Carrie Goldberg: Online Harassment, Revenge Porn & the Law
Podcast Transcript Season 2 Episode 31
Interviewer: Liz Goldwyn
Illustration BY Black Women Animate
This week’s podcast guest is Carrie Goldberg— victim’s rights attorney and founder of C.A. Goldberg; a cutting edge law firm that helps victims fight pervs, assholes, psychos and trolls. Some of her most prominent legal battles include ongoing cases against the New York Department of Education and Grindr. Carrie details how her own experience with a vengeful ex changed the course of her career; why the internet is outpacing law enforcement; what to do if you are being harassed online and her new book, Nobody’s Victim, which is out now!
The following is a transcript of the interview from the episode:
Liz:
You are such a high profile, busy lawyer and fighting crime and fighting for justice wherever you go so, I appreciate you coming to LA and being here.
C.A. Goldberg:
Oh, this is a privilege. Thank you for having me Liz.
Liz:
Your firm, which is your namesake, C.A. Goldberg PLLC, focuses on victim's rights litigation in particular dealing with cases of online harassment, stalking, sexual assault, and sexual privacy, which is, from what I understand not very common for law firms to specialize in this area. How did you come to practice this type of law?
C.A. Goldberg:
Well, first of all, I never thought I would become a lawyer. It was just all these ... Some people are just born knowing that they're gonna be lawyers and it was nothing that really appealed to me until I had this job working for Nazi victims. Then I was doing all this work on reparations and restitution and I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna go to law school and get involved in truth and reconciliation tribunals all over the world and stuff, and then I got shitty grades. I didn't get some amazing human rights job and instead started doing litigation. I was working at the non-profit when I ended a short term relationship with a crazy person and he basically told me that he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying mine and I had no idea what to do. I was a lawyer but I was not prepared for the tsunami of emails and threats and revenge porn and threatening to send my pictures to judges and lawyers and clients, and making false police reports. This happened in 2013 and my entire life was just uprooted.
I had to move, my family was pissed at me because he was doing stuff, making false reports to the IRS about them. Everything was totally different and I reported it to the cops and they were like, "Well you should go to family court." I went to family court in New York and the judge said to me, I had this, "Eureka," moment where he said to me, he was like, "Mrs. Goldberg, I know you are a lawyer but I suggest you get a lawyer. You have a First Amendment problem." What he was referring to was I was trying to get an order of protection that would protect me not only from this man being in my physical space as he was threatening to do, but also an order of protection that would stop him from communicating with me. But I wanted an order of protection that would stop him from aggressing on the internet and sending out naked pictures that he had in his possession of me. The judge telling me I had a First Amendment problem was just this light bulb moment 'cause I was like, "What? It's somebody's freedom of speech to be able to post a person's most intimate material on the internet, that's so fucked up."
When I finally got to the other side of it, and I was doing Elder Law at the time, nothing related to what I do now, and when I got to the other side of it I just decided I was going to quit everything and become the lawyer that I needed. I had this epiphany about it in December of 2013 and gave my notice, and my last day of work was January 23rd, 2014 and I started my firm the next day.
Liz:
Wow.
C.A. Goldberg:
Yeah, I mean, so basically, the point is to ... We go after assholes, psychos, pervs, and trolls and-
Liz:
Which is the title of your new book.
C.A. Goldberg:
Yes, it's called, "Nobody's Victim Fighting Assholes, Psychos, Pervs, and Trolls." Oh wait no, it's called, "Nobody's Victim Fighting Stalkers, Psychos, Pervs, and Trolls." The publisher-
Liz:
But you get the gist.
C.A. Goldberg:
The publisher made me change it from assholes, stalkers but, in my mind it's still-
Liz:
Assholes.
C.A. Goldberg:
Still assholes.
Liz:
The silver lining of that situation is that it gave you, not only this fire in your belly and this power, but also empathy for the kinds of clients and cases you'd be taking on, which is a very different position for a lawyer to be in.
C.A. Goldberg:
Right. I actually had no idea, I thought when I started, I was just going to be a solo lawyer and my office was about the size of most people's dinner table. I started it just on, I think I had $3,000 from the vacation days from my old job being reimbursed to me. It turns out, you can start a law firm for really cheap because you're basically the inventory. But things just started working almost immediately. I started Tweeting and blogging a lot about revenge porn, and I didn't have any clients, and so I was spending all my time doing that and spending all my time sending email blasts to the politicians in New York state demanding that they stop revenge porn. At the time there were maybe, I think there were 10 or 12 states that had revenge porn laws. Within a month, there were random articles about me being the revenge porn lawyer and the expert on revenge porn. I'm like, "I've only been doing this for a month," but, I looked around and I was the only practicing lawyer really in that space. I was like, "Well I guess that makes more of an expert than other people."
Liz:
That is interesting because also in 2014 there was a big media moment around Zoe Quinn and Gamergate involving an Ex she met on OkCupid. Perhaps it dovetailed with, "Holy shit, we don't have any laws in place to deal with these kind of issues."
C.A. Goldberg:
Totally. I mean, that was such a watershed moment and Gamergate was people, I think, finally realized how incredibly abusive the internet could be and what an incredible organizing tool it is for people who have an agenda and want to just spread hate and abuse.
Liz:
It's such a deep betrayal of love and trust, right. In any relationship when you breakup, pre-internet days there is that fear like, "I've been so vulnerable with this person. They're gonna share my secrets." But then it comes and we come into the phase of sending digital nudes, right?
C.A. Goldberg:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Liz:
It's tricky because one, should we assume a risk that if we send a lover a nude that maybe one day it could end up in public, but then there's also the issue of the voyeuristic or surreptitious photographs and videos that people take, often mostly of women. Where is that line, 'cause I don't know if you can really say, especially to teenagers or Millennials today, "Don't send those photos."
C.A. Goldberg:
You certainly cannot tell them not to send photos because Millennials have been raised with their cellphone, not just within arm's reach but attached to their hand and have grown up using the internet and their phones for everything, like shopping and communicating and Tweeting and dating. There's nothing we don't use the internet to do really. Of course it's gonna also expand to include sexuality and dating and it's gonna be a tool for that. I certainly think that it's unrealistic to say, "Don't take the pictures in the first place." But, we should say, "If you are entrusted with intimate pictures of somebody else, don't share those." I mean, that's where the emphasis is. You asked, should we assume the risk if we take pictures? My answer is absolutely not. Certain information should be treated as private. We accept that credit card numbers and social security numbers are private information and, we would be a lot less humiliated ... We are a lot less humiliated when somebody tries to use or credit card and yet that's criminal behavior.
Liz:
Has it changed you personally in terms of that experience? Knowing everything that you do, would you since then, send intimate photos knowing from your side of the street as an expert in this area?
C.A. Goldberg:
Would I? Yeah. I mean, to somebody I totally trusted. I think the difference is calibrating who I trust and not trusting the wrong person because there are some people that are just assholes that break the law. At this point we now have 42 states, plus Washington DC with revenge porn laws. Now there are criminal consequences for sharing somebody's nudes or videos without their consent. Criminal laws do deter bad behavior, and so the memo has gotten out that it's illegal. But that doesn't stop people who want to break the laws like we have people murdering each other and walking up to each other and punching them in face so it's not a complete solution.
Liz:
Well I know that just this year in 2019 New York joined the list of states that passed non-consensual porn legislation, is that correct?
C.A. Goldberg:
It is. The Governor hasn't signed it yet, we're still waiting on Cuomo to sit down and sign the law but that should be forth coming really, really soon. I mean, it's amazing to me that it's finally happened because when I started my firm in January 2014, by spending all my time just on that law and I ended up writing a big section of the civil component of that law so that not only is it criminal but now we can also sue people who send our intimate images without our consent. Which, California already has a law that you can do that, that a victim can take matters into their own hands and sue and I think about 12 other states do too.
Liz:
I was really surprised when I was researching this that it was only in 2004 that New Jersey passed the first legislation in this area, which is not very long ago. That's 15 years.
C.A. Goldberg:
Right. Right. Yeah. I mean, it makes sense 'cause this wasn't really a crime, I mean, it didn't happen before smart phones that much. I mean-
Liz:
Well it happened, but it was people who were exploiting their lovers and sending those pictures of films into adult magazines or adult videos.
C.A. Goldberg:
Right. But still, you had to take the picture, you had to go get it developed.
Liz:
It was a lot more trouble.
C.A. Goldberg:
I mean, there are cases where somebody went and got the intimate pictures developed and then xeroxed them and put them on the car windshields of everybody in the neighborhood, but yeah, it just takes so much more effort. Again, back then you weren't completely beholden to your online reputation the way that we are now. Anything that happens to us online can become inescapable because of the power that search engines have over our reputation.
Liz:
Yeah, I'm also curious how the law can protect us from non-consensual or revenge porn when the internet is inherently not inhibited by state lines. What legal recourse do people in other parts of the world have or what if I send someone nudes in California and somehow they get put on a site in Belgium or Brazil?
C.A. Goldberg:
Yeah, I mean that's a great question. Really, revenge porn laws apply to individuals. They apply to the individual that is distributing it they don't necessarily apply to the website that might be profiting from it where it's uploaded because we have Federal laws that actually immunize interactive computer services like websites, and social media companies from any content the third parties put up there. The question really is, If somebody in the Philippines or Singapore or somewhere uploads your naked pictures and you report that in California, how responsive is California going to be when the person may have done it anonymously and law enforcement is like, "Really ami going to start a criminal case with somebody that could be on the other side of the country? It's not like I'm gonna go extradite them for a misdemeanor." The biggest problem we have, or the biggest obstacle is with law enforcers who might not want to enforce the law in situations where the identity of the offender is anonymized. Usually the victim knows who it is but it still can be a hurdle convincing law enforcers that's who it is.
Liz:
What was your experience like with the police when you initially went to them in 2013 with this issue? I've dealt personally with repeated online harassment from an individual for a couple of years now and what I found in trying to get this person to stop is that I didn't have a lot of recourse at all.
C.A. Goldberg:
Yeah, yeah.
Liz:
If I wanted to do something, I would have to pay my own money to fight through the legal system.
C.A. Goldberg:
Yeah, I mean, the issue with the police when it comes to internet crimes is that there isn't usually a willingness to make immediate action. If you just get punched in the face, you can call 911 and they will come, and they might even arrest the person who did that to you, the same if you're the victim of an even more, like a gunshot wound or something. They are immediately on top of it. But they don't see the same urgency when it comes to internet crimes. Even if there's active harassment and active organization of a mob to harass you and their calling in SWAT teams and stuff and, it's really active harassment, law enforcement tends to want a lot of evidence to prove that the offender is who they think it is. That creates tremendous delays. I mean, in my case, law enforcement ... I had a very complicated experience with law enforcement where I reported it, they told me to go to family court to get an order of protection, indicating that they weren't going to be able to do anything very soon, and then they finally issued a warrant for my offender to be arrested. Then he started creating false police reports.
C.A. Goldberg:
In New York law enforcers don't have the same level of discretion when it comes to domestic violence type crimes, they have to do an arrest, they say. They told me to come to the precinct to identify my offender because I had gotten a call from the investigator saying they turned him in. I went there and it was just like in TV where I was taken into a little room and a venetian blind was pulled up and he was sitting on the other side of the one-way glass and I was like, "Yep, that's him," and then, this is where it gets really fucked up, after I identified him, the investigator who I had been working with for a month, asked me if I could stick around to speak to his partner, officer Kirkwood. I said, "Sure, no problem." I was sitting there waiting around and this officer comes and he tells me I am under arrest because my offender had turned himself in and at the same time brought in some sort of evidence, to this day I don't know what it is, saying that I had harassed him or abused him or something. Which, is really, really common, I've come to learn. So many of the cases that we handle the offenders use the court system as a tool where they make false police reports or they call in bomb threats in somebody else's name and dispatch police to deal with that. It's so troubling.
When I was arrested, I was questioned by different cops and they were like ... One time I was in handcuffs, but they were also scolding me for having been in a relationship with somebody who was so clearly crazy. I'm like, "Right, but you just took his words as truth. You're telling me he's crazy, we agree with that, but you also took his false allegation as truth." I mean, the charges against me were dropped eventually but it was several months of having the torture of this criminal proceeding hanging over my head. There were days when ... I was working with elderly people and there were days when I was in one court room arguing a case for a client at work and then in the afternoon had to go in the same building in another court room where I was the accused. It was such a horrible, horrible time in my life.
Liz:
I can imagine. What's interesting is that so many of the systems of justice within this country obviously are stacked against women as we know but also, so many in the digital age, the Apps and the social media tools that we use on a daily basis were created mostly by White men. When you don't have a diverse team of people building a product, there's no one in there that says, there's no women, there's no people of color who would think immediately, this can be used for harassment, so those tools are not in place.
C.A. Goldberg:
Oh my God, yes. Yes, yes, it's so true and they have released products into the stream of commerce that are dangerous, they're not tried out and tested. For exactly the reason you said, "The creators of these products, whether it's Twitter or dating Apps or whatever, don't think about abuse and the funders, the Angel Investors and-
Liz:
VCs
C.A. Goldberg:
The VCs-
Liz:
They're all men too.
C.A. Goldberg:
They don't give a shit. They're not asking, "Well what's the reporting system if somebody is impersonating profiles in the dating App? Oh, well we might not want to fund it if there's not a good reporting mechanism or a good method for excluding abusive users." They're not asking those questions because they don't give a shit and they're opening their checkbooks regardless. I mean it's a Product's Liability issue. We don't sell cars that don't have working brakes and say, "Well we'll fix it maybe in the next iteration." It's so fucked up but, again, internet companies have interpreted this particular law, Section 230 of The Communications Decency Act, to give them pretty blanked immunity so that they're never liable to their users.
Liz:
I found that with Instagram because in my situation with the stalker it's been over two years now and reporting to Instagram, nothing, hundreds and hundreds of times. You can just immediately with any email address, get a new account shaken up. I found actually the way you and I first spoke, was I came to you for an issue with a friend who's ex-boyfriend had said that they were putting revenge porn on Pornhub. You told me that you could call Pornhub and get it taken down, which I thought was incredible. Are most companies immutable to that?
C.A. Goldberg:
Some are. Pornhub happens to be pretty aggressive when it comes to content removal. Their faster than Facebook or Twitter, the companies that we used to associate with upstanding companies doing the right thing. I don't know actually if we ever did, but companies that have the most resources often are the most slow to act. But, Pornhub has been super responsive, and they say, "Listen, we have enough porn. There's enough consensual porn. We don't need to be making money from non consensual porn. That's not good for the industry." They'll take stuff down without too many questions asked. But I think there's a really major problem with our search engines.
Liz:
Search engines but also, going back to dating Apps because I know you're involved with a high profile case with Grinder but, Zoe Quinn, going back to Gamergate, she met her stalker on OkCupid, and dating Apps are one of the first ways that people are starting to send digital nudes or whatever intimate things. Should these dating Apps be held liable?
C.A. Goldberg:
Yeah, I've got a lot to say about dating Apps. First of all, almost every one of my client's stories begins with, "I met him on the internet. I met her through Hinge or Tinder or OkCupid or Grinder," and I think there's something fundamentally different about dating when you meet somebody through the App. It used to be if you met somebody at a bar or you had a mutual friend, that was a check and balance. You could scope somebody out and know before you've gotten friendly with them, you just know whether or not there's something about them that's repellent and you stay away. But with dating Apps you might get into a back and forth really fun chatty, flirty conversation and already be grooming yourself to really like that person when you meet. You're then willfully ignoring the red flags that may otherwise have been more prone to pick up on. But I mean, in terms of the liability of dating Apps, I don't feel that dating Apps need to be held responsible for the ongoing bad behavior, or the bad behavior in an ongoing relationship.
But in situations where a dating Apps is used by a predator or where it's weaponized, I have cases where serial rapists used dating Apps to find their prey and they just create new profiles each time. I also have cases where we can talk maybe about Grinder, where the dating Apps itself is used as the weapon, not to find victims but instead to harass victims. In my Grinder case, Grinder, my client's ex-boyfriend was creating false profiles and sending people to his home and to his job of the have sex with him and over 1200 people came to his home and to his job and thought that they were there for a consensual sexual encounter. You can imagine that if in a single day you get 23 people knocking on your door or following you into the bath room at the restaurant where you work to have sex with you, it's really, really frightening and terrible. Particularly because the offender was sometime saying that he had rape fantasies and that, "I, Matthew might tell you that I didn't create the profile but, that's part of the game." He would incorporate Matt's protests into the sexual encounter so that the visitors would think that-
Liz:
It could be aggressive.
C.A. Goldberg:
Yeah, totally. I mean, that they were fulfilling rape fantasies. In that case Matt reported it over and over to Grinder. He had an order of protection against his Ex. He had reported it to the cops 10 times and nothing was helping. When he came to me, he was represented by a lawyer for the order of protection case and she was like, "I don't know what to do with him. Carrie you deal with internet stuff. Can you just help?" I was like, "Shit, I don't know what to do. Well let's get a restraining order against Grinder." I mean, if their App is being used to send somebody to another person's house, Grinder is the one that is in control of that. They're the ones who can actually help, they're the only ones really who have the power and control to help. I thought I was gonna save the day and it was just gonna be a quick letter the Grinder and by then I had worked on a lot of revenge porn bans on different social media companies like Twitter and Facebook and Google, and so I was super over-confident. They ignored me too so that's when we got the restraining order against them and ultimately they told us they didn't have the technology to stop somebody from using their product.
Liz:
Bull shit.
C.A. Goldberg:
Which is crazy.
Liz:
That goes back to who's creating products.
C.A. Goldberg:
Right. It totally does. It's also, it's insane because it's so foreseeable that a dating App that has geo locating technology, and Grinder has the patent to that, would not find it foreseeable that their product would be used to stalk that it would be used by pedophiles, that it would just generally be abused. Them saying that they didn't have the technology to stop the user, number one, Matthew had also been harassed by his offender the same way through Scruff and Jacked to other gay dating Apps. Both of them were super responsive and they had figured out a way just through the identifying information like Mac IP address, or the Mac address and IP information, how to exclude that guy. But Grinder was like, "No," and it turns out they were basically just being belligerent because they felt that they were protected under the Communications Decency act, which we called bull shit on.
We sued them under Products Liability Theory. It was, I think, the first time that I was really proud of this. It felt like an invention. I was like, "I'm not suing you Grinder for anything that Matthew's abusive Ex said," which arguably, Grinder would have been covered by the immunity, "I'm suing you because you have released a dangerous product into the marketplace, one that has no ability, so you say, to stop abusive users." The judge thought that was terrible and dismissed our claims entirely so we appealed it to the Second Circuit. It's interesting just the tide how it's shifted since we first started the Grinder case because-
Liz:
That was in 2018?
C.A. Goldberg:
Matthew entered my life in the Winter of 2016 actually. We filed in early 2017 but the appeal and stuff that was 2018 and our argument at the Second Circuit was just this past January of 2019. But in the intervening years, it's like people have finally awoken to the fact that these internet companies may not always have our best interests at heart, and that they're not really in the business to be providing us with whatever free product has lured us, whether it's to date or to post our pictures, like Facebook to interact with our friends and family. Those are just the lures to get us to the site so that then they can advertise at us-
Liz:
And collect our data.
C.A. Goldberg:
And collect our data. We are the product and I think people have become more critical thanks to Facebook and their bull shit with our 2016 election and Cambridge Analytica and I mean, there's a new privacy violation from Facebook almost every single week. The latest one is that millions and millions of user's passwords were released and available to Facebook employees completely unencrypted.
Liz:
What's the current status of your case with Grinder?
C.A. Goldberg:
We are waiting for the decision for the appeal. The judge basically said, "Your Product's Liability Theory is bull shit because all this really does depend on the user. This is all really actually at the end of the day, user content," because JC was creating these fake profiles. Any harm that comes from that is not something you can hold the company liable for. Even though we were saying, "We're not holding him liable for the words in his content. We don't even know what he was saying. We're holding them liable for not responding to Matthew's many, many requests and they had, at the point knowledge that there was a harm happening on their platform and having no back end system to deal with that." When the judge dismissed that, she was basically saying that, "You don't get your day in court. You may have been horribly harmed, which he was, his life was completely over turned but, your only recourse is to go after the individual who did that." The Tech companies, these precious, precious vulnerable little Tech companies, they should never be sued, especially not by their users.
Liz:
'Cause then it just opens the flood gate.
C.A. Goldberg:
But does it? I mean, that's what the courts are afraid of, that's what the companies are afraid of, but really-
Liz:
Build better products guys.
C.A. Goldberg:
Yeah guys.
Liz:
Hire a diverse team of people to build your products.
C.A. Goldberg:
Hire some women who might have some insights about how, women and minorities and stuff like that might have some insights into how this shit's weaponized. Anyways, we are waiting for the ... by the time this airs probably will have gotten the decision about Grinder and the second circuit will decide whether or not we ... All we're asking for is to get back into court. That's the only issue is that this was dismissed and we're saying that, "That dismissal was wrong. We want our day in court. We want to be able to get discovery and see what really happened here, to see what Grinder actually did with Matthew's complaints and how many people all in all came and what your back end really looks like." That's what these companies are afraid of, is they're afraid of this discovery part of a lawsuit 'cause they do want to open their books. They operate in such secrecy but again, I don't know if there will, probably the full flood gates might open, but that should happen, that fucking shit happened.
Liz:
I agree.
C.A. Goldberg:
Because the only way these companies have been able to mint money is off the backs of their users because we are what makes them so profitable. When we, the users, or the general public are harmed, they need to fucking pay. It's so fucking foolish to think, "Oh the only recourse is to go after the offender." I mean, that guy's sitting in jail at this point, yay, and doesn't have a penny to his name. Matthew was harmed and somebody needs to pay, and it's got to be the person who has the money. Grinder was in a great position to be able to stop his injury and stop the bleed and they didn't. This isn't a situation where we brought the case years later, we brought the case because there was an emergency because the police weren't doing anything, the family court order of protection wasn't doing anything, and it was and ongoing urgent situation, and Grinder was the only one who could, and they didn't. Even during the course of the litigation they were still saying, "We don't have to, we aren't going to stop this user."
Liz:
You're going after some big behemoths, not only of technology but also, I know you've pursued multiple cases against the New York city Department of Education, which must be very difficult on a personal level as well because you're dealing with minors in those cases often as clients and saying that the NYC Department of Education is demonstrating a pattern of punishing young women of color after they report sexual assault by a peer.
C.A. Goldberg:
Yeah, I mean, those cases, I've represented three different individuals, girls of color all who were sexually assaulted by a peer at school or right after school near school property and then when they reported it they were punished. The first case, I was like, "Oh my God this is so fucked up. They made a horrible mistake." The second case, which came to me just a couple months later, I was shocked that there was this ... I mean, it was just this, "Oh weird, there are two cases like this. What a coincidence." But then when a couple months after that I got a third case of a girl who had been led into the stair well in the school by seven boys and then forced to give oral sex to two of them, she was somebody with an IQ of 71 and was just meekest person you can imagine. When she told the guidance counselor and it was then brought up to the assistant principal and stuff, the immediate reaction was to suspend her.
Liz:
She was 13.
C.A. Goldberg:
She was 15. I mean, they didn't investigate it, they didn't say, "Oh, you're reporting a sexual assault, let's get you some resources, let's get you help." Instead they were just like ... they sent her mom a superintendent's suspension and she had to go to a suspension school and they tried to ... It was so messed up. By then it was clear that this was a pattern practice that had been going on for how long, punishing girls of color and it's pushing them out of school. I mean, it's not kind of, that's what it is. We were demanding that they start teaching consent and that they start revealing their records about what's been going on. How many times girls of color have reported sexual assaults, what the response has been and we've got no progress on the Department of Education making their processes and their history more transparent, but we have gotten some good judgements. We got almost a million dollars for our client who was attacked in the stairwell and then the other cases are ongoing.
Liz:
But it's about making long term change, right.
C.A. Goldberg:
Yeah.
Liz:
I read a troubling statistic when I was researching these cases that you've been involved in that Yale university has a very high number of counselors dealing with consent training and sexual assault reporting and the NYC education system has one for how many million students.
C.A. Goldberg:
Okay. I did some math and basically in some of those schools, at Harvard and Yale there's one Title Nine coordinator staff member for every four or five hundred students, as you said, in the New York City Department of Education there's one Title Nine coordinator for 1.1 million students. Of course, there's not any good policy system procedure for when students come forward and of course the administrators don't know what to do and aren't handling these situations well 'cause there's no training, there's no staffing, it's just clearly not a priority. Everybody talks about how fucked up the problem of sexual assault is on college campuses and it is. And there's so much attention to the fucked up Title Nine procedures and stuff at higher level education but, in K-12, we don't even have the procedures to complain about. It's a completely different landscape where victims don't have a system, or if they do, they don't know about it there's not a point person. The people who most need to learn about consent aren't taught about it, instead their taught abstinence. They're not talked to about sexual assault and maybe, not to do it.
Liz:
What can we do? Are there any laws or policies or initiatives that we as listeners of this interview can support today that might make things better in ways like this? Is it really just bringing these individual cases that create so much shame? As we know with corporations in the last couple of years within the Me Too movement, I think that they've wised up 'cause they're like, "Oh shit, were gonna have to pay out millions of dollars in settlements and were gonna oust our CEO." Is that what has to happen in terms of the Department of Education or is there anything that we can do as civilians?
C.A. Goldberg:
I think the most important thing to do is vote for the right people because by Trump getting elected his Secretary of State is somebody who feels that she's there to protect the accused. That's completely changed policies and procedures that colleges abide by and there's not the same attention or interest from our highest level of government to look at cases where there's been college abuse. Instead, she just thinks that these matters should not be handled by colleges at all, that it's a matter of law enforcement. The problem is that if you're on a campus, which we know are so insular and there's a sexual predator, the school needs to take action against that and law enforcement doesn't always. They have a lot of discretion about what cases to take and you hit on this earlier that when it comes to cases involving sexual assault and things that impact women the most, it's the hardest to get people arrested and criminal justice to be had.
It could take months and months and months for somebody who's raped to actually be arrested and in that period of time, that person's just going to be in college with everybody else and preying again and again. I mean, very few people who sexually assault are one time offenders, that's the Me Too movement. It's not appropriate for us to say that the issue needs to be completely resolved only be law enforcement because if there's a dangerous condition on a campus the campus needs to deal with that.
Liz:
As for so many thousands of years, women have helped protect each other through a whisper network unfortunately it's very difficult to find support to hold people accountable. One of the interesting things I think, which hopefully we'll learn from reading your book are ways in which women are harassed or stalked or sexually abused online have our intimate video or photos shared, I know you suggest certain practical immediate tips on how to do that so you have records. I'm hoping you could share that with us.
C.A. Goldberg:
If you find that your pictures or videos on the internet, the first thing to do is not to panic and just take some deep breaths and recognize it's okay. The second thing to do is, a lot of times victims will go to the source material. If they send somebody a nude selfie, they'll go into their phone and erase it. But the biggest thing is not to erase anything because you might have to prove that you sent that to the person if it goes into a criminal case, so don't erase anything, and then start to take screen shots. Before you try to take anything down, make sure you have screen shots showing that it was up and that you have the full URL. If it's on social media at the point, most of the big social media companies do have bans on revenge porn and you can report it. If your material is still up then, I mean, call me. We've taken 10s of thousands of sex videos and pictures that weren't supposed to be on the internet off the internet.
Liz:
What about engaging with the person that's harassing you online?
C.A. Goldberg:
That's a no. That's a no. People who are harassers or stalkers are looking for a response. The smallest response, even if it's no, and sometimes even if it's a lawyer's cease and desist letter, can just be gasoline on the fire. You have to freeze out the offender. You can say one time, "Don't ever talk to me again," and after that you have to just freeze them out. Harassment's illegal, stalking is illegal so these things should be reported. Revenge porn is illegal in almost all of the country. The only way we're going to get better results is if people are actually reporting it and then agitating their law enforcers, the cops that they report to and making them prosecute. A lot of the times we think that if we're the victim of a crime, all we need to do is call 911 or show up at the precinct to report it in someone's going to be arrested but, that's not at all true. That's not at all true at all. Part of what I do as a lawyer is agitate law enforcers to actually enforce the law.
Liz:
In a way you've used some of these same tools like Twitter, which don't have these harassment policies as part of your arsenal to create more attention, shine more attention on the people who are doing it, which is interesting.
C.A. Goldberg:
I mean, I think that it's really important for victims to know that their life is not over if there is another side to this we can get you beyond it but you do have to address it because the longer material is up, the more it can get spread. The more time there is for anybody to download it and then post it somewhere else.
Liz:
If anybody listening thinks that their life is over because they're currently going through this, you just have to look at this woman sitting in front of me who's built this incredible firm and business and career out of-
C.A. Goldberg:
Out of shit.
Liz:
Out of an asshole, pervert, stalker, and troll. I just have one more question for you, what are you still learning when it comes to sexuality and the internet?
C.A. Goldberg:
I mean, God, I feel like I learn something new and absurd every single day because every client that comes to me has their own permutation of something fucked up happening to them. I mean, one of the issues that needs to be tackled besides holding internet companies liable is what to do about the deep fake problem. As our video technology and spoofing technology gets better we can basically be superimposing other people's focus onto porn videos or politician's faces onto videos of them talking to spies and stuff like that. The Internet's just gonna become more and more of a breeding ground for fake news and fake videos. I think the next frontier is really what to do about that because it's fraudulent image abuse.
Yeah, and I also think that we have a real problem with, so long as internet companies interpret the law so that they're not liable for harms to their users, we've got a real problem because very few products don't involve the internet and we're entering a world where there's going to be more AI and there's going to be self-driving cars and virtual reality. Where the harms to people are just going to increase so we have to develop a system to hold companies liable. Because again, criminal laws keep people in check, they keep me from not murdering somebody that canceled my hotel reservation. But civil laws and the threat of being sued is what keeps companies in check because they don't want to be sued and have to give their money away. To just say, have this blanketed immunity for the Tech industry of all industries, is just wild. No other industry in the world gets that kind of immunity.
Liz:
What's fascinating is that you've had more success it would seem, and there are more policies in place within the adult industry-
C.A. Goldberg:
Oh yeah.
Liz:
Than there are in the civilian facing industries. I think many of these Tech companies and perhaps even the justice system, the New York City Board of Education might want to take a queue.
C.A. Goldberg:
Yeah, there's so much room for improvement, that's what's great. I would love to put myself out of a job and have the problem of psychos, assholes, pervs and trolls just be one of the past and to find a new profession but, until that happens I'm just gonna be growing my law firm, writing more books showing the patterns of these assholes.
Liz:
Thank you. Thank you for showing their patterns and thank you for being here.
C.A. Goldberg:
Liz, thank you so much. I'm so excited about The Sex Ed, this is such a great podcast and thank you for having me.