In her fight to represent victims “under attack by stalkers, perverts, idiots and trolls,” Carrie Goldberg says the work is personal.
“I fall in love with cases the same way people fall in love with other people,” said Goldberg, a lawyer and author of the book “Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls.”
And when that work involves going up against big corporations and tech companies, “it can also lead to a lot of heartbreak,” she told The Hill.
Goldberg is the founding attorney of a law firm that bears her name and focuses on victims’ rights law, with practice areas ranging from revenge porn and sextortion to technology product liability.
“Nobody’s Victim” is a memoir of her own battle with harassment from an ex and an account of her affairs and advocacy for stronger laws to protect survivors of abuse. She launched the company in 2014 after her personal legal battle.
Goldberg said her ex would send explicit images of her to the judges and copy other people’s emails. Through her process of fighting for her own protection, she learned firsthand about the legal obstacles that can hinder other victims.
When she tried to get a protective order, the judge said it was a First Amendment issue. She was even arrested during the process over false accusations from her ex, Goldberg said.
Even the “good, experienced” lawyers she hired didn’t know how to handle his actions, she said.
It took six months for the ordeal to happen. Eventually, his ex pleaded guilty and Goldberg received an order of protection. But the process left her traumatized, depressed and even suicidal, she said.
“Nothing in my life felt the same,” Goldberg said.
“I left my job and decided I was going to try to spend the next year and see if I could help other people who had gone through something similar to what I went through, and I became interested in this idea that there were no laws protecting people from disclosing intimate images,” she added.
Now, she leads a firm of seven lawyers to fulfill that mission.
“There is so much heartbreak that fuels us here, and we are really trying to avenge these injuries and these big, huge faceless corporations that have such a lack of humanity,” she said.
Goldberg, who began his career working with Holocaust survivors, compared some of the issues he dealt with to the same issues that arose after World War II.
“There has been a real reckoning with business ethics and this acceptance that companies should not contribute to death and dying,” she said.
“With all the automation of the technology industry and algorithms, we are returning to a world where we accept this – that the cost of having a successful business is that sometimes people die,” Goldberg said.
One important case that Goldberg is in the middle of involves 22 families who have children who died by suicide after purchasing sodium nitrite from Amazon. His company claims that the e-commerce giant created “veritable suicide kits,” recommending that customers buy sodium nitrite along with a “small scale to measure the right dose,” Tagamet to prevent vomiting, and a book that includes a chapter on how to manage the ingredients together to die.
An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the litigation but said the company minimizes the potential for misuse of sodium nitrite, which is also used to preserve food, by limiting its high-concentration sales to business buyers. The policy came into effect in October 2022.
In his early years, Goldberg was a solo practitioner. After a settlement in one of her first high-profile cases representing an eighth-grader who had explicit images of her shared by someone else, Goldberg hired an intern. In 2016, she was brought forward in a lawsuit against the New York City Department of Education, representing three girls who were sexually abused at school.
“I had cases bigger than me and my company was not on a good financial trajectory,” she said.
“I had this moment of realization that if I didn’t figure out how to run a business—the sales, the marketing, the hiring, the finances, the taxes, and so on—I would just be [compounding] the harm to these girls who really needed me, because these litigations would last for several years. And so I committed to learning how to run a law firm so I could continue to represent them,” she added.
Goldberg said one of the most significant changes she would like to see is the end of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a provision that protects technology companies from being held liable for content posted by third parties.
She became familiar with the controversial provision almost immediately when she opened her office, and since then it has been her mission to fight it through litigation and advocacy with Congress.
“This industry was not responsible. The entire purpose of this law has been perverted, and what was supposed to be about protecting people and empowering companies to moderate their platforms is being used as a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card,” she said.
Goldberg said he supports the bipartisan proposal put forward by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Ranking Member Frank Pallone (DN.J.) that would provide a “sunset” clause to end the protections.
While the provision has been opposed on both sides of the aisle, lawmakers grappling with concerns about online content moderation have often been unable to reach agreement on reform. Democrats consider the provision to provide a way to protect companies that host hate speech and violative content, while Republicans widely accuse technology companies of being protected from accusations of censoring conservative voices.
Goldberg said it will be a challenge to get lawmakers to agree on anything since they come to Section 230 with “different perspectives,” but sharing stories about their cases helps illuminate the human impact.
“When I can talk about these really specific examples, people think, ‘Oh, I don’t want that. They shouldn’t get away with this,’” she said.
Overall, though, in the 10 years since Goldberg launched her company, she said the landscape for handling these cases has changed — both with new laws aimed at protecting victims of revenge porn and pressure on companies to change. There are now 49 states that criminalize nonconsensual pornography. And from 2015 to 2016, there was a “domino effect” spreading across major social media companies to ban it, she said.
“The number of people who come to me with this problem is very small. And now we use the same framework to look at new iterations, like deepfakes, and get laws to deal with them,” Goldberg said.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
