Michael Weigel and William Eldridge both had the same idea on how to inflict emotional pain on women in their lives. They created fake Facebook profiles, populated them with naked and sexual images of the women and alerted people who know them to take a look.
Last week, both were sentenced to jail for that behavior. They were two of the first perps convicted under Minnesota's revenge porn statute, which makes the "nonconsensual dissemination of private sexual images" a felony or gross misdemeanor.
The prosecutions of Weigel in Ramsey County and Eldridge in Faribault County demonstrate how the movement to stop "revenge porn" is ramping up in Minnesota and nationwide. The feds have run out of business some of the most loathsome revenge porn website operators. And advocates for victims have also focused on persuading the big internet companies to prohibit the practice and eliminate the images from search results.
"The past two years have seen some real strides," said Danielle Citron, a law professor at the University of Maryland and the author of the book, "Hate Crimes in Cyberspace."
Citron noted that Google and Bing now agree to keep "nonconsensual pornography" out of name searches, and Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft and Reddit ban the practice. "This allows victims to report content as abuse and if reports are legitimate (and not an anti-porn group) it will be removed," she said via e-mail.
But, she said, "there are still thousands of sites that traffic in so-called revenge porn." While victims can get it off Facebook and Google, other sites remain legally untouchable.
A criminal complaint describes how Eldridge set up a fake Facebook page that linked to a "blogspot" account with naked pictures of the woman. The victim learned about it when the link to the Facebook page was sent to the "fathers of her children."
The case was easy to crack. A co-worker of Eldridge at a Mason City, Iowa, pizza place told an investigator that Eldridge shared the photos with him and admitted posting them, according to the complaint.
