Why NY1’s Weatherman Isn’t Protected by Revenge Porn Laws

When NY1 fired weather man Erick Adame after videos of him performing on a webcam were targeted and sent to his mother and employers that seemed to be a solid case of revenge porn.

Revenge porn is when someone, usually a former romantic partner takes sexual footage and uses it harm you. Nearly every state has these laws on the books so why isn’t he protected?

Wired:

Many thought Adame was the victim of what our culture now labels “revenge porn”: the distribution of a person’s intimate images without their consent. In a court filing last week, Adame similarly claimed to fall within the scope of Section 52-b of New York Civil Rights law, the state’s “revenge porn” law enacted in 2019. Over the past decade, 48 states have enacted similar revenge porn laws, which criminally punish those who distribute sexual images without consent. A majority of states also provide civil remedies, such as monetary compensation, to revenge porn victims.

Erick Adame’s case does bear many of the hallmarks of revenge porn. His recorded sexual expression was sent to his employer and family in an effort to shame him for being visibly queer in a sex-negative, homophobic culture. Still, what happened to Erick Adame is highly unlikely to be protected by New York’s revenge porn law. As a result, he likely will be unable to pursue a lawsuit against the people who contacted his employer and family, and any related criminal prosecutions against the leakers are unlikely to succeed.

In nearly every state, there are significant, largely overlooked limitations in the scope of criminal and civil revenge porn laws. Such limitations exclude from protection a wide range of sexual expression that is extremely common in the digital age, yet doesn’t conform to dominant understanding of moral propriety and sexual privacy.

But…

For some, common sense suggests that being purposefully naked in front of strangers with recording devices means giving up privacy. Yet this line of thinking flies in the face of most contemporary understandings of privacy. Meaningful privacy is not about keeping all information absolutely secret from the outside world, but instead about managing the boundaries between the varied social contexts in which we spend our lives. What might be appropriate at a nightclub or church may be very different from what is appropriate at the office; meaningful privacy allows us to embrace the norms of our different social contexts and decide for ourselves when intimate information can cross community lines. Queer digital environments demonstrate the importance of embracing this context-sensitive understanding of meaningful privacy.

Participants in queer digital environments believe there to be norms of limited disclosure and consent surrounding sexual images. Yet even if participants in sexually charged spaces subjectively expect to retain privacy in their sexual expression, laws regulating sexual privacy typically hold these expectations up to an objective\—and heteronormative—paradigm of near-absolute secrecy. In other words, according to existing revenge porn laws, if you show your body to anyone but your spouse or committed significant other, then it becomes available for all to see. This “objective” secrecy paradigm is reflected not just in recent revenge porn legislation, but in a long line of privacy laws with limited usefulness for queer people.

Even if queer people do give up some privacy when they take their clothes off on a cam site, they do not deserve the intentional harassment, often infused with homophobia, that follows. When someone obtains possession of a person’s sexual images, they hold immense power over that person’s career, relationships, and overall well-being. Revenge porn laws mean to send the message that it is entirely inappropriate for someone to distribute another person’s sexual imagery without their consent, but this message is significantly undermined by laws that carve out from protection some of the most vulnerable and marginalized forms of sexual expression.

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash