'Revenge Porn' Outlawed In NYC Under New Law

NEW YORK, NY — Keep those nudes to yourself. The City Council voted Thursday to outlaw "revenge porn," the practice of sharing sexually explicit photos of someone to publicly shame them.

Leaking intimate images with the intent to harm the person who's in them could now get the leaker up to a year in jail or a $1,000 fine.

"With passage of this landmark legislation, New York City finally calls revenge porn exactly what it is: a crime," city Councilman Rory Lancman (D-Queens), who sponsored the bill, said in a statement. “For too long, our laws failed to keep up with our technology, leaving victims of revenge porn unable to seek justice and hold perpetrators accountable. That changes today."

It's illegal under state law to take sexual photos or videos of someone without their permission, but it's technically legal to share them.

The city bill bans anyone from sharing, without permission, photos of someone taken when they were fully or partially naked, or while they were "engaged in sexual activity."

To break the law, the person sharing the photos must be trying to cause the victim "economic, physical or substantial emotional harm," the bill says.

The bill also makes it illegal to threaten someone with leaking their intimate photos and allows revenge porn victims to sue the person who does so, regardless of whether that person gets charged with a crime.

Some 38 states have laws on the books banning revenge porn, according to the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative.

The state Senate in June passed a bill similar to the city's that would make revenge porn a misdemeanor crime and give victims the option to sue. But the state Assembly has yet to act on it.

One in every 25 Americans — and one in 10 women younger than 30 — has either been a revenge porn victim or had someone threaten to publish their photos online, according to a 2016 study by the Data & Society Research Institute. LGBT people are especially vulnerable, the study says.

Having photos leaked can damage victims' reputations and lead to further harassment from other people, according to the study.

"Offenders are motivated by all sorts of reasons — to injure or humiliate, but also out of boredom to show off sexual conquests, for sexual gratification, money, competition, just because hacking is fun," Carrie Goldberg, a Brooklyn victims rights attorney, said at a City Council hearing in April.

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(Lead image via Morguefile)