Paris Hilton says that her non-consensual sex tape will haunt her for the rest of her life.
What if we told you that one sex tape, “One Night in Paris,” actually won an award at the AVN Awards in 2005?
This award show has been dubbed as the “Oscars of Porn,” and the tape won “Best Selling Title” just 11 years ago.
And what if we told you that the woman in the video, American socialite and former party girl, Paris Hilton, had never given explicit consent to her boyfriend at the time, Rick Salomon, to release that video, let alone sell it?
This makes this sex tape revenge porn, which, with the power of the Take it Down Act, is a federal offense in all 50 states, according to the law firm C.A. Goldberg.
This experience appears to be the springboard for the former party girl to hang up her heels and enter the world of politics.
Hilton travelled to the US Capitol building in Washington, DC, alongside other anti-abuse advocates, to discuss the growing issue of deepfake pornography.
The socialite and businesswoman is putting her famous face behind The Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act, otherwise known as the DEFIANCE Act.
It makes it easier for victims of non-consensual deepfake pornography to come forward and take legal action against its creators.
The bill was passed in the US Senate and has bipartisan support in the House of Representatives.
Alongside lobbying for the DEFIANCE Act, Hilton relived her own experience where she was a victim of non-consensual intimate content.
At the age of 19, Hitlon was a victim of revenge porn where an older boyfriend had published intimate content of them without her consent.
What was once dubbed a sex tape “scandal” is now a ubiquitous issue facing many women today, and technological advances, like the widespread use of artificial intelligence, are only adding fuel to the fire.
Hilton recounted the event outside the US Capitol, adding that there were no laws in place to protect her, and due to the internet being in its infancy at the time, the World Wide Web functioned as the World’s Wild West.
"The internet was still new and so was the cruelty that came with it…they called me names, they laughed, and made me the punchline,” Hilton said, according to ABC News.
People then capitalized on her revenge porn.
“They sold my pain for clicks,” Hilton added, “and then they told me to be quiet, to move on, and to even be grateful for the attention.”
Unfortunately, this behaviour isn’t symptomatic of a particular time period when the internet was the Wild West, and there were no regulations to protect people online.
Recently, Elon Musk’s AI model, Grok, was found fulfilling users' requests to create deepfake pornography of women and, allegedly, children.
Grok was still undressing women for days after the scandal went viral, which prompted women everywhere to stand up against the chatbot and its creator.
While Musk urged users not to create illegal content, as there would be consequences, people continued to make deepfake pornographic images using Grok.
Following investigations by the UK and the banning of Grok in Malaysia and Indonesia, Musk eventually took action and stopped allowing the chatbot to edit images of real people.
However, this isn’t the end of non-consensual deepfake pornography, as Hilton claims there are roughly 100,000 deepfake intimate images of her, created without her consent using AI.
"Not one of them is real, not one of them is consensual. And each time a new one appears, that horrible feeling returns, that fear that someone somewhere is looking at it right now and thinking it's real," Hilton said.
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