Paris Hilton joins Rep. Laurel Lee to push DEFIANCE Act as Congress targets nonconsensual deepfake porn
Paris Hilton brought her story and star power back to Capitol Hill in late January, urging lawmakers to pass the DEFIANCE Act, a bipartisan bill aimed at giving victims of nonconsensual, sexually explicit deepfakes a clearer path to sue the people who make and spread them. The push puts Hilton alongside Rep. Laurel Lee, a Florida Republican who is co-leading the House effort with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as Congress tries to show it can move quickly on a fast-evolving form of online abuse.
The DEFIANCE Act cleared the Senate by unanimous consent on Tuesday, January 13, 2026, ET, and is now waiting on action in the House. Further specifics were not immediately available on how quickly House leaders plan to schedule the legislation.
A celebrity advocate and a Republican co-lead make an unusual coalition
Hilton has reframed her public image in recent years around advocacy, and her appearance in Washington this month emphasized a direct throughline from earlier internet-era exploitation to today’s AI-driven impersonation problem. For supporters of the bill, her argument is simple: the technology has changed, but the harm still centers on loss of control over one’s identity, reputation, and sense of safety.
Laurel Lee’s role has helped give the effort a bipartisan face at a time when tech policy often splits along party lines. Lee has positioned the measure as a victim-rights and accountability bill rather than a broad platform-regulation fight, arguing that the law should focus on giving people a way to pursue the individuals responsible for creating and trafficking explicit fakes.
Key terms have not been disclosed publicly about how House leadership will sequence this bill alongside other online-safety and privacy measures already competing for floor time.
What the DEFIANCE Act would do and who it targets
The DEFIANCE Act is short for the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images And Non-Consensual Edits Act. In plain terms, it seeks to strengthen victims’ legal options when someone creates an intimate digital forgery that appears real to an ordinary viewer and is made without consent.
The bill’s core idea is to expand and sharpen a federal civil cause of action so victims can sue people who knowingly produce, possess with intent to disclose, disclose, or knowingly solicit and receive nonconsensual sexually explicit digital forgeries. It is designed to cover the entire pipeline of abuse, from creation to distribution.
It also sets out meaningful remedies. The act would allow a victim to seek damages and recover legal costs, including attorney fees. Courts could also issue orders aimed at stopping further spread, including injunctions that direct a defendant to delete, destroy, or cease to display or disclose the material.
How the legal mechanism works in practice
Civil-right-of-action bills like this are built to change incentives by shifting risk onto abusers. If enacted, the DEFIANCE Act would let a victim bring a lawsuit in federal court and seek either liquidated damages or actual damages, with the option to pursue the defendant’s profits tied to the abusive conduct. The measure also contemplates higher liquidated damages in situations linked to stalking, harassment, or sexual assault conduct, reflecting the compounding harm victims often face when a fake image is used as a tool for intimidation.
A key operational feature is privacy protection. The act would allow courts to take steps to protect a plaintiff’s identity, including use of a pseudonym and sealed or redacted filings, and it gives judges authority to keep the explicit material under court control during litigation. It also includes a long lookback window by setting a statute of limitations that runs for years after discovery, which matters because victims often learn about a fake long after it begins circulating.
This framework does not automatically remove content everywhere or guarantee global enforcement. It is built to give victims leverage, financial recourse, and court orders against identifiable defendants within U.S. jurisdiction, while leaving broader platform-removal and international enforcement challenges to other laws and policies.
The real-world impact on victims, platforms, and AI development
The immediate beneficiaries would be victims, especially women and girls who are frequently targeted with intimate digital forgeries as a form of humiliation, coercion, or retaliation. The act’s supporters argue that the threat of meaningful damages and court-ordered relief could deter repeat offenders and encourage faster cooperation when a victim pursues a case.
A second affected group is online services and the broader tech ecosystem, even though the bill’s legal trigger focuses on the people who create and traffic the fakes. Lawsuits often create secondary pressure on hosts, payment processors, and distribution channels as victims seek evidence, trace accounts, and stop recirculation. AI tool developers and app makers may also feel indirect pressure to build stronger safeguards, watermarking, or user verification systems to reduce misuse and legal exposure.
At the same time, critics of civil-remedy approaches often warn that bad actors can be hard to identify and may operate across borders, limiting the deterrent effect. A full public timeline has not been released detailing how enforcement and identification challenges will be handled in the most difficult cases, where creators mask their identities or operate outside U.S. reach.
The next verifiable milestone is whether House leaders schedule a Judiciary Committee markup or a House floor vote on the DEFIANCE Act, a procedural step that would determine whether the bipartisan coalition around Hilton and Laurel Lee can translate into an enacted federal act in the weeks ahead.
