By Brian Murphy
McClatchy Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Just days after a member of Congress had an explicit image released on the internet by an anonymous Twitter user, congressional lawmakers began a strong push to make “revenge porn” or “sextortion” a federal crime.
Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said he shared a sexually explicit video and text messages with a woman he was seeing after he separated from his second wife. An image from that video of a naked Barton, now 68, appeared on the internet last week, becoming the talk of his hometown and spurring debate over criminal intent.
Tuesday, Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said they’d sponsor the new legislation to make “revenge porn” a federal crime. It’s similar to a bill introduced last year by Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif. Speier introduced the bill in the House again Tuesday.
“It’s time to update the law and ensure that individuals who maliciously exploit the private information and images of their victims are held accountable under criminal statute,” Burr said in a statement. “New technologies can make our lives better, but they also open a new platform for abuse and exploitation.”
Barton apologized last week for the leaked video, saying he should have used better judgment. He also suggested he’d been the victim of the crime of revenge porn, which is illegal under Texas’ law but not federal law.
Barton sent the video to a woman who he saw over the span of several years. In a recorded phone conversation that the woman gave to the Washington Post, Barton asked her not to use the video to hurt his career. She said she had no intention of doing so, but the video surfaced last week from an anonymous Twitter account.
Barton took the incident to the U.S. Capitol Police, but said last week he’d heard no word that an investigation had been opened.
Thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia have laws against distributing “revenge porn.” The new federal legislation would make it “unlawful to knowingly distribute a private, visual depiction of an individual’s intimate parts or of an individual engaging in sexually explicit conduct, with reckless disregard for the individual’s lack of consent to the distribution, and for other purposes.”
The FBI defines “sextortion” as “when someone threatens to distribute your private and sensitive material if you don’t provide them images of a sexual nature, sexual favors, or money.”
The federal legislation would establish federal criminal liability for people who share private, explicit images without consent. In order to prosecute someone under the proposed law, officials would have to prove the defendant was aware of a substantial risk that the victim expected the image would remain private and that sharing could cause harm to the victim.
“Perpetrators of exploitation who seek to humiliate and shame their victims must be held accountable,” said Harris, the former attorney general of California who prosecuted operators of “revenge porn” sites. “It is long past time for the federal government to take action to give law enforcement the tools they need to crack down on these crimes.”
The bill provides up to five years in prison and/or unspecified fines.
