What Are the Legal Issues Around the Unauthorized Release of Sex Tapes?

In 1995, after a dispute about payment, electrician Rand Gauthier stole rocker Tommy Lee's safe, busted it open and found a videotape. He took the tape to a porn studio, where he worked, to see what was on it.

"We put it in and see what it is, and of course, cha-ching. The dollar signs fly before our eyes," he told Rolling Stone in 2014.

Yes, it was the tape. The now-infamous, intimate recording of Lee with his wife, actress Pamela Anderson. True to his cha-ching predictions (for someone, not necessarily him), copies of the tape were soon sold via the internet. The video itself was eventually uploaded online, where it went viral. It earned an estimated $77 million, according to TIME magazine.

Lee and Anderson filed lawsuit after lawsuit to prevent the video's distribution, but their fame hurt their case.

When Penthouse acquired the tape, the magazine's lawyers successfully argued that the couples' previous public discussion of their sex lives and Anderson's posing for Playboy "forfeited their privacy rights."

Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton also had intimate recordings of themselves released online without their consent in the early 2000s. Kardashian dropped her lawsuit against Vivid Entertainment for a settlement of $5 million. Hilton's privacy case was dismissed, but she successfully sued her ex-boyfriend for a share of his profits.

Gone are the days of actual VHS or digital sex tapes being stolen and distributed by major pornographers; in the last two decades, digital videos and photos have been uploaded quickly across multiple platforms.

In 2014, an incident widely known as "The Fappening" ("fap" being a slang term for masturbation) saw several hacked celebrities, including Selena Gomez, Jennifer Lawrence, Rihanna and Kate Upton fighting to have their private images and videos removed from digital platforms after a breach to Apple iCloud. Lawrence referred to the hack as a "sex crime…a sexual violation" to Vanity Fair.

But laws at the time were still playing catchup when it came to handling such crimes.

Ultimately, Ryan Collins, the Lancaster, Penn. man deemed largely responsible for the hack, was sentenced to 18 months in prison and charged under California's Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He pleaded guilty "to one count of unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information," according to NBC News. A handful of others also received relatively short sentences.

So, what has been done lately to stop this phenomenon of nonconsensual pornography and punish its distribution? And just how often do crimes like these affect non-celebrities?

The advocacy group Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) estimates that one in eight social media users have been targets of what's called nonconsensual distribution of intimate images (NDII)—and this has been happening en masse for over a decade.

NDII is currently distributed through various social media websites, such as 4chan, Reddit, X and porn aggregators, but an early perpetrator was the now-defunct website Isanyoneup.com, which was also one of the earliest sites held accountable for its content.

Founded in 2010, it relied largely on user submissions and often violated victims twice—once by posting their intimate images and videos and again by including their social media and personal contact information. During the height of its popularity, Isanyoneup.com was garnering 350,000 unique views a day, according to the documentary The Most Hated Man on the Internet.

That hated man in question, site founder Hunter Moore, created the website after being spurned by a woman. Moore called this "revenge porn," a term many activists hate because it lays blame on the victim.

Victims who requested that their private content be taken down were often met with mockery and threats from Moore and his supporters.

This included threats against a woman, Charlotte Laws, who had sought action when topless pictures of her 24-year-old daughter appeared on the site. She and her husband, a lawyer, were able to successfully have the image removed, but Laws couldn't stand the idea of this happening to others. She started a blogging campaign, reaching out to at least 40 other victims, and speaking to legislators and the FBI.

The result of the FBI investigation led to Moore being charged with hacking and identity theft in 2015. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two and a half years in prison and banned from social media. He was released in 2017.

Laws wasn't the only one spurred to activism after a personal experience.

In 2011, while pursuing her graduate degrees, Dr. Holly Jacobs became a victim of nonconsensual pornography. She went to the police, but their lack of action led her to take her own.

The next year, she launched the End Revenge Porn campaign, which aimed to bring awareness to the public's desire to criminalize the distribution of NDII and its harmful effects on victims. A year later, she founded the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), an advocacy resource for victims of NDII that they say has assisted over 20,000 victims.

According to CCRI, a model criminal statute on NDII has served as a template for 30+ state laws and pending federal legislation, such as 2023's Stopping Harmful Image Exploitation and Limiting Distribution Act (the "SHIELD Act"), which would prohibit the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images. The bill is currently being held at the Senate desk.

In June 2024, Senator Ted Cruz introduced the Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks (TAKE IT DOWN) Act, which intends to help victims of NDII, whether their images are real or deepfakes generated by artificial intelligence.

"Up to 95%of all internet deepfake videos depict NCII, with the vast majority targeting women and girls," a Senate press release notes.

First Lady Melania Trump has also supported the TAKE IT DOWN Act, appearing with a teenage victim of deepfake pornography at President Donald Trump's Joint Address to Congress in March 2025. This bill, too, is being held at the Senate desk.

Thus far, NDII cases have varied wildly, in part due to different laws being used to prosecute offenders. But there have been noteworthy, big-sentence victories in the fight against nonconsensual pornography.

For example, in 2013, then California Attorney General Kamala Harris charged Kevin Bollaert, who ran the nonconsensual pornography website UGotPosted, with 31 felony counts, including extortion and identity theft. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2015.

Daniel S. Szalkiewicz, a New York City attorney who has been handling NDII cases for 13 years, says his firm uses the latest state laws and leverages the 2020 Domestic Violence Act against perpetrators. "It makes it easier to sue for damages," he tells A&E Crime + Investigation.

"It feels counterintuitive in a way because all you want is for them to be gone, but the first thing you should do is save everything, the URLs, the images and any messages you receive–from harassment to supportive messages," Szalkiewicz says. "You want as much as evidence as you can get. You'll need to be able to submit the URLs to Google or to third parties to stop the images or video from being disseminated." (Since summer 2015, both Google and Microsoft have promised to remove nonconsensual pornography by request; victims must fill out an online form.)

Next, Szalkiewicz suggests reaching out to CCRI or another not-for-profit organization who might be able to offer direction or help locate "either a pro bono or low bono attorney to help you  with the process or make sure that you're being protected."

"There are certain websites that the survivors will request content be removed, and [the sites will] ask them for invasive documents, such as a driver's license, or [ask them] personal questions or completely ignore them days—a lawyer should step in then," he says. "This week alone, we've had two people come to us with this issue. We sent [the sites] an email and those images are [now] down."