The nude photos of her surfaced again, years after she thought they had long disappeared from the internet. When she was dating her now husband and told him about her original experience with the images and revenge porn, he was understanding.
But when the photos surfaced again after they had married, that understanding was gone. He was upset with her and frustrated by the amount of money she wanted to spend to address the issue. The victim said the incident caused strife in their marriage.
The victim, who asked to remain anonymous, told Teen Vogue she paid a lawyer over $10,000 to issue copyright takedown requests after nude photos of her that were circulated online years earlier resurfaced. But the results were lacking (she says she was finding more of the images than her lawyer was), and later she says she saw him joking about revenge porn in a Facebook post. She now spends $500 a year for DMCA Defenders, a service that proactively monitors the web for her images and sends takedown requests.
“Unfortunately this has and will continue to impact my life,” she says. “There isn’t much I can do about it because of the sick people in the world. But I have the tools in place to minimize and help me through what gets thrown at me.”
In the United States, 46 states, Washington, DC, and the territory of Guam have passed laws against nonconsensual pornography (NCP). New York was the most recent state to enact such a law, signing it into law in late July. But the costs of NCP are overwhelming. They go far beyond the scope of legal cases, if those are even brought, and impact victims financially and psychologically for years. Experts told Teen Vogue that some victims pour thousands of dollars into paying lawyers who don’t deliver on getting images taken down, while others have had to change their names, move away from cities they lived in, and start over entirely. Nothing is ever truly dead and gone on the internet, including images that people wish weren’t online. They can resurface to haunt a victim years after the fact.
Recent research suggests that the number of NCP victims is increasing. A 2017 study by the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), which focuses on addressing NCP, found that 1 in 8 people “had someone threaten to post and/or post sexually explicit images of them without their consent.” A subsequent study from earlier this year published by the American Psychology Association found that 1 in 12 of respondents said they’d experienced at least one instance of nonconsensual pornography victimization in their lifetime. The study found that women reported higher rates of victimization and lower rates of perpetration than men. But remedies for victims remain limited.
In a 2018 Boston College law review article, Meghan Fay, then a law student but now an associate at WilmerHale, wrote that current laws do “little to redress the damage. Tort claims are often unsuccessful because many victims do not have the resources necessary to initiate a lawsuit.”
Christina M. Gagnier, a California-based privacy lawyer who has worked with NCP victims, echoed these concerns.
“A primary barrier is the availability of resources. Very few attorneys practice in this space or are equipped to practice in this space, and there is not widespread availability of pro bono services,” Gagnier told Teen Vogue.
One of her clients sunk $30,000 into a case, she recalled. To Gagnier, the overlooked cost is not financial. It’s the emotional and time toll that this takes on victims.
The cost of NCP can go far beyond legal fees. Many victims leave their professional fields entirely, and those who might have considered going into public fields like politics decide not to do so, according to Mary Anne Franks, the president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI). That’s a cost that, according to Franks, we can’t even quantify — the victims who elect not to strive for public notoriety because they’ve had people warn them that they will ruin their lives.
Katelyn Bowden, a victim of NCP who went on to found BADASS, a grassroots organization dedicated to helping educate victims and marshall resources on their behalf (such as monitoring the web for images and giving them copyright takedown requests to send), says the financial and psychological costs can’t be disentangled.
“We come across people every day that are like, 'I need help, I've got PTSD, and I can't find a psychiatrist that handles this sort of thing, or that I can afford,'” Bowden said.
Bowden has worked with many victims, and said that these images often resurface years later, even once victims think they’ve all been taken down. She said this is because once an image is uploaded to the internet, it’s often locally downloaded onto someone’s computer. So even if a copyright takedown request is sent, which can compel websites to remove images, the photo can pop up again months or even years later.
The after-effects pile up, Bowden said. People miss work. They grow depressed. They’re anxious. And of course, the images always seem to resurface right before a victim has a big presentation or something of importance going on, according to Bowden.
“It definitely affects your ability to work and your ability to function,” Bowden said. ”That day that you find the photos are out there? You’re panicking.”
Franks thinks the psychological cost is the one we should be paying the most attention to, even though it's hard to rank the numerous issues that come with having your photos distributed against your will. She points to the experience of CCRI founder Dr. Holly Jacobs.
“She was a graduate student trying to write her dissertation, and simultaneously she was writing these desperate letters to every site she found her pictures on, pleading with them to take it down,” recalled Franks. "She had done this for so long that one day, she says that she Googled her name, and the pictures were gone. And she feels like, okay, it was terrible, but I did it right. I got them all down.”
The next morning, according to Franks, Jacobs Googled herself again, and her pictures were back up on 300 more sites and there were 45,000 total search results for her name. She then gave up and changed her name because that’s the only thing she could do.
In many states, victims must be able to prove that the perpetrators demonstrated intent to harm or harass them in order to pursue a case involving NCP, Gagnier, the privacy lawyer, said. The recently passed New York law, for example, positions disseminating nonconsensual pornography under the umbrella of harassment. Because of this, Franks said, prosecutors are legally required to show that an individual operated with the “the intent to cause harm” for it to fall under the state’s NCP law.
Advocates say that the intent requirement misunderstands how revenge porn spreads online and restricts the number of cases that can be pursued. But once those photos are uploaded to the internet, people trade them as if they are playing cards, according to experts like Gagnier. The people sharing them aren’t necessarily doing so with an intent to harm the victim — even if their actions certainly do so — and therefore fall outside the purview of laws like New York’s.
Perhaps more fundamentally, though, Franks argues that the New York law was a missed opportunity, because intent requirements fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the wrong committed. The harm, Franks says, is the invasion of privacy, not the motive for the invasion of privacy.
The first federal law to address this issue was introduced by Rep. Jackie Speier (D-NY) in 2016 and was reintroduced in May, but it has yet to be voted on. Supporters hope the law will supersede the harassment stipulations many states require.
“My hope for victims going forward is stronger laws and being able to hold people accountable so victims feel they have a voice and can stand up for themselves instead of being silenced and ashamed,” the anonymous victim tells Teen Vogue. “This can happen to anyone. The scary part is in this day and age photos can be fabricated to look like NCP. People that think, ‘Oh, I never took nude photos or videos, so it could never happen to me’ are wrong. And for people that don’t have a support system or the means to get help, [they] could end their life because of something like this.”
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: What to Do If You're a Victim of Revenge Porn
Correction: This article initially said that the 2017 CCRI study found that 1 in 25 adult social media users had been either victimized by or threatened with NCP. The correct statistic is 1 in 8.