“Revenge Porn” Bill Clears House

Jefferson County assistant attorney, Jeff Metzmeier, has helped several victims of revenge porn. Revenge porn is when someone’s personal images are released to the public without their permission. Metzmeier described an incident where a man took a intimate picture of an ex-girlfriend, put it on T-shirts, and had his friends where the T-shirts to a bar to humiliate the woman.

Currently, if this woman calls the police, she would be told that this is not actually against the law. House Bill 110 is hoping to change that. This bill would make it a class A misdemeanor to distribute pornopgraphic images with the intent to harm or harass without consent of the person in the photo and a felony if those images are released for profit.

Since this type of behavior can easily be done from a computer, revenge porn can cross the line into cyber-bullying. Metzmeier said that if these images are sent to a website, if the victim requests their removal, the sites will have to remove them.