Goldberg builds a convincing case that sexual privacy is a right that should be protected by federal law, much in the way that our personal, financial and medical information already is. If anyone can make that happen, it is she. In 2014, with little more than the resolve to become “the lawyer I’d needed,” Goldberg quit her job at the Vera Institute of Justice, rented a tiny, windowless office in a shared work space in Dumbo and hung a shingle as a victims’ rights attorney specializing in sexual privacy. In the five years since, her firm — now 13 people strong — has removed more than 30,000 nonconsensual images and videos from the internet, jailed more than a dozen offenders, and successfully sued the New York City Department of Education on behalf of a teenage girl who was gang-raped by classmates in her school’s stairwell and then suspended for lying. Goldberg also helped craft a dozen states’ revenge-porn laws and promote the first federal bill aimed at protecting victims of revenge porn. Introduced to Congress in 2016 by Representative Jackie Speier of California, the bill was reintroduced in 2017 by Senator Kamala Harris as the Ending Nonconsensual Online User Graphic Harassment (ENOUGH) Act. (As of this writing, the bill is still pending.)

In a 2016 New Yorker profile, Margaret Talbot suggested Goldberg is a cross between Gloria Allred and the Marvel Comics superhero Jessica Jones. It’s a wonderful characterization, though it would seem that Goldberg is far more upbeat than her depressive fictional doppelgänger. With the help of Jeannine Amber, an award-winning journalist who often reports on communities in crisis, Goldberg chronicles in “Nobody’s Victim” her battle for justice in a tone that is both take-no-prisoners and warmly gregarious (indeed, she befriends many of her clients). The text bubbles with colloquialisms like “shrug emoji” and “mouth-breathers,” who, along with “power pervs” and those who simply feel free to conduct themselves with “unbridled assholery,” make up her “Carrie Goldberg Offender Taxonomy.”

The cases she narrates are gut-wrenching, and her conversational approach lightens what could otherwise be an unbearably heavy load. It also makes accessible the complicated legal history leading to our current moment. Goldberg reminds us that “the internet was a very different place” in 1996, when the Communications Decency Act was signed, with a small provision called Section 230 declaring that interactive computer services were not publishers and therefore weren’t liable for user-posted content: “There was no Google, Reddit, YouTube or Twitter. Mark Zuckerberg was in middle school, and Amazon was an exciting new website that only sold books.” She believes that the “free speech purists and tech heads” who claim the law enables the internet as we know it today are missing the forest for the trees. Section 230, she writes, “is the No. 1 reason the internet is a safe space for peddlers of fake news, graphic death threats, conspiracy theories, Russian propaganda, racist slurs, Nazi hate speech, anti-L.G.B.T.Q. vitriol, vivid promotions of violence against women, instructions for how to make your own bomb and phony dating profiles offering sex in someone else’s name,” which is to say it’s the “enabler of every … troll, psycho and perv on the internet.”

Donna Freitas became a young adult in the late 1980s and ’90s, which limited the man who stalked her — her much older graduate school professor and mentor, who also happened to be a Catholic priest — to postal mail and landlines. In “Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention,” Freitas recounts with great thoughtfulness how her perception of the power differential between them, as well as her faith in the religious and educational institutions she’d grown up with, lulled her into susceptibility and disbelief. She let more than a year pass before reporting the man’s harassment to university officials, who gave her “a very small sum of money” to never speak of it again. “I cut out my tongue,” she writes, now well aware, thanks in large part to the #MeToo movement, that she was hardly the only one to suffer this particular injustice. “All around the country, at universities far and wide, at workplaces of all sizes and types, at companies that boast of doing good and making the world a better place, there are file cabinets full of the bloody tongues of women.”