LOS ANGELES – If you have followed the evolution of revenge porn as a legal issue, then you’ve probably heard attorneys, activists and victim’s advocates talk about the difficulty of getting justice for victims. Historically, just getting law enforcement to pay attention and follow up on accusations of revenge porn, let alone launch effective investigations into the complaints, has been difficult.
Whether victims seek justice through the criminal courts or civil complaints, the process is painfully long, costly, emotionally taxing and all-around awful.
Even when revenge porn complaints do result in criminal convictions or civil damages, the ordeal often doesn’t end with the trial. Some defendants appeal their convictions, further extending the legal wrangling — and, of course, the images themselves often spread far beyond the original place of publication, meaning the victims often relive the initial humiliation and invasion of privacy repeatedly over subsequent months and years.
Most frustrating of all for revenge porn victims and their advocates: Many cases simply aren’t prosecuted at all. Sadly, that’s consistent across many other laws largely designed to protect women from harassment and abuse.
If there’s one manner of revenge porn (or to use a more apt term coined by former California Attorney General and current Senator Kamala Harris, “cyber-exploitation”) offense virtually guaranteed to get the full attention and commitment of law enforcement, it’s when the target of the exploitation is a celebrity — preferably a very wealthy one with a pit bull of an attorney and the clout, financial means and determination to go after the perpetrator with a vengeance.
Somehow, I have a feeling the latest celeb-involved revenge porn story to hit the news fits into this category. While it may remain difficult for the Jane Does of the world to get justice in a revenge porn case, I have a feeling Tiger Woods and Lindsey Vonn are among those rare victims who are going to get at least some degree of satisfaction in court.
When the stories about “the Fappening” first broke, I remember reading quite a few comments from people who thought the perpetrator would never be identified, much less prosecuted. All I can say is people posting such comments clearly have never been subject of a very wealthy person’s righteous ire.
Rich people tend to get what they want in this world, even when they aren’t entitled to it. When they’re legally and morally entitled to an outcome, everyone from elected officeholders to the rank and file of law enforcement become suddenly and unsurprisingly motivated to produce an outcome.
Woods reportedly has put Michael Holtz from the law firm of Lavely & Singer on the case. For whoever the culprit behind the alleged hack of Vonn’s phone may be, this is not good news.
Granted, unless you’ve been involved in a contract dispute with a very famous, very rich person, defamed such a person, violated their copyrights or infringed upon their right of publicity, you’ve probably never heard of Lavely & Singer. (You may have heard of the firm if you grew up a Richard Pryor fan, I suppose. The “Lavely” in question represented Pryor in a case that led to the actor/comedian being awarded $3.1 million in damages against his former agent and manager.)
The hubbub surrounding Woods and Vonn’s hacked images is still ramping up, so it remains to be see if it becomes a criminal matter. For now, Woods’s attorneys have demanded the site to which the images were posted take them down, but I won’t be surprised if this turns out to be just the first step of putting a serious legal hurting on someone, whether it’s the site’s operators, or (more likely) an end-user responsible for uploading the images.
As the site reportedly has published images of several other celebrities including Miley Cyrus, Katharine McPhee and Kristen Stewart, my hunch is momentum may be gathering behind the scenes, with legal representatives of the affected celebs burning up the California Attorney General’s phone lines, asking them to initiate a criminal investigation.
This incident isn’t creating quite the same buzz as the Fappening (to which multiple websites remain dedicated, at least in a titular way, despite the legal trouble Ryan Collins landed himself in), so it’s possible the situation will sputter out without much in the way of legal action.
If I were a betting man, however, I’d happily put a few bills on this: Someone is going to jail for posting a handful of nude pics and videos featuring a golfer and skier.
Images: Lindsey Vonn © Nick Step; Tiger Woods © Angela George.
