Florida state senator Lauren Book has a very compelling reason to make revenge porn a felony in her home state: She herself has been a victim of it.
Not that she, or anyone, needs a compelling reason to make revenge porn—which we’ll loosely define as using sexually explicit images of someone without their consent by sharing them or threatening to share them to get money, as legal definitions vary by state—a felony. But while it’s illegal in almost every state, the laws vary across the country. In some, it’s a felony; in others, a misdemeanor (according to Business Insider, as of 2019).
Lauren Book, a Democrat, is sponsoring a bill that would strengthen Florida’s current law banning the practice, making it a felony to steal, distribute, sell, or trade stolen explicit images. Book’s images were stolen from her phone, where she had pictures of herself and her husband as well as a photo of her post-lumpectomy breast scar that she sent to a friend, reports CBS.
Jeremy Kamperveen, 19, was arrested and charged in 2021 with “extortion and cyberstalking” after he threatened to release nude images of Book unless the politician paid him $5,000, per CBS. But it wasn’t Kamperveen who originally stole the photos—he reportedly got them from private networks.
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Book learned during the investigation that her images had been passed around the internet since 2020, telling the Associated Press, per NBC, that the online messages she saw about herself were disgusting: “They were reading about who I was and talking about how I’m a survivor of rape, so let’s try to get some rape videos. Can we get some of her getting raped, killed, tortured? Can we make some of that? Can we find it? How can we get it?”
The proposed law would also cover “deep fakes,” or images/videos altered to depict something that never happened.
Book added that no matter what she does, the images of her and other revenge porn victims will likely be on the internet forever. “There are still things up there. Still,” she said. “They’ll never be gone. People were buying it, people were trading it, and this is not unique. This is happening every single day, to women predominantly.”
