Revenge Porn Bill passes NY State Senate – some initial thoughts

Today, it was announced that the New York State Senate passed legislation criminalizing the act of “revenge porn”. The bill needs to be approved by the New York Assembly in order to become law, but we suspect that it will. We have previously written about revenge porn and New York state’s need for a criminal statute that applies, so we consider this a welcome development, generally. Also, in theory, victims of this crime will have an implied cause of action in civil court for damages against the perpetrators, which we think is of critical importance and ideally would have been explicitly added to New York state law as a civil cause of action.

However, we have one minor quibble with the bill as it stands. The bill makes it a class A misdemeanor to disseminate “sexually intimate images or images of intimate parts of another person without that person’s explicit consent in order to harm, harass, scare or alarm that individual.” (It also makes it a class E felony for re-offenders). It seems to us that it would be better and more precise if the charge caused one count of this crime to issue for each sexually explicit image that were disseminated. Otherwise, someone might be charged with one count of this crime for disseminating dozens of images, whereas another person might be charged with the same crime for disseminating just one image.

In any event, the announcement is great news for victims of revenge porn, as it indicates that public officials have finally recognized just damaging revenge porn truly is to the mental and emotional health of victims.

If you or a loved one have been involved in a revenge porn case and need legal representation, you should strongly consider contacting the attorneys at the Law Office of Matthew Galluzzo.