Rhiannon Siân Adams (she/her) is a Teaching Fellow with the Intellectual Property and Information Policy Clinic at Georgetown Law. Her research explores the intersection between emerging technologies, human rights, and intimate privacy. Prior to joining Georgetown, she worked at Amnesty International and the Clooney Foundation for Justice, and on human rights litigation in London, including on the first ever claims concerning the use of Pegasus spyware against activists in the UK. She is a Winston Churchill Fellow, incoming Scholar-in-Residence at St. Mary’s University School of Law and has forthcoming articles in Harvard’s Journal of Law and Technology and NYU’s Clinical Law Review. Rhiannon received her BSc from University College London and her LL.M. from Columbia Law School, where she graduated as a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar and LL.M. Public Interest Fellow. She co-directed a reading group at Columbia Law School on trauma-informed lawyering, the first of its kind.
Project: The Cost of Criminalizing Nonconsensual Deepfakes
Deepfakes are cheap, easy to make, and increasingly so. The growing accessibility to deepfakes has fueled harms at an increasingly intimate level. Whether peers, intimate partners, or those acting in loco parentis, people are targeted by those they know closely, but with disparate effect—99% of nonconsensual deepfakes depict women and girls. Deepfake nonconsensual intimate imagery forms a new modality of aggression that characterizes gender-based violence, but the relationships between those harmed and those who harm shape how we must tackle nonconsensual deepfakes. Known and unknown perpetrators cause distinct harms—these relationships also shape the benefits and costs of different legal remedies. Criminal penalties have been the first port of call to address these harms. However, when viewed through the lens of relationships, we can learn from these accounts in understanding the limits of criminalizing nonconsensual deepfakes for some of the communities most affected. This research project explores how alternative legal remedies may better serve those harmed by nonconsensual intimate deepfakes—particularly children, survivors of domestic violence, and those marginalized by intersections of discrimination. This project seeks to provide a novel account of nonconsensual deepfakes: through the lens of relationships. This lens shows us that the cost of criminalizing nonconsensual deepfakes may be too high. This project seeks to articulate why, and what we can do about it.