WASHINGTON, D.C. — When an explicit video of 19-year-old Paris Hilton having sex was leaked by her ex-boyfriend in 2003, the world turned on her. She was pilloried in the press, called “horny,” and “trashy.” “Sex video gives Paris Hilton publicity money can’t buy,” The Guardian declared. 

Nowadays, the reaction would probably be different. Hilton’s ex-boyfriend, who was 12 years her senior, shared the video online a decade before the first “revenge porn” law went into effect in the United States. The full-length video was later published, becoming a bestseller. Hilton says she never saw any profits, and said she donated her $400,000 settlement with her ex to charity. 

At a Thursday news conference on Capitol Hill, Hilton spoke about the impact of having the intimate video shared without her consent. 

“People called it a scandal. It wasn’t. It was abuse,” she said. “There were no laws at the time to protect me. There weren’t even words for what had been done to me. The internet was still new, and so was the cruelty that came with it. They called me names, they laughed and made me the punchline. They sold my pain for clicks, and then they told me to be quiet, to move on, to even be grateful for the attention. These people didn’t see me as a young woman who had been exploited. They didn’t see the panic that I felt, the humiliation or the shame. No one asked me what I lost.”

The movement to outlaw image-based sexual abuse has entered the mainstream in the two decades since Hilton became the butt of crude jokes everywhere. But the laws haven’t kept up with technological advances, especially as explicit deepfakes can be made with AI image generators for virtually no cost. 

Hilton spoke at the news conference alongside Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Laurel Lee, the co-sponsors of the DEFIANCE Act, a bill that would allow victims of deepfakes to directly sue the people who caused them harm. The bipartisan bill passed the Senate unanimously last week, just as it did last year, and now the lawmakers are rallying for a House floor vote. 

“This bill shows what is possible when we put victims ahead of politics,” Lee said.

The push to pass the DEFIANCE Act is the latest effort to unite women lawmakers like Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, and Lee, a Florida Republican, across party lines. Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Sarah McBride, progressive Democrats, and Republican Reps. Anna Paulina Luna, Claudia Tenney, Nancy Mace and Marianette Miller-Meeks were among those in attendance at Thursday’s news conference.

The House has yet to schedule a vote. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, spoke favorably of the bill to The Independent after last week’s Senate passage. 

Years after the first violation, fake images of Paris Hilton still abound. During the news conference, Hilton said over 100,000 nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfake images of her have been circulated online. 

The DEFIANCE Act allows targets of deepfake abuse to sue the creators, distributors or commissioners of explicit nonconsensual images. There is a booming market for high-quality (read: more life-like) sexually explicit deepfake videos, and the DEFIANCE Act would allow survivors to recover profits from their likeness. 

“Take It Down gave us removal, and DEFIANCE will give us recourse and restitution,” Ocasio-Cortez said. Last year’s Take It Down Act was championed by First Lady Melania Trump and instituted criminal penalties for the publication of nonconsensual intimate imagery, real or fake. The second provision of the law, which requires platforms to have a process to remove nonconsensual images 48 hours after reporting, goes into effect in May.

Seventeen-year-old Francesca Mani, a survivor of deepfake abuse from her high school peers, emphasized that DEFIANCE would provide accountability for perpetrators. 

“DEFIANCE adds consequences that hit where it hurts. If ethics aren’t in your heart, self-preservation should be,” she said. “If you don’t care about others, protect yourself. It’s not cool or comfortable in jail and to Congress: pass this now, please, no more waiting while tech outpaces justice.”

The DEFIANCE Act has been revived as the image generation feature of Grok, the AI chatbot integrated in social platform X, has been used to make nonconsensual explicit deepfakes of women and children. Reporting from The New York Times and the Center for Countering Digital Hate estimates Grok created and posted over 1.8 million sexualized images of women over nine days in December. X said it took steps to restrict the creation of nonconsensual deepfakes, but users have been consistently able to bypass guardrails. 

None of the speakers at the Thursday news conference mentioned Grok or X specifically in their remarks.

But Ocasio-Cortez said she is among the women elected officials who have been targeted by such nonconsensual explicit deepfakes. Users asked Grok to generate nonconsensual images of the congresswoman in January.

“As a survivor of sexual assault myself, this resurfaces trauma for so many people across the country, and that is what it is intended to do,” she said. “Because the creation of this content parallels the same exact intention of physical assault, which is about power, domination and humiliation. And while these images may be digital, the harm to victims is very real. Women lose their jobs when they are targeted with this. Teenagers switch schools and children lose their lives. Congress has a moral obligation to stop this harm.”

When asked about potential free speech conflicts, Lee said that there were no First Amendment concerns with the bill and that it does not contradict Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally does not hold online entities responsible for speech posted on their platforms.

This isn’t the first time Hilton has visited Capitol Hill to advocate for a bill. Last year, she shared her experiences as a survivor of the “troubled teen” industry, helping pass the Stop Institutional Abuse Act. 

Hilton closed her official remarks by talking about the world she wants to build for her 2-year-old daughter. 

“I would go to the ends of the earth to protect her, but I can’t protect her from this, not yet, and that’s why I’m here, because this isn’t about just technology,” she said. “It’s about power. It’s about someone using someone’s likeness to humiliate, silence and strip them of their dignity. But victims deserve more than after-the-fact apologies. We deserve justice.”