PERSPECTIVES
Attorney CARRIE GOLDBERG has made a name for herself defending
victims of online harassment and vengeful exes. Now the high-profile lawyer
is opening up about the abuse she suffered along the way. By Jessica TestaTHE REVENGE-
PORN WARRIOR
In Nobody’s Victim, Goldberg expands on the story. The ex didn’t just threaten to
publish photos; he messaged her family, friends, and coworkers on Facebook to tell
them Goldberg was a drug addict with a sexually transmitted infection. She went to
the police, reporting the ex for threatening her, stalking her, and trying to break into
her apartment. But he filed a police report, too, accusing her of assault and alleging
she’d slept with judges in exchange for favorable outcomes in her legal cases. His report
landed Goldberg in jail for a night, she writes. Her charges weren’t dropped until a few
months later, after she’d spent $30,000 in legal fees to clear her name.
In December 2013, at the end of that awful year, Goldberg replayed the drama over
in her head, standing on a cliff in the middle of a storm in Ireland, where she’d gone on
vacation. There, she writes, “I decided I was going to advocate for victims the way I wish
somebody had fought for me. I would become the lawyer I’d needed when I was most
desperate.” It’s a powerful, cinematic moment. It’s a nice story. It’s not the whole story.
Later in the book, Goldberg reveals she was in a much darker place by the time
she climbed onto that cliff. In 2012, before she met the “psycho ex,” she went out for
drinks with a man who said he was a doctor, whom she met on OKCupid. The night
devolved into “a series of hazy snapshots,” Goldberg writes. One of them is this: bend-
ing over a bed while the doctor took a needle and thread to one of her bare ass cheeks,
photographed his work, and then raped her. The next morning, she discovered he’d
sutured a swastika onto her body.
In telling this tale—one that just a handful of people knew until now—Goldberg
comes clean about what really happened on the Ireland cliff: She wanted to jump. “I
was so overwhelmed by the doctor’s rape and the psycho’s stalking, I felt hopeless. Like,
end-it-all hopeless,” she writes. Suicide felt “like a permanent solution to my unbearable
pain.” At this thought, she panicked, climbed down, and made a pact with herself: If
she didn’t turn her life around in 2014, she could come back to Ireland and kill herself.o she started a business. Five years later, Goldberg’s firm has claimed
victory in a variety of cases: securing six-figure settlements; helping
send clients’ stalkers to prison; initiating investigations into schools’
handling of revenge porn cases. Goldberg has spoken about sexual
assault in schools at the White House. She’s consulted on Netflix’s 13
Reasons Why; Paramount Television and Anonymous Content are
now developing a fictionalized version of Goldberg’s story for TV. In the early days of
Time’s Up, she was invited to talk about legal services and legislation at the Hollywood
homes of Jessica Chastain and Julianne Moore. She works with a blazing energy. In her
chic office—think pink sofas, acrylic chairs, and shiny gold accents—she double-fists Diet
Coke and hot chocolate, pausing the conversation to reserve her treadmill at Equinox
for the next day. There’s no word she uses more than “fight,” though “fuck” comes close.
That doesn’t mean she wins every battle. This spring, Goldberg lost a case against
Grindr. She was representing a man named Matthew Herrick, whose ex-boyfriend in
2016 allegedly created multiple fake Grindr accounts in Herrick’s name, seeking ag-
gressive sex and sending hundreds of strangers to Herrick’s front door and workplace.
This went on for months; Herrick begged the company to take the fake profiles down,
but it took no action.
Grindr, best known as a hookup app for gay men, was legally covered by Section 230
of the Communications Decency Act of 1996—the bane of Goldberg’s existence. Under
Section 230, online platforms can’t be held liable for any content posted by their users.
According to Goldberg, this law is “the single greatest enabler of every asshole, troll,It’s been a week since Carrie
Goldberg submitted a final draft of her book, but when
I ask how she feels about it and she says “holy shit,” it’s
not out of excitement. Nor is it that she’s feeling stunned,
or proud, or relieved. At one point she’d felt all those
things, but right now Goldberg is mostly experiencing
dread—a nerve-racking, “holy shit” kind of dread.
“There’s gonna be, in August, all these people who
know my shit,” she says. “The darkest moment in my life,
it’s just gonna be out there. Which is super liberating, but
it’s just fucking with me.”
Goldberg is a 42-year-old attorney based in Brook-
lyn. Her law firm specializes in representing victims of
“psychos, stalkers, pervs, and trolls,” as she calls them.
Each case is different, but usually this means Goldberg
is working with women who’ve been hurt by men, of-
ten in ways facilitated by technology. (She also has male
clients but, predictably, not as many.) After opening her
firm in 2014, Goldberg began working on cases involv-
ing revenge porn, helping victims scrub the internet of
nudes posted online without their consent. While her
practice has since grown significantly, along with Gold-
berg’s national reputation as a tech-savvy, somewhat
foul-mouthed legal avenger, one thing hasn’t changed:
Her clients know all about having their darkest moments
“out there.” Many of them didn’t have a choice. Goldberg,
however, is willingly giving up her secrets.
That’s not all her new book is about. Nobody’s Victim
weaves together stories of Goldberg’s major cases—
like suing the dating app Grindr, and representing ac-
cusers of Harvey Weinstein—with her analysis of how
the law interacts with harassment, porn, power, and
privacy. The book’s tone is straightforward and com-
pellingly combative. On page one, Goldberg describes
herself as a “ruthless motherfucker,” writing as if she’s
raising an “army of warriors.” Feminists who grew up
alongside the internet—who don’t see a distinction
between real life and what happens online—will find
Nobody’s Victim instructive; those who identify as
survivors will find it essential.
But the book also rewrites Goldberg’s own narrative.
That’s where the dread comes in. Since reporters began
paying attention to her work, Goldberg has told the same
origin story, including to the New Yorker in 2016: She
became a “revenge porn lawyer” because that was the
kind of attorney she needed in her midthirties, when her
initially adoring boyfriend turned obsessive, jealous, and
then full-on “psycho,” threatening to put her intimate
photos online when she left him.S
“HOLY SHIT.”
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