In October 2023, 14-year-old Elliston Berry’s life was turned upside-down. Her friends called her one morning, letting her know that someone had taken a picture of her from her Instagram account, created a pornographic image with her face, and sent it around her entire school in Fort Worth, Texas. Elliston and her parents were devastated and horrified. They went to the school and the local police, but the school said there was nothing they could do because the picture was posted outside of school hours. Once police identified who the boy was that posted the picture about four months later, the school suspended him. However, he had not broken any law so there were no further consequences.

Even more appalling: the AI-generated sexual image of Elliston was still online and being shared worldwide even after the boy was suspended from school. Elliston’s mother, Anna McAdams, spent months calling Snapchat, begging them to take it down. But they wouldn’t listen. So Elliston and her mother went to their senator, Ted Cruz (R-Texas), pleading for help. Cruz asked them, “Are the images still up?” When they confirmed that they were, the senator immediately told his staff to get Snapchat on the phone “right now.” “We’re going to get this image down.” Within minutes, Snapchat removed the images — about eight and a half months after the image was first posted. Cruz told Fox News, “It shouldn’t take a sitting member of Congress picking up the phone to get these images down.”

On March 3, First Lady Melania Trump hosted a roundtable on Capitol Hill to bring awareness to the severe problem of AI-generated pornography and to give victims the opportunity to share their painful stories.

One of those victims was Francesca Mani of New Jersey. In the exact same month that Berry was victimized, 14-year-old Mani also discovered that deepfake pornographic images of her and other girls were being shared by boys throughout her high school. She said, “The most disturbing part? Not just that they thought it was okay, but that the school failed to hold them accountable.” She went on to describe:

“Despite the seriousness of the incident, only one boy received a one-day suspension. Two years later, those responsible are still in my school, representing in team sports as if nothing ever happened. That is not okay. When I asked my school why they weren’t using the code of conduct or HIB [Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying] policies, their response: ‘They need to be updated to include AI.’ My response was, ‘Then update it.’ It took them one year to make changes.”

Mani’s school’s only response to the community was an email dismissing the issue as “widespread misinformation.” Therefore, she says, the school is essentially telling girls, “You’re not worth fighting for” and telling the boys, “What you did is okay.”

When Breeze Liu was 24 years old, she received a phone call from a friend who informed her that a video of her had been posted on the pornography website PornHub. A man had used AI to put her face into an explicit video. She had met him years earlier, and because she had rejected his advances, he wanted to “humiliate her.”

Liu confronted the man and asked him to take the video off of PornHub. He did, but proceeded to post the video onto hundreds of other websites. Liu shared her experience with deep emotion:

“The devastation I felt is indescribable. I was humiliated, dehumanized, and overwhelmed with shame. But when I sought help, the system failed me. I was victim- blamed and shamed while the perpetrator faced zero consequences as more videos spread to hundreds of malicious websites. I nearly lost everything — my dignity, my reputation, and I almost lost my life.”

Liu has since used her own savings to start Alecto AI, a company that develops free facial recognition software which enables victims to identify fake and abusive content and remove it.

The most devastating story shared at the Capitol Hill roundtable was by South Carolina State Representative Brandon Guffey (R). Guffey lost his 17-year-old son, Gavin, to suicide in July 2022. Guffey explained: “We quickly found out that [Gavin] was being extorted online — that someone pretending to be a young female at another college requested images to be shared back and forth, and as soon as he shared those images, he took his life. It was an hour and 40 minutes from the time that he was contacted until the time that he took his life.”

He continued, “Unfortunately, the amount of parents that are losing children are growing daily since my son took his life. There [have] been 40 other teens that are public about this. I can tell you there [are] more than a dozen that I know of that just do not feel comfortable sharing their stories. But I’m witnessing teens constantly take their life.”

Senator Cruz’s meeting with Berry and McAdams in June 2024 motivated him to introduce the Take It Down Act on June 18. According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), the Take It Down Act does four things:

1. It criminalizes non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII) and threats to publish it.
2. It will require platforms to remove NCII within 48 hours of a victim’s valid request and to take reasonable steps to delete duplicate content.
3. It protects victims who disclose NCII in good faith, such as to law enforcement or for medical purposes.
4. It adheres to First Amendment standards by requiring computer-generated NCII to pass a “reasonable person” test for realistic depiction.

The Take It Down Act passed the Senate by unanimous consent on February 13. It now awaits action in the House, and the members of Congress who were at the roundtable are optimistic that the House, too, will pass it with bipartisan support.

Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), who serves as chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, confirmed that they have reason to be optimistic, announcing that the committee is going to have a hearing “very, very soon.” “This bill is going to pass out of the House of Representatives, and I have no doubt that the president will sign this bill.”

Guthrie noted that Cruz told him that getting the Take It Down Act passed is “the most important thing to him” this session of Congress.” In addition, he noted that Americans ought to appreciate the impact that free citizens have in our democratic republic, saying, “If you think about that — here the constituent goes to visit her senator in America, and now you’re sitting next to the First Lady of the United States. This is how it’s supposed to work. … It’s a horrific situation, but the response to it is the way that we’re supposed to respond.”

Berry, Mani, and Liu have taken the tremendous pain that they have suffered and decided to do everything that they can to prevent others from enduring such anguish. As Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Mich.) said, “You want to talk about courageous, you want to talk about winners, you want to talk about young people with some guts, you’re looking at them right here. We can’t thank you enough. We’re sorry from the bottom of our hearts for what you’ve had to go through, and for the parents — for the suffering that you have [endured] — but it is darkest before the dawn, and it starts today.”