Transcript of episode 010 -

Building a Better Internet with Carrie Goldberg

Bridget Todd (00:00):

Just a heads up, this episode includes mentions of sex crimes.

Bridget Todd (00:08):

There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.

Bridget Todd (00:16):

I'm Bridget Todd and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

Bridget Todd (00:21):

There used to be a time when we didn't really have a term for the idea of revenge porn.

There used to be a time when we didn't really have a term for the idea of revenge porn. Spreading someone's intimate content online without their consent was just a thing that happened on the internet. Just last week, 19-year-old Aaron Coleman won the democratic primary for a Kansas house seat, even after admitting to obtaining nude photos of a girl when he was 14, trying to blackmail her into sending him more photos and spreading them online when she refused. On Twitter, journalist Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept called Aaron's behavior, quote, "Bad middle school bullying," but this kind of behavior isn't just bullying, it's a serious sex crime. When we minimize revenge porn, we're contributing to an attitude that says once someone takes an intimate photo of themselves, they deserve whatever happens next, even if it means their life is destroyed, they're harassed or worse. Luckily, women are fighting to build a better internet. One where we have the right to feel safe online.

You could be forgiven for thinking of Carrie Goldberg as a real life super hero… With her law firm, she spent her professional life holding all manner of internet creeps, abusers and stalkers accountable.

Bridget Todd (01:22):

You could be forgiven for thinking of Carrie Goldberg as a real life super hero. Instead of a cape, she rocks heels, bold statement glasses and sometimes even caps it off with a baseball hat reading, "I sue abusers." With her law firm, she spent her professional life holding all manner of internet creeps, abusers and stalkers accountable. Going head to head with powerful abusers and their enablers is scary, but Carrie has never been one to back down from a challenge. She represented Lucia Evans and Paz de la Huerta who were among the first women who made public allegations against Harvey Weinstein, which led to his arrest. Her book Nobody's Victim is about her own experiences with an abusive ex who vowed to use the internet to ruin her life and her journey to become the lawyer she needed. Carrie has been responsible for creating a massive cultural change around the kind of experiences marginalized people can expect from the internet. Her work, creating accountability for people who misuse the internet to cause harm, forces us to ask, "Why should we accept mistreatment as a given? Why can't things be better?"

Bridget Todd (02:34):

Carrie, it turns out, has been holding creeps accountable since the very beginning. So one of the stories I've read about you is that when you were in school, one of your classmates was bragging about having gotten a hand job from one of your girlfriends. And you responded by gluing a bunch of amputated doll hands to a poster and giving it to him with a card that says, "We'll give you a hand." Has holding people accountable for their bad behavior always been a mission of yours?

Carrie Goldberg (03:00):

It didn't feel like it was a mission of mine, no, but it was a fun pastime. And I remember one of my friends was on the boys' soccer team and she was the only girl on the team. We didn't have a girls' soccer team in Aberdeen. And there was an incident where she was on the school bus and they were going to an away game and she fell asleep with her mouth open. And she told me about how when she woke up, there were all these pubes in her mouth. And I guess a bunch of her teammates had like plucked their pubes and put them in her mouth.

Carrie Goldberg (03:37):

Now I was a member of the yearbook team and I got assigned to write this story about the boys' soccer team. And I got kicked off the yearbook team or the yearbook class because the teacher had realized that the first letter of each word in the first couple of sentences spelled out pubic pluckers. And now that's a Title IX situation, her waking up and having, that's a disciplinary issue. Back then, we didn't think that much of it, it was playful. But I mean she was the only girl on that team, it's certainly impacting her enjoyment of it.

Bridget Todd (04:27):

Boys will be boys. It's just a joke. She deserved it. I'd never let something like that happen to me. It's difficult for me to admit, but I've had these kinds of harmful victim blaming reactions to hearing about the sexual abuse of a classmate. I was 15 and it was gossip, something to whisper about in homeroom. I got to feel like part of the ingroup, judging another girl for something that was done to her. It was wrong and I wish I had known better. Young me contributed to a culture that treated serious crimes and violations like some big joke. It wasn't a joke.

Bridget Todd (05:03):

Your work has been incredibly impactful for me, for my own process of understanding the cultural change that needs to happen around those kinds of stories, right? When I was in high school, I think that was in 10th grade. You know how every high school has that big scandal that happens in your class or in your school that everybody's talking about? In my school, it was a girl had sent intimate pictures to her boyfriend, clearly just for him, and he sent them to everybody. We went to a pretty small school. There's an all girls school but there was an all boys school nearby and these pictures were seen by everybody.

Bridget Todd (05:41):

And I hate to say this, it's like a shameful confession, but 15 year old Bridget thought this was a joke, right? 15 year old Bridget thought that because she had taken these pictures at all, she deserved what happened to her. She deserved to be shamed. And I was very young, but looking back, I thought about it as a joke, right? I didn't think it was serious. And I thought that it was okay to make fun of her, to shame her, because she had done this to herself and she deserves it. And it wasn't until becoming older did I really step back and think, I was really complicit in continuing a cultural attitude that A, when things like this happen, that it's just a joke. It's not serious. It's not a crime. And B, that the victims deserve whatever scorn or shame they get because they put themself in this situation.

Bridget Todd (06:37):

And I guess my question is how do we get to a place where more people go through that process of being like, "Oh, well actually I believe some pretty fucked up stuff about victims, about sexualized violence, and I have a role in making sure that everybody understands that these are very serious."

the issue is that kids don't learn empathy

Carrie Goldberg (06:59):

I mean Bridget, what you're talking about is the issue. Most of my underage clients, almost all of them are that victim, are the person that the scandal around the high school is orbiting around. And the issue is that kids don't learn empathy and they don't develop empathetic skills until later on and they can't roll reverse with the victims. There's a natural instinct in all of us to want to be part of the gossip and part of the story and to see the picture that everyone else is seeing and talking about and not to be the up stander who is like, "That's actually a sex crime and everyone who's looking at that and has it on their phone and is sending it to other minors is actually engaging in a felony. Child pornography, felonious behavior."

Carrie Goldberg (08:02):

But the issue is that that attitude of victim blaming and stuff, which is really natural in kids, it's also frequently present in the administrators, in the school resource officers who are cops and even in the parents who get involved, including sometimes the victim's parents. A lot of times our clients don't take immediate action because they're afraid of their parents disciplining them. We talk about consent education and how we need to teach kids about consent but a big component of that is about empathy and just doing role reversal exercises where kids have to imagine what it's like to be in somebody else's shoes. And I think that's important when we're talking about race and gender and also victimization.

Bridget Todd (09:05):

One of Carrie's clients, a Brooklyn teen with mental disabilities, was raped at a stairwell while at school. When she reported what happened, her school counselor decided that she was at fault and suspended her. Sadly, her story is not really that uncommon. School aged black and brown girls are more likely to face interpersonal violence at school and are also disproportionately criminalized and punished. Carrie's client won a $950,000 settlement against the city and a city spokesperson promised $47 million annually in school climate training programs. It won't undo the hell she suffered Carrie said, but it will buy her some comfort and healing.

Carrie Goldberg (09:44):

It's not necessarily about suing, although I am a big believer in that when the circumstances are right, but it's amplifying your voice. And I mean sometimes when I would be writing my legal complaints in preparation of lawsuits, I would get so emotional that I would just go on these Twitter storms, just diva fits. But even that, those would get retweeted, and by the time I filed my complaints, I had a lot of journalists that were in line to cover them. So some of it's just letting the natural rage of the injustice speak for itself.

Bridget Todd (10:29):

Let's take a quick break.

Bridget Todd (10:38):

And we're back.

Bridget Todd (10:39):

Carrie has a real connection to her clients. She rages about the injustices they face on Twitter. She uses her own experiences to help them combat stigma and shame and let them know they're not alone.

Carrie Goldberg (10:51):

I feel very invested in making the process of the litigation or getting justice tolerable because it can take years and you need them to be able to feel like it's worth it. And it's stressful at times and it can be very invasive. When you're only 16, 17, you're having to relive this awful thing that happened to you when you were 13. You need to feel like it's for something really important.

Carrie Goldberg (11:31):

And also, just getting back to what you were talking about Bridget, about how when we're young, we can actually be complicit in some of the violation. It makes me think about how much more traumatizing it is to be a victim when you're young. Where not only have our violators not developed the skill of empathy, but the victims haven't figured out how to cope. And it can feel like your whole world is crashing around you if you are not only sexually violated, but then all the students in your class think you're a joke and are spreading it. And you're afraid your parents are going to punish you and you're afraid your school's going to punish you. And kids already don't have control over their lives and then to be kind of socially ostracized or put in this category of other and have your friendships kind of crumble, that can create such desperation. And every single one of our young clients has been suicidal during those moments. It's just like they don't have the coping skills. I didn't when I was that age.

Bridget Todd (12:54):

When Carrie was younger, she was victimized by abusive exes. One had intimate images of her and vowed to use them to ruin her life. This was before revenge porn was even really a thing. People didn't know how to talk about it or deal with it when it happened and lawyers didn't really know how to handle what she was going through. In your book you talk about how you became the lawyer that you wish you would've had in your thirties. Can you tell me a bit about that?

Carrie Goldberg (13:21):

Yeah. Well, I had some violence. I was a victim of some dating violence and incident of sexual violence before I started my law firm. And when I was trying to escape my ex-boyfriend's stalking and he was just besieging me with text messages and threats and false police reports and it was never ending. I had trouble finding a lawyer. I worked with somebody on the domestic violence piece. I worked with somebody on the bogus criminal complaints piece. But for everyone that I talked to, this was a real abnormal case for them and you don't want to be the outlier when it comes to getting legal help and having a lawyer be kind of learning as they go.

Carrie Goldberg (14:32):

And it was unpredictable for them what would happen or the profile of my offender was something really new to them. And when I finally got my orders of protection and he pled guilty, which was six months after the breakup, I quit everything and started my law firm a few months later. In retrospect, I was still in the midst of a lot of trauma, but I started this law firm basically to become the kind of lawyer that I'd needed because I'd gotten this kind of involuntary education into the world of being stalked and having no control over what's happening in the internet. And I learned that in New York, we didn't have a law criminalizing somebody sending around your naked pictures.

And so the internet component of the attack on me was the most scary thing, the scariest part about it.

Carrie Goldberg (15:36):

And so the internet component of the attack on me was the most scary thing, the scariest part about it. Because even after I got my order of protection, I knew that legally he could still be sending around my images. As far as I know, he didn't, but he had threatened to and he sent me emails with the pictures saying that he'd blind copied other lawyers and judges and stuff. But it was this constant anxiety that I wasn't protected even after all the legal issues had seemingly wrapped up.

Bridget Todd (16:30):

Carrie became one of the most prominent lawyers specializing in revenge porn and offers victims legal support and a pathway to justice, whatever that looks like for them.

Carrie Goldberg (16:40):

Our expertise is dealing with people who've been stalked and harassed and victims of sexual assault and sexual trauma and getting justice for them. Sometimes it's just about getting an order of protection or helping advocate in the criminal justice system or just sending a cease and desist and getting the offender to go away forever. Other times, the victim doesn't want to take any legal action, but just wants those images to be removed from the internet. And then we also do sometimes have really big cases against like the city of New York when there was a retaliation against a student or our big case against Grindr because we felt they were facilitating our client being stalked.

Carrie Goldberg (17:30):

But basically the idea is that every client that comes to us has either been attacked or is under attack and so we know what to do. And we've seen all these behavioral profiles over and over again. And the more you do something, the more expert you get. And so we can predict, "Well, by sending a cease and desist letter to this kind of behavioral profile who is mentally ill and unrelenting and obsessed, we can know that's just going to escalate things." Whereas, "Oh, this other person, he's threatening revenge porn, but he's actually got a really stable job and has a kid. And he's actually going to feel scared of a threat because it could take things away from him."

Bridget Todd (18:25):

More after this quick break.

Bridget Todd (18:34):

Let's get right back to it.

Carrie's case against the dating app Grindr was one of the biggest fights of her career.

Bridget Todd (18:36):

Carrie's case against the dating app Grindr was one of the biggest fights of her career. In it, she sets her sight on legislation called Section 230, which basically says that tech platforms can't be sued for what people say on those platforms. Now free speech advocates, like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, say Section 230 is what makes the internet the internet, but Carrie says that's exactly the problem. Forgive me if I bungle this. From my kind of like layperson's research, I understand that it really comes down to Section 230, which I know that is something that you really, really have an issue with. This is the section that allows tech companies to not be held liable for things that are said on their platform, the way that their platforms are used. Free speech advocates say that that section is what makes the internet what it is, but you say that's exactly the problem, right? That we should be thinking about the internet in a different way. We should be building a different internet.

Bridget Todd (19:32):

I guess how do we reconcile those two arguments I guess? Is there some way to preserve free speech online while also not letting tech companies just avoid accountability for the way that their platforms are misused?

Carrie Goldberg (19:50):

Oh my gosh, I have so much to say to this. Bridget, you framed it better than I could. Our client Matthew Herrick was a waiter slash actor slash former reality star who lived in Manhattan in Harlem. And he had just ended a relationship with a really controlling and abusive man. And among the ways that that man stalked Matthew was he started creating fake profiles on Grindr, the gay dating app, and then luring people to Matthew's job and to his home using Grindr's geo locating technology and DMing with the unknowing people. And over the course of several months, over 1300 individuals came in person to Matthew's apartment and to his job thinking that they were there to have sex with him.

Carrie Goldberg (20:49):

So imagine just in the course of this interview, if your buzzer rang three times. It was sometimes as many as 23 people a day Bridget. And each time, he didn't know who it was going to be. He didn't know if that person was going to be dangerous. Sometimes Matthew's ex would torment and taunt the visitors and say homophobic or racist things or say that Matthew had free drugs. And so sometimes the visitors would come really angry or tweaked out, but always they were there thinking that Matthew had rape fantasies and stuff. So I mean, it was scary, it was a crime that was happening to Matthew day in and day out every single day. And Matthew had gone to the police 10 times. He'd gotten an order of protection that the offender was violating over and over again and nothing mattered.

Carrie Goldberg (21:54):

Matthew flagged the accounts with Grindr about 50 times by the time we came along. And then I had just worked with a bunch of big tech companies at the time, this is like the fall or the end of 2016. And I've worked with a bunch of tech companies on their revenge porn policies and so I was super like, "I'll just call up Grindr's general counsel and get them to remove this user," and they ignored me too. And so I was raging with him and we ended up getting a restraining order against Grindr saying that they had to remove this user, which it's not super common to get a restraining order against a tech company, but we got it. And Grindr even ignored that, the visitors kept coming.

Carrie Goldberg (22:53):

As we plotted our lawsuit against Grindr, we had to worry about the Communications Decency Act, Section 230, which was this law, as you mentioned, that went into effect back in 1995 when the internet looked nothing like it does now. And the law was actually, it was just a 26 word law that was part of a bigger law that basically banned pornography on the internet. But the other part of that law got deemed unconstitutional, in case you're wondering why we have porn on the internet. It's not constitutional to outlaw it, but this little section survived. And it originally was supposed to just make it so that if a bulletin board, which was basically the way that people talked to one another online, if somebody posted something defamatory on the bulletin board, there wouldn't be a lawsuit against the bulletin board but the defamation would be user to user.

Carrie Goldberg (24:09):

It kind of makes sense because then the platforms are not tasked with this burden of having to moderate all the speech and all the posts and stuff like that. But the issue is that over the last 25 years, that law has been interpreted by our courts in this really expansive way. And so anytime Twitter or Facebook or anybody gets sued for something that's happening to a user they say, "We're not liable because of Section 230. You can't hold us accountable for anything that one user does to another." And courts have said, "You're right, because all the other cases before you didn't."

Bridget Todd (25:01):

It's important to emphasize that Carrie isn't just talking about what someone says on a platform. If a platform allows an abusive user to impersonate you and set you up for a dangerous encounter in real life, it's a pretty big flaw.

Carrie Goldberg (25:15):

The issue is that the internet and apps are so much different now than they were and we're not just talking about defamation. We're talking about geo locating technology and social media companies which have so much functionability. And we're talking about dating apps and apps that are playing a role in matching users. But we had to make it when we were filing this lawsuit so that we were not suing Grindr for anything that Matt's ex was doing to Matt, because we knew it would get kicked out of court for violating Section 230.

Carrie Goldberg (25:51):

And so when Grindr's lawyers finally came to court and told us that they didn't have the technology to ban an abusive user, we were like, "What? You have the world's biggest dating app, the biggest dating app for gay people. It's so foreseeable that sometimes it's going to be abused by stalkers, by predators, and you've not designed into it a way to stop abusive users? Well, then you've released a dangerous product into the stream of commerce." And just like our product liability laws for cars that have air bags that don't go off or broken breaks or something, Grindr had created a dangerous product. We say, "You shouldn't have been on the market in the first place. And the fact that you are, well, that's how we're going to sue you."

Carrie Goldberg (26:49):

Grindr still said, "At the end of the day, you're still holding us liable for stuff this user's done to Matthew. It's not us." And the judge agreed with Grindr and we appealed and kept losing at every stage and ultimately petitioned to the Supreme Court and lost which happens. This was from the beginning a real, it was a very experimental lawsuit. At the time that we filed it, it was novel for anybody to even be referring to apps as products. Everyone was saying, "They're services, they're services." But now this idea has caught on and it's kind of changed the way that we think about apps and internet products.

Carrie Goldberg (27:44):

And the fact that Matthew experienced such a horrific thing and he couldn't get justice, that's actually helped us fight for legislation. And so as you mentioned, you've got all these people on the other side that, and I don't actually think it's all these people. I think they're just very vocal and they're getting paid a lot of lobbying money from big tech.

Bridget Todd (28:18):

Is the internet we have now working for everyone? Is it the version of the internet we want? Is it one worth preserving as is? Carrie doesn't really think so.

Carrie Goldberg (28:27):

But they're saying that basically the internet as we know it wouldn't exist without Section 230, and we're going to lose all this wonderful free exchange of ideas if we lose Section 230. And I call total BS on that, because number one, you're assuming that the internet as we know it is a great place and that as we know it should be preserved. It's kind of like any constitutional argument or Make America Great Again, you're assuming that things are great and you're assuming that everyone has the same level of free speech. But I mean speech on the internet really belongs to those who are the loudest and basically for companies. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple, I mean they control the internet and we've got all our issues with antitrust and also the quantity. So the most hostile people on the internet are the ones who have the greatest protections. But also when we're talking about lawsuits and the right to sue, it's such a fundamental right.

Bridget Todd (29:54):

Carrie says that as long as tech companies have the kind of legal protection afforded to them by Section 230, it creates a situation where there's not a lot of avenues to hold them accountable.

Carrie Goldberg (30:04):

No, the thing is as you see with our cases against the New York City Department of Ed, for the cost of an index number, which is a couple 100 bucks which you can get waived. I had a client whose mom was a part-time home health aid and didn't speak English and they had no money to speak of. I had her suing the city of New York, which is worth multi billion dollars. And that's the great equalizer in our country is that anybody can sue if there's been a harm. And it's fundamental and it's also how we keep our big organizations, our companies, from being total assholes because the threat of being sued, it's a bottom line issue, it costs money. And like so many safety measures, whether we're talking about pharmaceuticals or cars, it's because of litigation that happened or it's because of the fear of litigation.

Carrie Goldberg (31:13):

And also it's because most companies want people to be safe. They want their customers and clients to not have a bad experience. You don't see that with big tech though. If you had a crisis on Facebook, if let's say you're a parent and your kid was manipulated into giving nudes to a pedophile, and then he was sharing them online. You're a parent, your first instinct was, "Who do I talk to? Who do I talk to? What's the phone number? Who's live to help me with this crisis?" And it's just like a one way street here where we're giving these companies all this information about us and stuff and it's like Oz. They're behind this magic curtain and don't have to interact with us users.

Bridget Todd (32:17):

So as you were talking, it occurred to me that when you first started your law firm, the idea of revenge porn didn't even really exist. And it was through advocating for legal protections and working with victims that you helped usher in both a legal change and a cultural re imagining of what revenge porn actually is. And in listening to you talk about tech companies just now, it seems like you're poised to do that same kind of thing again when it comes to re imagining what role tech companies should play in creating an internet that's safer for everyone, like a hard reset of how these companies operate.

Carrie Goldberg (32:47):

Yeah. I mean it's true, Bridget. There's so much work that can be done and it's a really critical time because you have all this concentrated power and wealth in just a few companies and the inequality in our society is just getting greater because of these companies. And also the power and the omniscience is also another thing that's just creating so much more inequality in our country.

Carrie Goldberg (33:26):

And the thing is, I do have so many cases where you can't ignore that the facts are horrific. An 11 year old who was sextorted and made to create all these videos and they were sent around on Instagram. Or my client whose murder was basically live streamed or another client who was raped and murdered on a first date through match.com by a known sex offender. Okay, even if these cases can't be brought in court or get kicked out, you can't deny that there is extreme negligence by these companies. I'm going to just keep producing them until we get new law.

Carrie Goldberg (34:20):

And it's just like any other case where if you don't feel like you can become a victim, then you're not going to care. But the whole purpose of my book and everything is to pound into the consciousness that we're all a moment away from becoming victims. All it takes is one person to decide they want to destroy you. One bad interaction at the supermarket with somebody who finds out your name, they then have the right to go to pedophile websites and tell the world that you're a pedophile and good luck getting that down.

Carrie Goldberg (35:02):

Anybody can become a victim, but it shouldn't take that in order for us to have empathy towards victims and want to change the internet. We're not talking about somebody calling somebody else a bitch on Twitter, that's not the kind of speech that's going to be impacted. And we're not even talking about speech really, because this is all conduct. But our law doesn't even see the difference there. Like with Grindr, we weren't suing them for any words on the profile or any words on the DM. We were suing them because this product was being used hundreds of times a day to try to get our client injured. That's not a speech issue. This is unjust.

Bridget Todd (35:50):

Carrie's work isn't just about the law. It confronts the cultural attitude that people who are victimized online deserve it or that it's just a sexy scandal rather than a serious crime. Or that we should just expect that the internet is a place where we'll be mistreated. Why can't it be better than that?

Bridget Todd (36:09):

So what has it been like to have such a personal hand in challenging the internet to be better and safer and stronger and working to build one where people with power are held accountable?

Carrie Goldberg (36:18):

Well, it's so kind of you to describe me that way. I really feel flattered about that. I love my job and I love that as the owner of this law firm, I can decide what direction we go in and what fights to choose. I mean that is an incredibly privileged position to be in. There are ways to use your law degree in a super awesome, fun, creative way. I mean what's it been like? It's just been fun, but there aren't moments where I wake up and I feel like, "I've done it. I've made it." Because there's always somebody waiting to give me a bad verdict or a troll that cuts me down to size. There's very fleeting moments of, well, what should I call it? Fleeting moments of success. I'm proud of what we do, I'm so proud of my staff, but we're always humbled by the next fight.

Bridget Todd (37:35):

On her website, Carrie says the clients she works with aren't fragile like a flower, they're fragile like a bomb. Through her work with those clients, Carrie is blowing up our understanding of the internet by asking the big, bold questions about how it can be better. She's taken the darkness she faced and used it to build a brighter future.

Bridget Todd (37:58):

Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You can reach us at hello@tangoti.com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoti.com.

Bridget Todd (38:07):

There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tari Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd.

Bridget Todd (38:21):

If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.