Laurel Lee champions bill to protect victims of deepfake porn alongside Paris Hilton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

Despite their differences, Republican U.S. Reps. Laurel Lee and Anna Paulina Luna, socialite Paris Hilton and Democratic U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have all faced similar harassment from deepfake porn videos.

Unfortunately, that’s something they have in common with a growing number of women across the country of all ages and levels of notoriety. That growing concern brought all those prominent women together on Capitol Hill to demand criminal consequences for anyone generating intimate images without consent and distributing them online.

“Deepfakes are not harmless and they are not victimless,” said Lee, a Thonotosassa Republican. “They are deliberate digital forgeries, often sexual in nature, created to exploit, harass and humiliate, the technology to make them is becoming more accessible and more widespread, and while the images and the videos may be fake, the harm they cause is very real.”

Lee co-introduced the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits (DEFIANCE) Act (HR 3562), a bipartisan bill crafted with Ocasio-Cortez.

Hilton, among supporters at the press conference, arguably knew best the consequences of private content landing in the wrong hands. The reality star was just 19 years old when an ex-boyfriend released an intimate video. She revisited the sex tape controversy that in 2004 became one of the most infamous videos in the early days on internet ubiquity, something she said was dubbed a scandal but should now be recognized as abuse.

“I lost control over my body, over my reputation. My sense of safety and self-worth was stolen from me, and I fought hard to get those things back. And I believed that the worst was behind me, but it wasn’t, because today, what happened to me then is happening now to millions of women and girls in a new and more terrifying way,” she said.

Hilton said the world lacked the vocabulary — and the laws — to treat the violation of personal trust for profit with appropriate action. Now, Congress can get ahead of people being victimized without their participation at all. Hilton noted that in recent years, AI tools created 100,000 deepfake images of her without any involvement or consent.

Ocasio-Cortez, a 36-year-old New York lawmaker with a national profile, has previously discussed the shocking discovery that deepfake porn of her could be found online easily.

Luna said she’s not alone. She recounted that after both she and Lee won election in battleground districts in 2022, it came to her attention someone made pornographic images of the two women together.

“It was like this weird thing,” Luna said. “It’s not just us. I have talked to residents in Pinellas County. One girl, specifically, unfortunately committed suicide as a result of some of this stuff.”

Lee said that through research, she found other images of herself, Luna and countless other women converted into pornographic images, all without permission.

Francesca Mani, an 18-year-old from New Jersey, also spoke at the oppress conference about a situation when she was 14 and deepfakes of her were distributed at her school.

“The administration told me there couldn’t be any accountability because no laws existed,” she said. “So I told them, I will bring you a law.”

At that point, only three states had laws about deepfakes. Now all do.

But no federal guidelines exist. While Congress passed a law last year requiring platforms to take down content at victims’ demand, there remain no federal laws making it a crime to create and share the content in the first place.

“DEFIANCE will give us recourse and restitution,” she said. “Once this bill is signed into law — and it will be signed into law — survivors will have the ability to hold their abusers accountable and seek financial and reputational damage for the harm they have caused.”