When a topless photo of her daughter was uploaded to a notorious website, Dr. Charlotte Laws was thrust into the seedy world of "revenge porn."
Dr. Laws recently did an AMA on Reddit and spoke to Fox News' Ashley Dvorkin about her experiences.
"Back in October 2011, my daughter had been taking photos in her room - one of the photos was topless," Laws said. "She had no intention of ever showing the topless picture to anyone, and she sent them from her cell phone through her e-mail to get to her computer. Three months later, her e-mail was hacked and nine days after that, her topless picture ended up on the most notorious revenge porn websites, Isanyoneup.com, along with her name, her social media and her city."
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Laws, a former private detective, began digging into the website and learned that a startling 40 percent of the photos on the site were the result of hacking. Another 12 percent of the photos had been Photoshopped.
"These were people whose heads had been put on another nude body, along with that person's identifying information so it was their life that was being ruined," Laws said. "They'd never even taken a nude picture."
Laws took that information to the FBI, who opened the case and spent two years investigating the website and its founder, Hunter Moore.
"Arrests were made January 23 of this year. The trial begins in September," Laws said. "It's been quite the ordeal."
Laws has turned her focus now to getting legislation passed to help victims of revenge porn. She works with the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and is also executive director of a legal services nonprofit.
"It's a really important issue to get out there and to pass laws protecting victims on this," Laws said. "Revenge porn is about humiliating people: it’s about getting them fired from their jobs, it’s about trying to drive them to suicide, that’s what it’s about. It’s not pornography – it has nothing to do with pornography."
Watch the full interview with Dr. Charlotte Laws here.
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