On Jan. 13, the U.S. Senate passed bill S.1837, the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act of 2025 (DEFIANCE Act). The bill defines non-consensual, sexually explicit, synthetic media, also known as deepfakes, as “a form of image-based sexual abuse,” and allows victims of deepfakes to take legal action against their abusers, defined as “any person that knowingly produced or possessed the intimate digital forgery with intent to disclose it, knowingly disclosed the intimate digital forgery, or knowingly solicited and received the intimate digital forgery.”
Paris Hilton, an advocate for the DEFIANCE Act and a victim of deepfake pornography, spoke publicly at a press conference on Jan. 22 about the threat of deepfake defamation, and its devastating effects on victims.
“[Deepfakes are] the newest form of victimization happening at scale. To your daughters, your sisters, your friends, and neighbors. A staggering 1 in 8 girls today are experiencing the harms of AI-generated deepfake porn,” Hilton said, “I hear from teenage girls who are terrified to go to school, because they know a deepfake of them is circulating. I hear from women who are scared to run for office, to apply for jobs, to speak publicly; because they know how easily their image can be weaponized against them. Too many women are afraid to exist online, or sometimes, to exist at all; and I know how that feels, because I’ve lived it. Now, I have a daughter. She’s just two and a half years old, and I would go to the ends of the earth to protect her. But I can’t protect her from this. Not yet.”
The rise in deepfake sexual exploitation is not limited to the United States. In a public statement from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), a study conducted in eleven countries found that deepfake child pornography has become more common in recent years.
“At least 1.2 million children disclosed having had their images manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes in the past year. In some countries, this represents 1 in 25 children – the equivalent of one child in a typical classroom,” UNICEF said.
