Goldberg was once harassed online by a vengeful ex. She started her practice to “be the lawyer I’d needed.” Photograph by Pari Dukovic for the New Yorker

One morning in March, in a courtroom in Newark, New Jersey, a young woman named Norma attended the sentencing of a former boyfriend, who had gone to grotesque lengths to humiliate her online. Four years earlier, when she was seventeen, she had met Christopher Morcos, who was then nineteen, at a Starbucks near her home, in Nutley. He was a business student at a local college, and Norma, who is soft-spoken, liked that he was outgoing. He was her first boyfriend, and they dated for two years. Like a lot of young men these days, he asked Norma to send him explicit selfies, and, like a lot of young women, she did. She made him promise that he would keep the pictures to himself. He assured her that he had hidden them on an app with a secure password, and that in any case he would never circulate them. Once in a while, however, he made a joke about doing just that. Norma, a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology who lives with her parents, never laughed in response; she warned him that if he did she’d take him to court.

In November, 2014, Norma broke up with Morcos. He barraged her with texts, sometimes telling her that she needed to talk to him because his mother was deathly ill. (This was a lie.) Other texts threatened to post online her intimate photographs. A few months later, Norma received a text message from a stranger, who said that he’d seen her page on PornHub, one of the most popular X-rated sites. She called her boss at the clothing store where she worked and said that she was going to be late that afternoon. Then she frantically began searching the Internet. Eventually, she found eight photographs that she’d given to her boyfriend, on a page that identified her by her first and last names. Norma told me, “It was basically soliciting people to contact me for oral sex. It had my phone number—that’s how that stranger had found me. It had my street name. My town was there. It said, ‘Find me on Facebook.’ My bra size was there. And then the photos.”

Norma initiated a criminal case against Morcos, and he was charged with invasion of privacy in the third degree, in accordance with a statute that is popularly known as a “revenge porn” law. In 2004, New Jersey passed the nation’s first such legislation. The statute makes it a crime for a person who knows “that he is not licensed or privileged to do so” to nonetheless disclose “any photograph, film, videotape, recording or any other reproduction of the image of another person whose intimate parts are exposed or who is engaged in an act of sexual penetration or sexual contact, unless that person has consented to such disclosure.”

The preferred term for such statutes is “nonconsensual-porn laws,” because the online harassment does not always involve a spurned ex like Morcos. Sometimes people hack into a celebrity’s iCloud or Gmail account to steal intimate pictures that can be sold and posted online. In 2014, Jennifer Lawrence and other prominent actresses were victims of such thefts; Lawrence told Vanity Fair that the incident was a “sex crime.” Last month, a Pennsylvania judge sentenced one of the men who hacked the images, Ryan Collins, to eighteen months in jail. Celebrities are not the only people targeted. A recent Brookings Institution report examined nearly eighty cases of “sextortion,” involving three thousand victims. In one such case, a Californian named Luis Mijangos tricked women into installing malware that searched their computers for sexually explicit photographs and switched on Webcams and computer microphones, allowing him to record the women undressing or having sex. He then threatened to release the resulting photographs or videos if the women didn’t make pornographic videos for him. In 2011, Mijangos was convicted of computer hacking and wiretapping, for which he is serving a six-year sentence.

Sometimes people surreptitiously film consensual sex acts, or even rapes, and make the footage public for reasons other than revenge. In April, Marina Lonina, an eighteen-year-old Ohio woman, was charged with live-streaming, on the Periscope app, the rape of a seventeen-year-old friend by a man they’d met at a nearby mall. Lonina and her lawyer said that she was trying to gather evidence by filming it. But, according to the prosecutor, she soon got caught up in the stream of “like”s from viewers. Lonina has been charged with rape, kidnapping, sexual battery, and pandering sexual matter involving a minor.

In the past decade, thirty-three more states and the District of Columbia have adopted nonconsensual-porn laws like New Jersey’s. Despite such efforts, one can easily find sites on the Internet that are dedicated to revenge porn. On myex.com, people post naked pictures of former spouses or lovers—mostly women, some men—along with their names, ages, and home towns. They add cruel captions: “My slut wife”; “Chubby frigid slut.” Posts about men frequently suggest that their penis is too small.

Prosecutions of individuals receive considerable media attention, in part because they are unusual. Pennsylvania has undertaken a dozen or so prosecutions—the most of any state. Other states with nonconsensual-porn laws have had just one or two cases make it to court. Victims are often reluctant, or ashamed, to come forward; police officers are sometimes unfamiliar with the new laws, or are unsure how to conduct the computer forensics needed to build a case.

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Norma’s complaint would almost certainly not have proceeded to court had she not been represented by Carrie Goldberg, who was sitting in the courtroom next to her that day. Goldberg is a thirty-nine-year-old Brooklyn attorney with a practice specializing in sexual privacy, a new field of law that has emerged, in large part, to confront some of the grosser indulgences of the Internet. She has clients like Norma, who are trying to get intimate images of themselves, or graphic ads offering their sexual services, off the Internet before they go viral and strangers start showing up at their houses. She also has clients who are being extorted into providing sex or money because someone has graphic pictures of them and is threatening to send the images to employers or parents or siblings. She has even begun advising teen-age students who have been sexually assaulted and had the incidents recorded on cell phones, and who have then had to go to school with peers who may have been watching the videos in the cafeteria or the hallways.

Goldberg, a graduate of Brooklyn Law School, is a surprisingly glamorous presence, especially for the places her work tends to take her: drab courtrooms, grubby police precincts. Her hair is long and wavy; her nails are always painted; she wears oversized designer glasses, five-inch heels, color-block minidresses, and sharply cut trenchcoats. Rebecca Symes, a lawyer who once worked with Goldberg at Housing Conservation Coordinators, which represents Manhattan tenants facing eviction, told me, “Housing court is predominantly male—the attorneys, the landlords. And, how shall I put this? They tend to be schlumpy. Carrie stood out. She was a total badass. She was aggressive—you had to be—and you had to believe in your clients when everyone else was calling them deadbeats. A lot of the people called to legal-services work are do-gooders, and they are a little passive and meek. They don’t have that fierceness that Carrie has.”