After Florida senator’s nude images are stolen, she fights to strengthen revenge porn law:
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — State Sen. Lauren Book often has told the story about how she was sexually abused by her nanny for six years when she was a child. She channeled the pain into a lifetime of helping other abuse survivors.
Now after years of working hard to heal herself and restore her life — running a nonprofit to help victims, getting married, having children, and winning her Senate seat — Book has been victimized again, this time by someone trying to extort her by threatening to reveal nude photos that were stolen from her.
The book was sacrificed again. To reveal nude photos stolen from her.
To make matters worse, during her investigation, she learned that images have been purchased and traded online since 2000.
“I hate that this happened to me,” Book told The Associated Press in an interview. “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. But I’ll take it, because I know that I can do something about it.”
The book is taking action so that only legislators can do it. While the pain returned in a hurry, her fighting spirit also returned, and she is looking for new laws to try to prevent others from being sacrificed.
The bill, sponsored by the Democratic Book, will hold its first committee hearing on Tuesday. It will strengthen Florida’s revenge porn law by making it a felony to steal sexually explicit images from someone’s phone or other digital devices. It also spreads sexually explicit images that have been modified or created, known as deep fake, a felony.
The book exhaled her anger in a telephone interview with AP on Monday night, explaining the international trade and sale of images stolen from people without her knowledge. She sometimes cursed loudly and sometimes held back tears. She called it a sick, altered subculture that pays more for images of celebrities and elected officials but at the expense of lesser-known women.
The bill sponsored by Book, a Democrat, gets its first committee hearing Tuesday. It would strengthen Florida’s revenge porn law by making it a felony to steal sexually explicit images from someone’s phone or other digital devices. It would also make disseminating altered or created sexually explicit images, known as deep fakes, a felony.
To tell the truth, I would have ended my life without the children,” she said. “It brought everything. Everything you think you got under your belt, fixed and changed it, and suddenly here it’s in front of your face. .
And the conversations people had on their websites exacerbated their fears.
They were reading about who I am and talking about how I’m a survivor of rape, so get some rape videos. Rape and kill some of her. Can I be tortured? Can I make some of them? Can I find them? How can I get them?
The book still doesn’t know how the image was stolen. However, investigators told her that the images teenagers used to blackmail her were sent from virtual private networks in Sweden and Russia.
Currently, she is a 37-year-old senator and feels well-positioned to fight back with the resources to hire a lawyer to remove images from the website. Many others are not.
