One morning in March, in a courtroom in Newark, New Jersey, a young woman named Norma attended the sentencing of a former boyfriend, who had gone to grotesque lengths to humiliate her online. Four years earlier, when she was seventeen, she had met Christopher Morcos, who was then nineteen, at a Starbucks near her home, in Nutley. He was a business student at a local college, and Norma, who is soft-spoken, liked that he was outgoing. He was her first boyfriend, and they dated for two years. Like a lot of young men these days, he asked Norma to send him explicit selfies, and, like a lot of young women, she did. She made him promise that he would keep the pictures to himself. He assured her that he had hidden them on an app with a secure password, and that in any case he would never circulate them. Once in a while, however, he made a joke about doing just that. Norma, a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology who lives with her parents, never laughed in response; she warned him that if he did she’d take him to court.
In November, 2014, Norma broke up with Morcos. He barraged her with texts, sometimes telling her that she needed to talk to him because his mother was deathly ill. (This was a lie.) Other texts threatened to post online her intimate photographs. A few months later, Norma received a text message from a stranger, who said that he’d seen her page on PornHub, one of the most popular X-rated sites. She called her boss at the clothing store where she worked and said that she was going to be late that afternoon. Then she frantically began searching the Internet. Eventually, she found eight photographs that she’d given to her boyfriend, on a page that identified her by her first and last names. Norma told me, “It was basically soliciting people to contact me for oral sex. It had my phone number—that’s how that stranger had found me. It had my street name. My town was there. It said, ‘Find me on Facebook.’ My bra size was there. And then the photos.”
Norma initiated a criminal case against Morcos, and he was charged with invasion of privacy in the third degree, in accordance with a statute that is popularly known as a “revenge porn” law. In 2004, New Jersey passed the nation’s first such legislation. The statute makes it a crime for a person who knows “that he is not licensed or privileged to do so” to nonetheless disclose “any photograph, film, videotape, recording or any other reproduction of the image of another person whose intimate parts are exposed or who is engaged in an act of sexual penetration or sexual contact, unless that person has consented to such disclosure.”
The preferred term for such statutes is “nonconsensual-porn laws,” because the online harassment does not always involve a spurned ex like Morcos. Sometimes people hack into a celebrity’s iCloud or Gmail account to steal intimate pictures that can be sold and posted online. In 2014, Jennifer Lawrence and other prominent actresses were victims of such thefts; Lawrence told Vanity Fair that the incident was a “sex crime.” Last month, a Pennsylvania judge sentenced one of the men who hacked the images, Ryan Collins, to eighteen months in jail. Celebrities are not the only people targeted. A recent Brookings Institution report examined nearly eighty cases of “sextortion,” involving three thousand victims. In one such case, a Californian named Luis Mijangos tricked women into installing malware that searched their computers for sexually explicit photographs and switched on Webcams and computer microphones, allowing him to record the women undressing or having sex. He then threatened to release the resulting photographs or videos if the women didn’t make pornographic videos for him. In 2011, Mijangos was convicted of computer hacking and wiretapping, for which he is serving a six-year sentence.
Sometimes people surreptitiously film consensual sex acts, or even rapes, and make the footage public for reasons other than revenge. In April, Marina Lonina, an eighteen-year-old Ohio woman, was charged with live-streaming, on the Periscope app, the rape of a seventeen-year-old friend by a man they’d met at a nearby mall. Lonina and her lawyer said that she was trying to gather evidence by filming it. But, according to the prosecutor, she soon got caught up in the stream of “like”s from viewers. Lonina has been charged with rape, kidnapping, sexual battery, and pandering sexual matter involving a minor.
In the past decade, thirty-three more states and the District of Columbia have adopted nonconsensual-porn laws like New Jersey’s. Despite such efforts, one can easily find sites on the Internet that are dedicated to revenge porn. On myex.com, people post naked pictures of former spouses or lovers—mostly women, some men—along with their names, ages, and home towns. They add cruel captions: “My slut wife”; “Chubby frigid slut.” Posts about men frequently suggest that their penis is too small.
Prosecutions of individuals receive considerable media attention, in part because they are unusual. Pennsylvania has undertaken a dozen or so prosecutions—the most of any state. Other states with nonconsensual-porn laws have had just one or two cases make it to court. Victims are often reluctant, or ashamed, to come forward; police officers are sometimes unfamiliar with the new laws, or are unsure how to conduct the computer forensics needed to build a case.
Norma’s complaint would almost certainly not have proceeded to court had she not been represented by Carrie Goldberg, who was sitting in the courtroom next to her that day. Goldberg is a thirty-nine-year-old Brooklyn attorney with a practice specializing in sexual privacy, a new field of law that has emerged, in large part, to confront some of the grosser indulgences of the Internet. She has clients like Norma, who are trying to get intimate images of themselves, or graphic ads offering their sexual services, off the Internet before they go viral and strangers start showing up at their houses. She also has clients who are being extorted into providing sex or money because someone has graphic pictures of them and is threatening to send the images to employers or parents or siblings. She has even begun advising teen-age students who have been sexually assaulted and had the incidents recorded on cell phones, and who have then had to go to school with peers who may have been watching the videos in the cafeteria or the hallways.
Goldberg, a graduate of Brooklyn Law School, is a surprisingly glamorous presence, especially for the places her work tends to take her: drab courtrooms, grubby police precincts. Her hair is long and wavy; her nails are always painted; she wears oversized designer glasses, five-inch heels, color-block minidresses, and sharply cut trenchcoats. Rebecca Symes, a lawyer who once worked with Goldberg at Housing Conservation Coordinators, which represents Manhattan tenants facing eviction, told me, “Housing court is predominantly male—the attorneys, the landlords. And, how shall I put this? They tend to be schlumpy. Carrie stood out. She was a total badass. She was aggressive—you had to be—and you had to believe in your clients when everyone else was calling them deadbeats. A lot of the people called to legal-services work are do-gooders, and they are a little passive and meek. They don’t have that fierceness that Carrie has.”
In 2014, Mary Anne Franks, a University of Miami law professor who has advocated for revenge-porn laws, was attracting online critics who repeatedly attacked her with obscenities. Goldberg, in a show of support, sent her a lipstick with the name Lady Danger. Franks told me, “She included a card where she’d written, ‘This is what I wear when I want to feel like a warrior.’ It made me laugh, and I loved getting it. I love her whole persona. She’s so completely and utterly herself.”
Several years ago, Goldberg was harassed by a vengeful ex. At the time, she was working as the director of legal services at the Vera Institute, a criminal-justice nonprofit in Manhattan. The ex threatened to send intimate pictures she’d given him to her professional colleagues. “I stand before you as a lawyer but also as somebody’s target,” Goldberg said recently, in a speech that she gave at a conference on domestic abuse, in Albany. “When I went to the police, they told me it was not a criminal issue.” She’d been frightened and embarrassed, and after the ex was served with a restraining order—he did not disseminate the pictures—she decided to start her own firm. As she put it to me, “That way, I could be the lawyer I’d needed.” To her clients, many of whom are in their teens and twenties, Goldberg comes off like a cool older sister who always has your back. She greets them with girlish flamboyance—“Hi-i-i-i-i-i-i-i!”—then gets down to business.
A week before the sentencing of Christopher Morcos, I interviewed Norma in a conference room at Goldberg’s office, in Brooklyn Heights. At one point, Norma said, “Personally, I don’t see myself ever sending a photo like that again.” Goldberg was sitting with us, and she interjected, “Even though you know you did nothing wrong.” Norma nodded, and said to her, “I felt shame talking about it before, never knowing if the person you’re confiding in is judging you. I felt so worn out when I met you.” Goldberg said, “You’ve become much tougher. Whatever happens at the sentencing, you’re, like, a national leader on this, because so few people have got this far. You’re a warrior goddess, holding him accountable.”
Goldberg tries to impress on her clients that they should not feel ashamed. I once asked her how she responds to the argument that people who value their privacy should not send naked pictures in the first place. Goldberg replied that this was judgmental and reductive. She mentioned the case of Erin Andrews, the former ESPN reporter, who was filmed, without her knowledge, by a man staying in an adjoining hotel room. “Are you just supposed to never take your clothes off?” she said. “You can’t get naked, you can’t take a shower?” She spoke of upskirting—the voyeuristic practice of taking unauthorized pictures beneath a woman’s dress. “Are you never supposed to go out in public in a skirt?” Goldberg said. “Or what about images where somebody’s face has been Photoshopped onto somebody else’s naked body? What’s getting distributed isn’t necessarily images that were consented to in the first place. That’s why it’s the distribution you have to focus on.”
Goldberg went on, “But, even if you did take a naked picture and send it to somebody, that’s not necessarily reckless behavior. That’s time-honored behavior! G.I.s going off to war used to have pics of their wife or girlfriend in a pinup pose. It’s often part of intimate communication. It can be used as a weapon, but, the fact is, almost anything can be used as a weapon.”
When Norma’s boyfriend first threatened to release her photographs, she went to the police. They told her that there was nothing they could do. But after the pictures turned up online Norma’s mother, Arlene, looked up the New Jersey legal code and surmised that Morcos had broken a law. She found Goldberg’s practice through an Internet search, and when she called her office, in February, 2015, Goldberg picked up the line. “Oh, my God,” Goldberg told Arlene, upon hearing the story. “Of course I can help you.” Arlene’s family was struggling financially, and to their enormous relief Goldberg said that, in that case, she would provide the help pro bono.
First, Norma needed to get her photos off the Internet. Until recently, getting images removed from the Web was most often accomplished by filing a notice of copyright infringement. The person who takes a photograph automatically owns the copyright to it, so a selfie is your property. If a selfie has turned up on a porn site, then the person who took it can file a takedown notice, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, and requesting that the relevant Web hosts and search engines remove the image. The copyright on a picture that somebody else snaps of you—even with your cell phone, at your request—theoretically belongs to him or her, but you can apply to register the copyright under your name. Using copyright law to combat revenge porn is a bit like using tax law to go after Al Capone, but copyright is one of the only restrictions that the Internet respects.
Since images proliferate swiftly online, and takedown notices have to be filed with each site separately, stopping a viral image can be tedious and expensive. Erica Johnstone, a San Francisco lawyer who is one of the few in the country besides Goldberg with a practice devoted largely to sexual privacy, recently told me about a case that she worked on in 2013. A mother was helping her daughter take down nonconsensual porn. Johnstone said, “They spent at least five hundred hours between May and October sending requests. It was like a full-time job.” Worse, not all the sites complied.
Last year, partly in response to arguments by Goldberg and other activists, some major social-media platforms and search engines began banning revenge porn. The Attorney General of California, Kamala Harris, who was just elected to the U.S. Senate, convened a task force including tech companies, law enforcement officials, and advocates, which helped shape new policies. Companies have started providing online forms that allow victims to request that content be deleted without having to assert copyright first. Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook adopted policies against involuntary pornography in early 2015. Instagram, Google, Bing, and Yahoo soon followed. The search engines also agreed to “de-index” revenge porn, so that it no longer comes up under searches of the depicted person’s name, though it can still be accessed through the URL. Google explained the new policy in a statement: “Our philosophy has always been that Search should reflect the whole web. But revenge porn images are intensely personal and emotionally damaging, and serve only to degrade the victims. . . . This is a narrow and limited policy, similar to how we treat removal requests for other highly sensitive personal information, such as bank account numbers and signatures.”
In October, 2015, PornHub joined the effort, announcing that it would honor requests to take down revenge porn. (Goldberg tweeted that PornHub was her “@twitter crush” of the day.) Meanwhile, several notorious revenge-porn Web sites have been shut down and their operators sent to prison—not because they were distributing the photos and videos but because they were committing crimes such as identity theft, extortion, and hacking along the way. The Federal Trade Commission has taken up some of these cases in its role as a monitor of fraudulent or deceptive commercial practices. Last year, the agency prohibited Craig Brittain, the operator of a Web site called isanybodydown, from sharing nude photographs of women that he’d acquired by deceptive means—such as posing as a woman on Craigslist—while redirecting the women to another Web site that he ran, and which promised to remove the pictures in exchange for money. (Brittain has denied using such methods to acquire the photographs.)
Misogyny on the Internet has proved notoriously intransigent. Trolls who threaten sexual violence against female writers in online comment threads have driven some women off-line, while anonymity protects the perpetrators. Some women confront trolls directly, but most try to ignore them. A few years ago, Lindy West, a witty columnist for the Guardian, who takes on such subjects as rape jokes and body shaming, was subjected to a particularly nasty barrage of comments on social media. (“No one would want to rape that fat disgusting mess”; “I want to put an apple into that mouth of yours and take a huge stick and slide it through your body and roast you.”) One troll created a fake Twitter account in the name of West’s father, who had recently died, as though his ghost were issuing vulgar insults to his daughter. Instead of brushing off the troll’s attack, she wrote an essay about how it had made her feel; this prompted him to apologize to her. In 2015, the man appeared with West on an episode of “This American Life,” and she asked him why he’d done it. He said that he’d been overweight at the time, and that West’s confidence in her own large body had set him off. In the segment, he was not named. Like most trolls, he never experienced any repercussions for what he’d done.
In the movement to combat online harassment, Goldberg is more of a pragmatist than a theorist. But Mary Anne Franks, of the University of Miami, and Danielle Citron, of the University of Maryland, have been publishing articles in law reviews arguing that extreme forms of cyber harassment undermine equal opportunity. Citron’s 2014 book, “Hate Crimes in Cyberspace,” contends that, because such behavior disproportionately affects women and minorities—damaging their ability to express themselves in public, their employment prospects, and their sense of personal safety—the legal system must treat it as a violation of their civil rights. She recommends criminalizing revenge porn, including online threats, in existing statutes against stalking and harassment, and making it easier for victims to sue under pseudonyms. Citron, who has been making such arguments for years, told me that tech companies and state legislators are increasingly embracing her perspective: “What seemed crazy to them back in 2007, when I was arguing that this should be criminalized and was a civil-rights violation, all of a sudden became non-crazy. It went from ‘Oh, no, she’s breaking the Internet’ to ‘Danielle, she’s fine, she’s middle of the road.’ ” Citron thinks the companies have realized that consumers “have a taste for sexual privacy.”
Arguments on behalf of online privacy still meet strong resistance. Citron, Franks, and Goldberg are among the leaders of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, a group that advocates for the passage of nonconsensual-porn laws. Its members have been criticized for being insufficiently attentive to the First Amendment, and for not respecting the untrammelled spirit of the Internet. If revenge-porn laws are too broad, they can incriminate consensually sexting teen-agers or people posting naked pictures that merit public interest—images of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, for example. At a time when many liberals are trying to fight excessive incarceration, it can be troubling to think about creating new classes of crime. Silicon Valley libertarians worry that the image-takedown policies instituted by social-media platforms could promote a shift toward the “right to be forgotten” regime that has taken hold in Europe, in which individuals can force a search engine to remove links to online content that they consider embarrassing—including content that they themselves posted. Might valuable content be effectively expunged from the Internet simply to shield people from shame?
In 2014, the A.C.L.U. opposed an Arizona law designed to combat nonconsensual porn, on the ground that the wording was “overbroad.” This past April, the Motion Picture Association of America voiced a similar critique of a law under consideration in Minnesota. And in June the governor of Rhode Island, Gina Raimondo, vetoed a revenge-porn bill, citing the First Amendment, because the bill did not specify that, in order to be criminal, an unauthorized release of intimate pictures had to be made with an intent to harass. Citron and others have countered that revenge-porn laws can be drafted so that they carve out exceptions reflecting the public interest. Moreover, as Franks has pointed out, laws with an “intent to harass” requirement let off the hook people who run revenge-porn sites, and who are just out to make money.
The Minnesota bill passed in May, and Franks considers it to be well-drafted legislation. It explicitly protects pictures and videos that were made for artistic sale or display, that were obtained legally in a commercial setting, that are of legitimate public interest, and that have a scientific or educational purpose. Under such a statute, a media organization could make a strong case that it was justified in publishing Anthony Weiner’s photographs of his penis, because it shows such foolish behavior in a politician running for office. It’s even possible, if a stretch, to make the argument that Hulk Hogan’s sex tape had to be posted online, as well as reported on, because he is a celebrity who bragged about his sexual prowess. (Gawker, which published the video, made this case to a Florida jury, but the jury was not convinced, awarding Hogan a hundred and forty million dollars in damages. Gawker said that it would appeal the verdict, but ended up settling the case, for thirty-one million dollars.) But, at least in states with nonconsensual-porn laws, it would now be very hard to make the case that a private individual posting a naked selfie of his ex, against that person’s will, is doing anything other than breaking the law.
A federal nonconsensual-porn bill was introduced over the summer by Representative Jackie Speier, a California Democrat, and it includes a set of exceptions that echo the Minnesota law. It also offers Internet-service providers a degree of immunity; without this, opposition from Silicon Valley would be fierce. Speier’s staff consulted with Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional scholar at the University of California, Irvine, and he declared the bill to be sound, saying, “There is no First Amendment problem with this bill. The First Amendment does not protect a right to invade a person’s privacy by publicizing, without consent, nude photographs or videos of sexual activity.”
In criminal courts, revenge-porn laws do not yet seem to be producing questionable guilty verdicts or egregious sentences. Some critics argue that existing laws can handle the problem, but many examples suggest otherwise. In 2013, a twenty-nine-year-old man from Brooklyn who posted naked photographs of his ex-girlfriend on his Twitter account, and sent them to her employer and her sister, was charged with three misdemeanors: aggravated harassment, dissemination of unlawful surveillance, and public display of offensive sexual material. (New York does not have a nonconsensual-porn statute.) The judge, Steven Statsinger, called the man’s behavior reprehensible but found that he had not broken the law. Harassment law in New York stipulates that there has to have been direct communication with the victim; the man had not obtained the pictures unlawfully; nudity alone doesn’t constitute “offensive sexual material”; and posting on Twitter did not amount to “public display,” since Twitter is a “subscriber-based social networking service.” (This reflected Statsinger’s misunderstanding of social media: Twitter content easily migrates across the Internet.)
After Norma went to the police, she asked PornHub to remove her pictures. The company complied. At the meeting in Brooklyn, Goldberg praised Norma’s quick thinking: the longer the images stayed on PornHub, which has billions of visits a month, the more likely they were to go viral. Some of the images, Goldberg explained, could still turn up on porn sites that would refuse to take them down; the images could also have been saved to people’s laptops and phones. But such problems were less likely because Norma had acted swiftly. It was too bad, Goldberg added gently, that Norma had not taken screen shots of the pictures online. That would have been useful in a criminal case or a civil suit. Goldberg counsels clients that, even though their first impulse might be to destroy all traces of revenge porn, they should collect evidence of its damaging effect, including online comments, which, as Goldberg’s associate Adam Massey told me, often contain “death and sexual-assault threats.” Goldberg’s firm uses a company called Page Vault, which preserves screen shots that capture the date, the time, and the URL, and are admissible in court. In nonconsensual-porn cases, Goldberg likes to say, “the proof of the crime”—images in a Web browser—“is the crime.”
The day after Goldberg accepted Norma’s case, she accompanied her to the police precinct. “Sometimes it’s a framing problem,” Goldberg told me. “Sometimes victims don’t know how to explain the issue in a way that’s going to have the greatest impact on the police.” She brought in a printout of the relevant state law, and told Norma to tally all the communications that she’d received from Morcos. “I always tell clients that it’s super important to get the metrics,” Goldberg said. “Like, ‘He contacted me seventy-five times during this two-hour period. And fourteen times within those contacts were threats that he was going to drown my dog. And he posted my picture on three different Web sites within x period of time, and now I’m on a thousand different Web sites.’ ”
Goldberg’s intervention here, though, was not a success. “We got the door shut in our face,” she told me. “I was, like, ‘I’m here to save the day.’ And they were saying, ‘No, Norma’s already reported this, and she doesn’t have enough proof, and the prosecutors told us not to be using this new law.’ Which was strange.”
Soon after taking Norma’s case, Goldberg e-mailed Jason Boudwin, a prosecutor she knew of in Middlesex County, New Jersey, who had brought one of the first revenge-porn cases in the state. Goldberg persuaded him to call a counterpart in Essex County, where Norma lived. The prosecutor who ended up taking the case, Seth Yockel, had worked on domestic-violence cases and had a background in computers.
Yockel issued subpoenas to Internet-service providers to find the I.P. addresses that had been involved in uploading Norma’s pictures. He told me, “We traced them back to the house of Mr. Morcos’s mom. We figured they probably weren’t coming from his mom.” He soon negotiated a plea deal with Morcos’s lawyer, in which Morcos pleaded guilty to the invasion-of-privacy charge in exchange for the state’s dropping a second charge, of cyber harassment.
Norma’s parents were both in court with her on the day of the sentencing, as were two of her friends. Goldberg had invited another client, a New Yorker named Connie, to watch the proceeding, thinking that she might find it encouraging to witness a perpetrator facing justice.
Connie and her boyfriend broke up after he became physically abusive. He then placed ads for her on escort sites and on Craigslist, including her full name and personal details; he also created fake Google+, Facebook, and porn-site pages about her. She was described as an “Asian black widow” who “enjoyed gang bangs” and had various sexually transmitted diseases. Connie, who is thirty-five, had never given naked pictures to her ex, but he posted photographs of her face alongside random images of vaginas. Connie told me, “I grew up in a very conservative Asian household—very quiet people, God-fearing and all that good stuff—in Jackson Heights, Queens. To see your picture on an escort site and all these venomous things about you, it kind of makes you question who you are. Because how did you allow this person to come into your life? And—how do I explain this without crying?—you feel ashamed.” Connie got some of the content taken down on her own; Goldberg helped her with the rest, and was pushing the New York prosecutor to count the online attacks as violations of a restraining order that had been placed on Connie’s ex.
Still, Connie’s life remained in many ways on hold: she had left Manhattan, abandoning a career in luxury-ad sales, and she had eliminated her online presence, which made it hard to maintain friendships or to find a new job. Goldberg told me that people in Connie’s position often had such difficulties. If you didn’t mention the harassment in a job interview, you risked having the potential employer find graphic pictures of you online; if, like Connie, you erased your Internet presence, the employer might see nothing about you online, which was suspicious in its own way. “I have no social life,” Connie told me. “I don’t go out. I basically have two friends. I’ve started to get used to it, but it’s also kind of lonely. I used to work in a very prestigious industry around a lot of people. But I’m really scared to have a Facebook account, or a Twitter, because I don’t know what backlash would come from it.”
Connie was thinking about suing her ex-boyfriend. Goldberg had told her that there were relevant torts under which she could seek damages, including intentional infliction of emotional distress, and that she could petition the judge to let her sue as a Jane Doe. A few victims of cyber harassment have successfully pursued civil actions. In 2014, a Texas jury awarded half a million dollars to a woman whose boyfriend had recorded their sexually explicit Skype sessions without her knowledge, then uploaded the videos to porn sites after they broke up. But victims don’t often pursue civil actions, in part because most potential defendants are what lawyers call “judgment-proof”: they lack the money to pay a big settlement. Connie’s former boyfriend was a successful real-estate developer, but she was reluctant to be back in his orbit during a protracted legal case.
At one point, I told Connie and Goldberg that the psychology of revenge porn confounded me. In trashing your ex, you were, in a sense, trashing yourself and a whole portion of your life. “Right,” Goldberg said. “It’s like you’re announcing to the world, ‘I was with a prostitute.’ But I think during breakups there is that devaluing. That’s how you justify it: ‘I dodged a bullet there.’ ”
The Internet, she said, had given rise to something new in the history of revenge: “Historically, we had checks and balances. If you are someone who is always seeking revenge, that’s going to affect your reputation. But on the Internet a guy can be really bad and his friends aren’t necessarily going to know that he’s doing all these shitty things.”
Goldberg also thought that the Internet had made people “more compulsive and impulsive.” She explained, “So many people don’t know how to sit with a thought, whether it’s a good thing—‘Oh, that’s such a pretty landscape, I have to post it on Facebook’—or a bad thing: ‘What do I do with this angry emotion?’ ”
Near the end of the New Jersey proceeding, Morcos offered an apology to the court and to Norma, whom he referred to only as “her.” He told the judge, “I went too far. I guess I didn’t handle it correctly.” Norma then got up to read a nine-hundred-word statement, which she had prepared and practiced in Goldberg’s office the previous week. The paper trembled in her hands, but her voice was steady. The courtroom got very quiet. Morcos looked down at the table.
“I worried about future job opportunities being affected if these pictures were circulated throughout the Internet,” Norma read. “I was afraid for my safety—afraid that a sex offender would be able to locate me after seeing my photos and my information.” Such fears are not unreasonable. In 2009, a Wyoming woman whose ex-boyfriend had advertised her on Craigslist as someone looking for “a real aggressive man with no concern for women” was raped, at knifepoint, by a man who responded to the ad. In 2013, a Maryland man was found guilty of posting fake ads about his ex-wife, including one that said “Rape Me and My Children.” Fifty men showed up at the condominium where the woman lived with her children; some tried to break in. Goldberg has a client whose stalker has repeatedly created fake ads in which the client advertises free sex; the client works at a pharmacy, and a steady stream of men have shown up there. The ads urge men not to be discouraged if she ignores them.
As Norma spoke, Goldberg sat up very straight. Connie shook her head in sympathy. “I cannot get back my privacy that had been invaded when those pictures were online,” Norma concluded. “I do not know how many people saw them, I do not know how many people saved them, and every single day I think about the fact that other people have seen me in my most private state.”
The judge, Michael Ravin, addressed the court. “As a parent with a daughter, I could say plenty,” he said. “This kind of conduct is just so over the line. . . . Especially for somebody intelligent. It shows a lack of insight, a lack of impulse control.” He sentenced Morcos to four years of probation, then said, “No—make it five.” This was the maximum allowed under the law. The judge also ordered Morcos to perform a hundred hours of community service, to undergo a mental-health evaluation, and to refrain from contacting Norma and her family. If Morcos violated any of these terms, Ravin said, he could be sent to prison.
Afterward, Norma and her family said that they wouldn’t have minded if the judge had imposed some jail time. But they were grateful to Goldberg and to the prosecutor. Connie said she felt heartened that “this one guy, anyway, probably isn’t going to do this to another girl.” Goldberg was pleased, too. “Norma’s not going to go home and cry,” she said to me. “She was treated respectfully by everybody today.” I mentioned Judge Ravin’s remark about how the facts of this case had hit him as a father. “That actually bothered me,” Goldberg said. “I wish it wasn’t always ‘As the father of a daughter’ or ‘As the husband of a wife.’ I wish it were ‘This kind of assault on someone’s dignity bothers me as a human being with a soul and a conscience.’ ”
Since so many of Goldberg’s clients have unhinged exes, she works in an office with an elaborate security system. She also carries pepper spray, making a point of using a product called BlingSting, which comes in sparkly cannisters. Although Goldberg acknowledges that she is a workaholic who spends much of her time thinking about men who cause women “irreparable misery,” she maintains the bright, squiggly demeanor of a screwball heroine. She has a Chihuahua named Meshugenneh, and drives a 1966 GTO. She starts most days boxing at the gym and keeps a silk apparatus for acrobatics hanging from her apartment ceiling, but she often eats candy for breakfast. She is divorced, amicably, from a Vassar English professor. They share custody of Meshugenneh.
Goldberg grew up in Aberdeen, Washington, the rainy, economically depressed logging town that Kurt Cobain was from. Her father ran a furniture store; her mother, an obituary writer for the local paper, quit to bring up four children. Goldberg, the second child, was an instinctive feminist and a bit of a misfit. “Artsy without the artistic talent,” as she puts it. It was the riot-grrrl era, and Goldberg was riotous. She started a little business, called Masked Mams, selling bras that she made out of baby-doll heads. “Well, selling might be overstating it,” she told me. “I’d go to the Evergreen College campus and barter them.” She and her friend Lindsay Lunnum, now an Episcopal priest, worked on the high-school yearbook together, and they amused themselves by writing erotica about some of the more boring boys’ teams. As Lunnum recalled, “We were very interested in sex, but we had no experience.” A teacher found their raunchy writings and confronted the young women’s parents about them. Goldberg was irate, pointing out that the teacher must have found the erotica by searching their lockers. He’d violated their privacy.
During high school, Goldberg once dropped a friend off at a motel where a man the friend liked was hosting a party. The friend passed out from drinking and was sexually assaulted by the man and his friends. “Back then, it didn’t occur to her or me to tell the police or even to call it rape,” Goldberg said. “But, as I think about it now, that was a pivotal moment for me.”
Goldberg’s office has a boutique-hotel vibe: navy-and-gold wallpaper, a blue velvet mid-century-modern couch. On a side table, there is a glittery plastic axe that a friend retrieved from an abandoned art exhibit. Whenever I saw the “disco axe,” as Goldberg calls it, I thought of that pejorative term for a fierce woman—“battle-axe”—and how she was redefining the role.
One morning in her office, she told me that she had recently gone to a management seminar where the instructor advised the lawyers in attendance to establish a stringent policy forbidding porn in the workplace. Adam Massey, Goldberg’s associate, laughed. His work often entails scanning porn sites and looking for evidence.
Goldberg hopped on a pile of cushions next to Massey’s desk. She was wearing a black turtleneck dress and a ring that spelled out the word “B-A-L-L-S.” “I told them we had a different, rather more nuanced policy,” she said. “I didn’t tell them about the times I’ve gotten annoyed, like today, when you’ve got pages and pages to go through, and I’m, like, ‘Adam, get back to the porn!’ ”
Massey, whose desk is in the middle of the office, keeps the sound on his computer turned down. That day, he was checking to see whether some porn links that had received takedown orders from Goldberg were still active. “My least favorite part of the job is looking at porn,” Massey told me later. “I try to think of it as document review.”
Massey kept clicking through links while we talked about the market for “amateur” commercial porn—which is often billed as featuring young women who have only once been filmed having sex. There are Internet subcultures dedicated to unmasking the women’s identities. The client whose links Massey was monitoring had made one porn video, in her late teens, under coercion. She had been promised, falsely, that the footage would not be distributed widely online. Amateur porn obsessives had recently found innocuous YouTube videos of her from when she was a young girl, and they were linking them to the porn, exposing her identity.
Goldberg came over and said that you couldn’t discount the thrill of the search as a motivation, too. “There’s that sleuthing aspect,” she said. “I get that, because we do our own version.”
Earlier in the day, Goldberg and I had talked about the sleuthing she had done on behalf of a college student who’d worked as a so-called cam girl. The young woman was a student at a university in the South, and she had responded to a Craigslist ad that asked, “Are you an aspiring model?” She’d needed the money and agreed to the work, performing solo sex acts or getting naked, for individual clients, on Skype. She had even signed a contract, which contained murky language about the company owning her performances, in all technologies “now known or hereafter developed.” The young woman fell behind on her hours, and the operator stopped paying her. Then he started demanding that she come to his house and have sex with him; otherwise, he warned her, he would distribute her videos. He texted her, “I know u would much rather have sex with me once than your entire family knowing what u do and everyone at your school too. Cause it will be broadcast all over.” He told her that she had to get an underage friend of hers to come work for him, too. She texted back, “Thanks for messing with my life and being so cruel. I’m not getting my friend involved with this shit.”
The man had used an alias, but his company had a Web site, and he had a Twitter account. Goldberg tried doing a reverse image search on his Twitter photo, but it didn’t yield anything. Eventually, she identified a phone number associated with the company’s Web-site registration, and that led her to the Facebook pages of the man and his wife. A photograph showed them in front of a house in Louisiana. Goldberg, using Google Street View, was able to track down the man’s address. She sent him a cease-and-desist letter, telling him that he could be charged with extortion under federal and state law, and noting that Louisiana law sanctioned threats to “expose or impute any deformity or disgrace to the individual threatened or to any member of his family or to any other person held dear to him.” The crime, she added, carried up to fifteen years of prison, including hard labor. Goldberg takes pride in her cease-and-desist letters. Her client never heard from the man again.
Not all of Goldberg’s clients are women, but the men, she says, generally have different concerns. Often, they are being extorted for money. One reason that revenge porn targets men less often is that, as Goldberg says, “there is less of a secondary downstream market for it.” She mentioned one male client, a graduate student from a prominent family. He responded to a Craigslist ad about a sexual fetish, and began chatting online with a woman who was into it. They were supposed to have a date, but he backed out, and the woman started threatening to expose their conversations. In this case, it was a matter of figuring out who she was and monitoring her online activity from afar, then deciding not to contact her.
“She had started getting quieter on the Internet toward him,” Goldberg explained. “So we didn’t want to do anything to rev her up. We found her blog, under a pseudonym. And within a couple of days she was seriously trash-talking someone else—someone who actually had gone out on a date with her but didn’t want a second date.” Goldberg continued, “I knew that, because she had clearly moved on, she was probably no longer a threat to my client. And if somebody was out of control and spinning, and then they’re not continuing to throw out communications, it means they’ve calmed themselves down. It’s kind of like a baby throwing a tantrum—once they’ve calmed down, something would have to trigger them to start up again. And that trigger could be a letter from a lawyer.”
One day when I stopped by Goldberg’s office, she was preparing for a visit from one of her youngest clients, whom I’ll call Jessica. In April, 2015, when Jessica was thirteen, a male classmate at Spring Creek Community School, in Brooklyn, dragged her into an alley and orally and anally sodomized her. She had never had sex, and she said that it was rape, but the boy said that it was consensual. He had filmed the incident, and the video was circulating at school.
Other students had bullied Jessica online and at school, where they waved cell phones that were playing the video. The principal had sent her home. A “safety transfer” to another school took a month to arrange, so that Jessica was in effect punished for what had happened to her. Goldberg considered the school’s handling of the incident a violation of Title IX, the statute under which any school receiving federal funds is required to quickly investigate claims of sexual harassment or assault, and to take steps to prevent abuse from happening again. Goldberg filed a complaint on behalf of Jessica with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which has agreed to investigate it. College campuses have been the locus for Title IX complaints about sexual assault, but middle schools and high schools may well be the next battleground.
Jessica is African-American, and Goldberg has taken on two other cases involving peer assaults on young black girls in Brooklyn public schools. On Twitter, she has cited a troubling statistic: Yale has nineteen Title IX coördinators for its twelve thousand students; the New York City school system has one Title IX coördinator for 1.1 million children. (Toya Holness, a spokesperson for the New York City Department of Education, said that school staff are trained in “reporting, investigating, and responding to such incidents.”)
In June, Goldberg filed another complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, on behalf of a developmentally disabled fifteen-year-old girl. According to the complaint, the girl had been taken into a stairwell at Teachers Preparatory School, in Brooklyn, by a group of seven boys, who forced her to perform oral sex on two of them while five watched. It was the second of three New York cases, Goldberg pointed out in her cover letter, “in which our client is a poor black girl age 13-15,” whose sexual assault had been mishandled, or neglected, by the school system.” (Holness said, “Nothing is more important than the safety of all students and staff, and we have policies in place that insure incidents are reported, investigated, and appropriately addressed. We are reviewing these deeply troubling complaints and addressing any pending matters with the Office for Civil Rights.”)
When Goldberg meets with her younger clients, she acts as both lawyer and social worker. She’d brought snacks for Jessica, and there was a translator on hand for her mother, whose primary language is Haitian Creole. Jessica is now fifteen, but she looks younger—she has a sweet, shy smile and a fresh-scrubbed face. She sat in the conference room huddled in a parka and a knit cap, her hands folded in her lap. But she seemed comfortable with Goldberg, whom she’s taken to texting when she gets a good grade. At one point, her mother said she was upset that her daughter hadn’t immediately told her about the assault: “She’s my life, so don’t keep secrets.” Goldberg told her, “So many kids her age would have done the same thing, especially because she knew it would hurt you.”
Goldberg asked them if they were still sure they wanted to pursue a case. Jessica nodded and said yes. Her mother mentioned a friend whose daughter was raped, and said that the family had decided not to take legal action. “Not my daughter,” Jessica’s mother said. Goldberg replied, “There are a lot of reasonable ways to react. This is one of them. And I think it could make a difference in New York City schools.” She added that, were they to win, “as part of a settlement, maybe there could be required classes about sexual consent, and what to do if you receive a picture or video like this. ‘Report it, don’t send it on.’ ” A short hearing on the case was held in late October, but Goldberg told me that she expects the case to move slowly. Jessica may be an adult by the time it is resolved.
By this summer, Goldberg had more than thirty-five active clients, and she decided to expand her firm. She hired a senior associate, Lindsay Lieberman, who had worked in the special-victims bureau of the Kings County prosecutor’s office. Goldberg’s public profile was steadily rising. In May, she was invited to the White House for the meeting of a task force about sexual assault in elementary, middle, and high schools. And, since the election of Donald Trump, she says, she’s seen a “drastic uptick” in people seeking her firm’s help—evidence of what she worries is a “new license to be cruel.” Some of the cases have an explicitly political cast. One family’s baby pictures, for example, became memes in an anti-Hillary Clinton conspiracy theory alleging the sexual torture of children.
Goldberg is emerging as a new kind of privacy champion—less concerned with government surveillance than with the sharing and leaking and hacking of our personal lives. She works on the assumption that, even in a world where graphic porn and Kardashian-style exhibitionism are ubiquitous, some people will want to keep certain intimate matters private, and society will be better off if they’re allowed to do so. It’s a complicated mission, because people do record and share so many images of themselves today. But she believes in protecting privacy as a form of dignity and as a bulwark against disgrace—an old-fashioned word that she is fond of. She’s a feminist lawyer who has turned her own experience of coming under attack into a fighting stance: Gloria Allred crossed with Jessica Jones.
Goldberg and I discussed an argument that I occasionally heard from younger feminists and Internet utopians: that someday disgrace would be irrelevant. If everybody’s naked pictures were available on the Internet, nobody would need to feel ashamed. “Well, I totally disagree with that,” Goldberg said. “I think that privacy is something that has to be respected, because otherwise where’s the boundary between you and me? And I’m not saying that everybody has to have the same level of modesty, but, if you are not wanting to show your naked pictures to everybody, that seems like a choice you ought to be able to have.” She smiled mischievously. “I think it would have worked, like, when we were cavemen.”
“Before the Fall?” Massey, who was listening from his desk, said.
“Yeah,” Goldberg said. She got up and walked across the room in her towering heels. “I mean, would people who make that argument say the same thing about your credit-card information? You know, it’s O.K. if everybody knows everybody else’s Social Security number? Or private medical information?” She paused, then said, “Can you imagine if everything was public? If we shared everything? That would be hellish.” ♦
