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Legal Commentary

: Althouse

Is that "Borat" sequence with Giuliani "revenge porn"?

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I didn't get around to the Giuliani story yesterday. I'd put a lid on my blogging at 12:56 PM when I finished my podcast and got to work painting my closet. I hadn't even thought about the display of video, recorded with hidden cameras in a private hotel room, edited into movie, and presented as out-of-context clips/stills to stun/shock/outrage/delight the people of the entire world. But sitting down to blog this morning, I thought: revenge porn. 

Do we accept that the rules of life in American society today include video recording private behavior and selecting the most revealing moment to put on the internet for everyone to see? If what Sacha Baron Cohen did is accepted, then why can't everyone set up a little camera in their hotel/bedroom and lure someone into that space and see if they get something that they're interested in putting on the internet? This could be used to hurt any person.

Quite aside from the ethics of treating other people this way, the trick ? which the clever man Sacha Baron Cohen did not invent ? has been enough of a problem over the years that laws ? criminal laws ? have been passed. Googling "giuliani" and "revenge porn," I found these tweets:
I contemplated whether Maria de la Torre might be a pseudonymous comedian (like Titania McGrath), but no, I think she's this college professor. A professor can still use humor, but I think she's at least partly serious. The idea that criminal law protects only the victims you view as good people is legally wrong and blatantly unethical. And by the way, it's an idea that was used to allow rapists to escape conviction! 

Giuliani might not want to argue that what was done to him was revenge porn. It's inconsistent with his assertion that nothing happened ? he was just tucking in his shirt. 

I have not research the revenge-porn issue in any depth, and I assume Sacha Baron Cohen has his legal advisers and the scene was planned with an interruption that occurred exactly where it needed to end to preserve the argument that it was not a violation of criminal statutes. But I do think it is a violation of social norms to lure a person into an intimate encounter for the purpose of recording compromising video. And yet, it's a practice as old as photography, and there's a long list of political figures who've been tricked and disempowered this way.

Oh! That reminds me! Today's the day the Ghislaine Maxwell deposition is coming out. So much sexual exposure this week. 

Full post as published by Althouse on October 22, 2020 (boomark / email).

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