Revenge Porn Lawyer Weighs in on Rep. Katie Hill's Resignation

Revenge Porn Lawyer Carrie Goldberg Weighs in on Katie Hill's Resignation

Rep. Katie Hill (D-Calif.), 32, is one of the youngest female members of Congress and the first-ever openly bisexual member of the House. She arrived in Washington in January, part of a historic wave of women, winning a longtime Republican seat.

 

Hill resigned on Sunday after a series of nude photos, published online without her consent, led her to disclose a romantic relationship with a former campaign staffer. In the days since, people have asked: If Hill was a middle-aged man — and not the woman behind “the most millennial campaign ever” — would she still be in Congress?

 

I posed that question to Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer who specializes in sexual privacy violations and is the author of “Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls.” Goldberg has decades of experience working with women — and it is overwhelmingly women — who are victims of revenge porn, which is defined as sexually explicit photos of someone shared online without their consent. The images often come from a former partner “hell-bent on their destruction,” Goldberg says, as looks likely in Hill’s case. ***

 

Caroline Kitchener: Whoever sent these photos to Red State — were they breaking the law?

Carrie Goldberg: Absolutely. In the last five years, we’ve gone from having three states with criminal non-consensual porn laws to having 46 states, plus D.C. These laws apply to situations where naked images or videos are disseminated online or offline without the subject’s permission. A lot of the laws do have an exception for newsworthiness. But the sexual humiliation of a person, even a public figure or celebrity, should never be newsworthy.

 

CK: What counts as an exception for newsworthiness?

CG: The newsworthy exception derives from the idea that there are certain images that are so powerful — images from the Holocaust, from the Vietnam War. We’re talking about images where the image itself is newsworthy, the nudity is not.***

 

CK: Was Red State breaking the law when they published these photos?

CG: You hear a lot about section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which usually shelters platforms from liability for content that individual users post. However, if the platform itself is making the decision to publish naked pictures, as Red State did here, they don’t benefit from that immunity. And therefore, the platform should be held liable.

 

CK: So is there a case for Hill going after Red State?

CG: Without giving legal advice, I would say, hell yes.