Taking on 'pervs' and tech giants in the name of abuse victims
In her fight to represent victims "under attack by stalkers, pervs, a‑‑holes and trolls,” Carrie Goldberg says the work is personal.
“I fall in love with cases the way that people fall in love with other people,” said Goldberg, an attorney and author of the book “Nobody’s Victim: Fighting Psychos, Stalkers, Pervs, and Trolls.”
And when that work involves taking on massive corporations and tech companies, it can “also lead to a lot of heartbreak,” she told The Hill.
Goldberg is the founding attorney at a law firm that bears her name and focuses on victims’ rights law, with practice areas spanning from revenge porn and sextortion to tech product liability.
“Nobody’s Victim” is both a memoir of her own battle against harassment from an ex and a recounting of her cases and advocacy pushing for more stringent laws to protect abuse survivors. She launched the firm in 2014 in the wake of her personal legal battle.
Goldberg said her ex would send explicit images of her to judges and blind carbon-copy other people on the emails. Through her process of fighting for her own protection, she learned first-hand about the legal hurdles that can stand in other victims’ way.
When she tried to get a protection order, the judge said it was a First Amendment issue. She was even arrested during the process on false charges from her ex, Goldberg said.
Even the “good, experienced” lawyers she obtained didn’t know how to handle his actions, she said.
It took six months for the ordeal to play out. Eventually, her 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 looked the same,” Goldberg said.
“I quit my job and decided I was going to try and spend the next year and see if I could help other people who had been through something similar to what I had been through, and I was interested in this idea that there were no laws protecting people from disseminating intimate images,” she added.
Now, she leads an office of seven attorneys to carry out that mission.
“There’s so much heartbreak that fuels us here, and we’re really trying to avenge these injuries and these big, huge faceless corporations that have such a lack of humanity,” she said.
Goldberg, who started her career working with Holocaust survivors, likened some of the issues she’s dealt with to the same ones that surfaced after World War II.
“There was a real reckoning with business ethics, and this acceptance that businesses should not be contributing to death and dying,” she said.
“With all the automation from the tech industry and algorithms, we're getting back to a world where we accept it — that the cost of having a successful business is sometimes people will die,” Goldberg said.
A major case Goldberg is in the middle of fighting involves 22 families who have children who died of suicide after purchasing sodium nitrite from Amazon. Her firm alleges the e-commerce giant created “veritable suicide kits” by recommending that customers purchase 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 administer the ingredients together to die.
A spokesperson for Amazon declined to comment on the litigation but said the company minimizes the potential for product misuse of sodium nitrite, which is also used to preserve foods, by limiting its high concentration sales to business buyers. The policy went into effect in October 2022.
In her first couple of years, Goldberg was a solo practitioner. After a settlement in one of her first major cases representing an eighth grader who had explicit images of her shared by someone else, Goldberg hired an intern. In 2016, she was presented with a case against the New York City Department of Education, representing three girls who were sexually assaulted at school.
“I had these cases that were bigger than me, and my firm 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 and marketing and hiring and finances and taxes and stuff — that I was going to just be [compounding] the harm to these girls who really needed me, because these litigations were going to be multi-years. And so I committed to learn how to run a law firm so that I could continue to represent them,” she added.
Goldberg said one of the most significant changes she’d like to see is an end to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a provision that protects tech companies from being held liable for content posted by third parties.
She became familiar with the controversial provision almost immediately when she began her firm, and ever since it’s been a mission of hers to fight it through litigation and advocating to Congress.
“This industry has not been responsible. The whole purpose of this law has been perverted, and what was supposed to be protecting people and empowering companies to moderate their platforms instead is being used as a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card,” she said.
Goldberg said she supports the bipartisan proposal put forward by the House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and ranking member Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) that would provide a “sunset” clause to end the protections.
Although the provision has opposition on both sides of the aisle, lawmakers dealing with concerns about content moderation online have often been unable to come to an agreement on reform. Democrats broadly think the provision provides a way to protect companies hosting hate speech and violative content, while Republicans largely accuse the tech companies of being protected from allegations of censoring conservative voices.
Goldberg said it will be challenging to get lawmakers to agree on anything since they come to Section 230 with “different perspectives,” but sharing stories about her cases helps shed light on the human impact.
“When I can talk about those really specific examples, then people are like, ‘Oh I don't want that. They shouldn't get away with that,’” she said.
Broadly, though, in the 10 years since Goldberg launched her firm, she said the landscape to take on these cases has changed — both from new laws that aim to protect victims of revenge porn and pressure on the companies to change. There are now 49 states that criminalize nonconsensual pornography. And in 2015 to 2016, there was a “domino effect” spread across mainstream social media companies to ban it, she said.
“The number of people coming to me with this problem is so reduced. And now we kind of use that same framework to be looking at the new iterations, like deepfakes, and getting laws to deal with that,” Goldberg said.