It was April 2008 when I took my first prescription anxiety pill. It helped calm the fear I felt whenever I spotted my ex-boyfriend driving behind me on my way home from work.
He was a 260-pound bodybuilder who posed with machine guns on social media.
Back when we dated, when he was angry with me, he would punch his car and tear up the plants outside of my house in fits of rage. We broke up. And eventually, I stopped seeing his car. I breathed a sigh of relief. It was over.
But it wasn’t.
Two years later, I discovered an online gallery of nude photos of myself after Googling my name. My photos were alongside galleries of other women that my ex had dated. My full name, the city where I lived and my occupation were listed in the gallery as well.
The room started spinning. My hands shaking, I messaged my ex-boyfriend and demanded that he remove the photos. He blocked me. I called the police. But they were powerless because what he had done was not a criminal offense in Florida at the time. After sending a copyright infringement notice to the website owner, the photos came down.
But it was just a matter of time until they resurfaced. And they did.
The worst website was PinkMeth.com, a site devoted to humiliating women with shaming comments under their nude photos. Next to their photos were links to their Facebook, Twitter and Myspace accounts.
Women in the comments section begged for their photos to be removed: “I am being stalked at work. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE remove my photos.”
I combed through the comments under my own photos: One remains seared in my mind: “Right click, save as.”
It was a sickening reminder that, no matter how many times I got my photos down, they would appear again.
[If you use technology, someone is using your information. We’ll tell you how — and what you can do about it. Sign up for our limited-run newsletter.]
I was among the first women in the United States to file a “revenge porn” lawsuit and speak publicly about the experience. It was the only way for me to get my photos down. In 2013, I sued Pink Meth, my ex-boyfriend and Cloudflare, who served as a proxy server for the site.
When my photos were first posted, I filed a police report, and a deputy was assigned to my case. He promised he would protect me. Several months later, he told me my case was closed and asked me out. The relationship didn’t last long. After I left him, he threatened to disseminate more sexually explicit photos that he had found of me from my first relationship.
I didn’t get justice with Pink Meth or my ex-boyfriend. My lawsuit took a nose-dive. But I did get justice when I filed a complaint against the cop — he was fired after a yearlong investigation by the local sheriff’s department.
When I told a good friend about this ordeal, he said that if he had children, he would not let them near me. My doctor compared my trauma to bad reviews he had once received on Yelp. A professor called me a publicity whore.
Over the course of two years, I went from 5’8” and 130 pounds to 110 pounds. My mother cradled my face in her hands while looking at the skeleton I’d become. “I don’t recognize my daughter anymore,” she said.
I was eventually hospitalized after spending a whole year in bed; there was simply nothing left of me inside.
Last month, New York became the 46th state to criminalize revenge porn. Depending upon the state, posting revenge porn is either a misdemeanor or a felony. In New York, it’s a Class A misdemeanor.
Representative Jackie Speier recently introduced a federal bill that criminalizes revenge porn. The long odds it faces are a slap in the face of victims who have risked everything in coming forward.
Some people claim that revenge porn is free speech, and should not be criminalized. But this is missing the point. Although men can be victims of revenge porn, we cannot ignore the fact that women make up the large majority of victims. That’s because revenge porn is not just about intimate images. It’s about stripping women of control over their own bodies and forcing them to live as communal property.
I will never forget the profound sense of loneliness I felt sitting in my bedroom the first time I discovered my images online. It was hard to imagine then, but there were others who were living with the same sick knots in their stomach, emptiness, and shame.
Over the past few years, they have come out of the shadows to tell their stories. A British YouTube star who won a substantial sum in a lawsuit, an anonymous law student who obtained a $6.45 million civil judgment against her perpetrator and a movie star who saw her perpetrator receive a 9-month prison sentence. While I have not met them, they are sisters to me. As time goes on, more victims will speak out and join us.
These days, I am happy. I can taste food again. My bones are hidden under a healthy layer of fat. Two years ago, I enrolled in law school, and I count the days until graduation. My story has a happy ending. But for every happy ending, there is a victim living her life while wanting to end it.
It has been called “revenge porn,” “involuntary pornography” and “nonconsensual pornography.” But using these terms is like calling rape “involuntary sex.” It simply doesn’t reflect the emotional, psychological and physical costs. Revenge porn is cyberrape, and we should call it as such.
The courts are loath to embrace new exceptions to the right to free speech, as they should be. But the courts also recognize that those who are harmed by speech, such as victims of defamation, can mitigate the harm through telling their side of the story. It’s called “counter-speech” or “more speech.”
But cyber-rape victims do not have this luxury. If we speak out about our experiences, it comes at a cost. Every time we speak, our intimate photos are viewed millions of times, they are further disseminated. We live the trauma all over again.
Those of us who have come forward are sometimes called “silence breakers.” But it’s not so much that we have been silent all these years. It’s just that no one listened.
Like other media companies, The Times collects data on its visitors when they read stories like this one. For more detail please see our privacy policy and our publisher's description of The Times's practices and continued steps to increase transparency and protections.
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Home » Analysis & Comment » Opinion | The Trauma of Revenge Porn
Opinion | The Trauma of Revenge Porn
It was April 2008 when I took my first prescription anxiety pill. It helped calm the fear I felt whenever I spotted my ex-boyfriend driving behind me on my way home from work.
He was a 260-pound bodybuilder who posed with machine guns on social media.
Back when we dated, when he was angry with me, he would punch his car and tear up the plants outside of my house in fits of rage. We broke up. And eventually, I stopped seeing his car. I breathed a sigh of relief. It was over.
But it wasn’t.
Two years later, I discovered an online gallery of nude photos of myself after Googling my name. My photos were alongside galleries of other women that my ex had dated. My full name, the city where I lived and my occupation were listed in the gallery as well.
The room started spinning. My hands shaking, I messaged my ex-boyfriend and demanded that he remove the photos. He blocked me. I called the police. But they were powerless because what he had done was not a criminal offense in Florida at the time. After sending a copyright infringement notice to the website owner, the photos came down.
But it was just a matter of time until they resurfaced. And they did.
The worst website was PinkMeth.com, a site devoted to humiliating women with shaming comments under their nude photos. Next to their photos were links to their Facebook, Twitter and Myspace accounts.
Women in the comments section begged for their photos to be removed: “I am being stalked at work. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE remove my photos.”
I combed through the comments under my own photos: One remains seared in my mind: “Right click, save as.”
It was a sickening reminder that, no matter how many times I got my photos down, they would appear again.
[If you use technology, someone is using your information. We’ll tell you how — and what you can do about it. Sign up for our limited-run newsletter.]
I was among the first women in the United States to file a “revenge porn” lawsuit and speak publicly about the experience. It was the only way for me to get my photos down. In 2013, I sued Pink Meth, my ex-boyfriend and Cloudflare, who served as a proxy server for the site.
When my photos were first posted, I filed a police report, and a deputy was assigned to my case. He promised he would protect me. Several months later, he told me my case was closed and asked me out. The relationship didn’t last long. After I left him, he threatened to disseminate more sexually explicit photos that he had found of me from my first relationship.
I didn’t get justice with Pink Meth or my ex-boyfriend. My lawsuit took a nose-dive. But I did get justice when I filed a complaint against the cop — he was fired after a yearlong investigation by the local sheriff’s department.
When I told a good friend about this ordeal, he said that if he had children, he would not let them near me. My doctor compared my trauma to bad reviews he had once received on Yelp. A professor called me a publicity whore.
Over the course of two years, I went from 5’8” and 130 pounds to 110 pounds. My mother cradled my face in her hands while looking at the skeleton I’d become. “I don’t recognize my daughter anymore,” she said.
I was eventually hospitalized after spending a whole year in bed; there was simply nothing left of me inside.
Last month, New York became the 46th state to criminalize revenge porn. Depending upon the state, posting revenge porn is either a misdemeanor or a felony. In New York, it’s a Class A misdemeanor.
Representative Jackie Speier recently introduced a federal bill that criminalizes revenge porn. The long odds it faces are a slap in the face of victims who have risked everything in coming forward.
Some people claim that revenge porn is free speech, and should not be criminalized. But this is missing the point. Although men can be victims of revenge porn, we cannot ignore the fact that women make up the large majority of victims. That’s because revenge porn is not just about intimate images. It’s about stripping women of control over their own bodies and forcing them to live as communal property.
I will never forget the profound sense of loneliness I felt sitting in my bedroom the first time I discovered my images online. It was hard to imagine then, but there were others who were living with the same sick knots in their stomach, emptiness, and shame.
Over the past few years, they have come out of the shadows to tell their stories. A British YouTube star who won a substantial sum in a lawsuit, an anonymous law student who obtained a $6.45 million civil judgment against her perpetrator and a movie star who saw her perpetrator receive a 9-month prison sentence. While I have not met them, they are sisters to me. As time goes on, more victims will speak out and join us.
These days, I am happy. I can taste food again. My bones are hidden under a healthy layer of fat. Two years ago, I enrolled in law school, and I count the days until graduation. My story has a happy ending. But for every happy ending, there is a victim living her life while wanting to end it.
It has been called “revenge porn,” “involuntary pornography” and “nonconsensual pornography.” But using these terms is like calling rape “involuntary sex.” It simply doesn’t reflect the emotional, psychological and physical costs. Revenge porn is cyberrape, and we should call it as such.
The courts are loath to embrace new exceptions to the right to free speech, as they should be. But the courts also recognize that those who are harmed by speech, such as victims of defamation, can mitigate the harm through telling their side of the story. It’s called “counter-speech” or “more speech.”
But cyber-rape victims do not have this luxury. If we speak out about our experiences, it comes at a cost. Every time we speak, our intimate photos are viewed millions of times, they are further disseminated. We live the trauma all over again.
Those of us who have come forward are sometimes called “silence breakers.” But it’s not so much that we have been silent all these years. It’s just that no one listened.
Like other media companies, The Times collects data on its visitors when they read stories like this one. For more detail please see our privacy policy and our publisher's description of The Times's practices and continued steps to increase transparency and protections.
Follow @privacyproject on Twitter and The New York Times Opinion Section on Facebook and Instagram.
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Source: Read Full Article