A bill criminalizing the sending of so-called revenge porn cleared the Senate Tuesday, a final parting gift from the Legislature to outgoing Gov. Charlie Baker who has been calling for lawmakers to act on the problem for years.
“An act relative to transmitting indecent visual depictions by teens and the unlawful distribution of explicit images,” if the House agrees to a July enactment provision, will now head to the governor for his consideration. It was unclear Tuesday evening if he would sign it before he walks out of the State House for the last time on Wednesday. He has long supported the idea, but doesn’t routinely comment on legislation he has not yet seen and often rejects bills for technical or legal reasons.
The act, passed in May by the House but stalled in the Senate until the end of December, will make it illegal for anyone to distribute visual material of another person’s nude body without their consent and when “the distribution causes physical or economic injury to the person depicted in the visual material or causes the person depicted in the visual material to suffer substantial emotional distress, and does so with the intent to harm, harass, intimidate, threaten, coerce or cause substantial emotional distress and with reckless disregard for the depicted person’s lack of consent.”
Those who do send images of another without their consent can face penalties up to a $10,000 fine or 2-and-a-half years in jail. Participation in the making of such imagery will no longer substitute for express consent, according to the text of the law.
“For the purposes of this subsection, a person’s consent to the creation of visual material shall not constitute consent to the distribution of the visual material,” the act reads.
The Governor’s signature would make Massachusetts one of the last states to criminalize the sending of so-called revenge porn, leaving only South Carolina as an outlier.
What emerges from the Legislature this week is along the same lines but not the same method as a bill originally proposed by Baker years ago. That proposal would have developed an entirely new class of criminal offenses to describe revenge porn.
The bill waiting for Baker’s signature will instead ensure that the state’s criminal harassment statutes apply to cases of sending revenge porn.
Herald wire services contributed.
