Wisconsin has officially criminalized revenge porn.
The act of vengefully publishing sexually explicit images without the permission of their subjects is now punishable by up to $10,000 in fines and as many as nine months in jail.
Governor Scott Walker made Senate Bill 367 a law Tuesday. Enactment of the legislation was part of a busy day of bill 62 bill signings. The new law makes Wisconsin the seventh state to have formal revenge porn laws on the books.
The details of such laws can vary widely from state to state—in New Jersey, those who post revenge porn online can be charged with a felony.
Like Utah, which just passed its own revenge porn bill March 31, Wisconsin defines revenge porn as just not posting intimate photos without their subject’s permission, but doing so as to deliberately cause them distress. That key stipulation allows for room for free speech, which some civil liberties advocates believe could be limited through the increasing crop of revenge porn legislation.
Because of the free speech protections, however, Wisconsin’s new law is fairly limited. It would still ban a jilted sleazeball from creating a site just to harass his ex, but wouldn’t have much effect on someone like Hunter Moore, whose since-shuttered website, Is Anyone Up, collected other people’s revenge porn for general consumption.
Now, it’s a race to see which state is next: more than a dozen other states are currently drafting their own versions, and a federal bill is in the works.
Illustration by Jason Reed
