Attorney General William Tong, joined by Judiciary Committee leaders, speaks about deepfake porn in the State Capitol in Hartford on April 23, 2026. Credit: Jamil Ragland / CTNewsJunkie
HARTFORD, CT – A bipartisan coalition of legislators and state leaders is seeking to give victims of the sharing of non-consensual intimate images another tool to hold perpetrators accountable.
Attorney General William Tong, joined by members of the General Assembly’s Judiciary committee, urged legislators to support House Bill 5312. The bill establishes a private right to action for people who have had their intimate images shared without their consent, and for victims of synthetically created images such as deep fakes, to sue their victimizer. People can also sue social media and technology companies who continue to disseminate the images.
“This is pretty tough stuff, and it has to be, because there is not just no excuse for this kind of behavior,” Tong said. “It’s not just bad behavior or naughty behavior. It’s criminal behavior. And depending on the circumstances, it can and will be a felony.”
The attorney general’s office is also empowered to go after companies which refuse to take down intimate images. Companies risk a fine of $25,000 per image, per day for failing to comply with takedown orders within 48 hours.
The bill unanimously passed the Judiciary Committee in March.
HB 5312 is a follow-up to the 2015 bill that criminalized “revenge porn,” which is the practice of sharing intimate images to cause harm, typically to a former spouse or significant other. During the press conference, Tong acknowledged that the bill didn’t go far enough.
“Though I commend the legislature at that time for passing it into law, we really were not familiar, or just getting to understand that issue. We are not unfamiliar anymore,” he said. “I think everybody knows what we’re talking about because of the proliferation of images on websites, videos on websites, thousands, millions, probably billions of images that are on the internet without the consent of the subject.”
State Rep. Craig Fishbein, R-Wallingford, the House’s ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, praised the attorney general’s office for the work done in bringing the bill forward.
“This is good sense practice to put tools through the crux of our attorney general’s arm so that he can use it to save not only children, but adults also from this scourge,” he said. “And hopefully we can get it to stop, but currently it is a large problem.”
Bridgeport Democratic Rep. Steve Stafstrom, the committee’s co-chair, said tools like artificial intelligence are powerful and useful, but come with downsides such as their ability to create sexually explicit imagery of people without their consent.
“What this bill does is it attempts to make our law catch up with the emergence of technology,” he said. “It is aimed at those who harm others by using AI to create intimate images and videos. Unfortunately, oftentimes these pictures and videos can be really indistinguishable from real life.”
State Rep. Ceci Maher, D-Wilton, talked about how the ability of AI and other tools to transform innocent pictures into sexually explicit, harmful material has made her and her family stop posting images of their children’s faces on social media.
“Hopefully in Connecticut, through the passage of this bill, we will start putting an end to it and we will make people think twice before they take images of children and manipulate them into sexually explicit situations,” she said.
