Deepfake Abuse Isn’t a Legal Void Anymore. Here’s What Victims Can Actually Do.

Generative tools made this kind of abuse cheap and fast long before the law caught up to it. A 2019 academic count found that the overwhelming majority of deepfake video circulating online was nonconsensual pornography, a figure Congress has cited repeatedly while drafting federal legislation. That gap between the technology and the statute book is mostly closed now, at least on paper. What follows is a procedural breakdown of what each piece of law actually does, what it does not do, and where the machinery underneath the statute still lags behind the right it created.

What Counts as a Deep Fake Under the Law

Michigan’s statute and the federal TAKE IT DOWN Act define the term in similar ways. Both cover a visual depiction created or substantially altered through software, machine learning, or comparable technological means, realistic enough that a reasonable person would believe it shows something that actually happened. Michigan’s law narrows further to depictions of intimate parts or a sexual act, where the person is identifiable either from the image itself or from personal information attached to it. Neither law requires the deepfake to have started from a real nude photo. An image built entirely from a public, fully clothed photograph still counts if it meets the realism and identifiability tests.

The Federal Floor: What TAKE IT DOWN Actually Does

President Trump signed the TAKE IT DOWN Act on May 19, 2025, after it cleared the Senate by unanimous consent and the House by a vote of 409 to 2. The law makes it a federal crime to knowingly publish a nonconsensual intimate visual depiction of an adult or minor, expressly including AI-generated digital forgeries. It also requires covered platforms to build a notice-and-removal process and take flagged content down within 48 hours of a valid request from the person depicted. The Federal Trade Commission has enforced that platform obligation as an unfair or deceptive trade practice since the one-year compliance deadline passed on May 19, 2026, and the first criminal conviction under the act was reported that April.

The limitation matters as much as the grant. TAKE IT DOWN criminalizes distribution and forces removal. It does not create a civil right of action, so the person depicted cannot use this statute alone to sue for damages. It is a tool for getting content off the internet and putting a distributor in criminal jeopardy, not a compensation mechanism.

The Federal Gap: Why the DEFIANCE Act Still Isn’t Law

The DEFIANCE Act would do what TAKE IT DOWN does not: create a federal civil right of action letting a depicted person sue anyone who knowingly produces, distributes, solicits, or possesses with intent to distribute a nonconsensual sexual deepfake. As drafted, it allows statutory damages up to $150,000, rising to $250,000 where the conduct involved sexual assault, stalking, or harassment, a ten year statute of limitations tolled until discovery or age eighteen, and the option to litigate under a pseudonym.

The Senate passed an earlier version unanimously in July 2024, but the bill died when that Congress ended without House action. It was reintroduced in the current Congress as S.1837 and H.R.3562, and the Senate passed it again by unanimous consent on January 13, 2026, days after renewed public attention following nonconsensual deepfakes generated through X’s Grok tool. As of publication, the bill remains in the House Judiciary Committee, where it has not moved since being referred there in May 2025.

The Three Tracks, Side by Side

Each track carries a different standard, a different remedy, and a different limitation. None of them are mutually exclusive, and a single case can run more than one at once.

Michigan’s Own Law: What the Statute Actually Requires

Public Act 11 of 2025, codified starting at MCL 752.381, gives a depicted person or someone representing them a civil action against anyone who created or disseminated the deep fake knowing, or reasonably having reason to know, that it would cause physical, emotional, reputational, or economic harm, or who made it specifically to harass, extort, threaten, or harm. The depiction has to realistically show intimate parts or a sexual act, and the person has to be identifiable, either from the image itself or from personal information attached to it.

Remedies under the civil track include economic and noneconomic damages, disgorgement of any profit the defendant made from distributing the content, and injunctive relief, with additional fines of up to $1,000 per day for violating a court order to stop. Michigan law also allows recovery of court costs and reasonable attorney fees, which matters more than it sounds like it should. A civil right that requires the plaintiff to fully finance the litigation before recovering anything is a much thinner right in practice than one where a prevailing plaintiff can recoup the cost of pursuing it.

The criminal side runs on a separate track under MCL 752.388. The base offense is a one year misdemeanor with a fine of up to $3,000. It escalates to a three year felony with a fine of up to $5,000 if any of several aggravating factors apply: the victim suffered a financial loss, the creator intended to profit, the creator maintains a website or app for the purpose of creating or disseminating this kind of content, or the creator has a prior conviction for the same offense.

Consent to the original photograph is explicitly not a defense unless the person signed a written agreement that specifically described the intimate depiction later created from it, a provision aimed squarely at defeating the argument that agreeing to be photographed once means agreeing to whatever gets made from that photograph later. The statute also carves out exceptions for lawful criminal investigations, reporting unlawful conduct, medical or mental health treatment contexts, matters of legitimate public interest handled in good faith, and legal proceedings. This law is distinct from Michigan’s separate, earlier statute restricting political deepfakes within 90 days of an election, a different statute built for a different problem and not a source of remedy for intimate image abuse.

Where Civil Torts Still Matter

Defamation and its close cousin false light both depend on treating the deepfake as a false statement of fact about the person depicted, a framing that works cleanly in some jurisdictions and remains untested in others when the underlying content is an obviously synthetic sexual depiction rather than a false factual claim in the traditional sense. Intentional infliction of emotional distress avoids that framing problem, since it turns on whether the conduct was extreme and outrageous and caused severe distress rather than on whether a specific statement was false, though Michigan courts set a genuinely high bar for what counts as outrageous. Right of publicity, sometimes called misappropriation, was built mostly for commercial exploitation cases, someone’s face used in an advertisement without permission, and courts are still working out how well that doctrine transfers to a noncommercial, harassment-driven deepfake. None of these claims are obsolete. They are simply older tools being fitted to newer technology, and the fit is not always exact.

The Practical First 72 Hours

Every legal track above depends on evidence that exists before a platform, and often the content itself, disappears. The sequence matters more than any single step in isolation.

Where the System Still Fails

The Counterargument: Free Expression Concerns

Civil liberties organizations including the Center for Democracy and Technology and the Electronic Frontier Foundation did not oppose the underlying goal of fighting nonconsensual intimate imagery, but flagged concerns about how broadly a platform removal mandate could sweep given imprecise statutory language, and warned it could be misused to pressure platforms into removing legitimate content, satire, or public interest reporting through a pretextual takedown request. That concern is worth taking seriously rather than waving off. Both the federal law and Michigan’s statute build in exceptions for public interest and lawful purpose content, but those exceptions place the burden on the platform or the accused party to invoke them after a request comes in, rather than screening requests before removal happens.

Why This Matters Beyond Any Single Case