The New Yorker
12.5.16 | Margaret Talbot
Carrie Goldberg is a pioneer in the field of sexual privacy, using the law to defend victims of hacking, leaking, and other online assaults.
One morning in March, in a courtroom in Newark, New Jersey, a young woman named Norma attended the sentencing of a former boyfriend, who had gone to grotesque lengths to humiliate her online. Four years earlier, when she was seventeen, she had met Christopher Morcos, who was then nineteen, at a Starbucks near her home, in Nutley.
He was a business student at a local college, and Norma, who is soft-spoken, liked that he was outgoing. He was her first boyfriend, and they dated for two years. Like a lot of young men these days, he asked Norma to send him explicit selfies, and, like a lot of young women, she did. She made him promise that he would keep the pictures to himself.
He assured her that he had hidden them on an app with a secure password, and that in any case he would never circulate them. Once in a while, however, he made a joke about doing just that. Norma, a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology who lives with her parents, never laughed in response; she warned him that if he did she’d take him to court.
