’s been a sweep across the country of refusal to tolerate the crime, and I certainly think that translates into more understanding towards victims,” Goldberg tells MTV News. “There’s just so much more rhetoric about being the intent of someone else’s control, and sexual privacy violation, and thus much more empathy and conversation about it.”