In the wake of California's new legislation against "revenge porn," a practice in which scorned exes send nude and compromising photos of their former partners (usually girls) to porn sites in exchange for money, a New York senator is proposing a state law with even tighter restrictions, insisting that California did not go far enough with their own legislation, CBS New York reports.
"If a young woman takes a picture of herself, sends it to the boyfriend, a couple of years later he's posting it, that would be included under our legislation and that's a very significant improvement in the law," New York State Sen. Phil Boyle said on-air to 1010 WINS' Mona Rivera.
"Remember, 80 percent of these pictures are 'selfies.' I mean, the usually psycho ex-husband or ex-boyfriend who just can't get over the relationship or whatever, what they find that they've been doing is actually sending the picture of the new employer of the woman,"
Boyle's suggested bill would make "revenge porn" punishable by up to a year in jail and an $1,000 fine, and another bill proposed to the state Assembly suggested imposing a fine of $30,000. But as California legislators realized when creating their new laws, it's difficult to track down perpetrators. In California, anti-revenge porn laws rely upon proof that personal images were sent out willingly to cause the victim emotional distress.
Sites like the now defunct IsAnyoneUp.com have helped turn revenge porn into a trend. Many victims have had to pay certain revenge porn sites a fee to have their images removed, one way in which the business has become increasingly lucrative.
Holli Toups, a Texas victim of revenge porn, told a KTVT-TV, Dallas-Fort Worth reporter that her experience of having her private photos originally sent to her former boyfriend put online without her knowledge or consent was "humiliating, to say the least."
One day Troups walked into a store and a man stopped her and said, "Hey, you're the girl from that Web site."
"I think I stopped breathing for a while," she said upon realizing what her ex-boyfriend had done with her private photos.
She and 26 other women sued the Texas-based revenge porn website that had made their pictures semi-famous.
"This has nothing to do with free will. Those were my personal photos reserved for me privately and somehow they were taken and now they are all over the Internet for anyone to see. It's an invasion of privacy and it's disgusting," another victim, Caitlin, told KTVT-TV.
Sent. Boyle agrees that these women are being victimized by former partners. Currently legislators in Florida, New Jersey and Louisiana are drafting similar bills to try and put a stop to revenge porn, or at least help provide victims with a way to seek justice.
