Voices for Voices®

Senator Ted Cruz's Mission to Protect Victims of Deepfake Abuse and 2025 Voice of the Year Award Recipient | Ep 316

• Founder of Voices for Voices®, Justin Alan Hayes • Season 4 • Episode 316

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Senator Ted Cruz's Mission to Protect Victims of Deepfake Abuse and 2025 Voice of the Year Award Recipient | Ep 316

Digital exploitation has reached unprecedented levels with the rise of AI technology, leaving countless victims feeling powerless against non-consensual intimate images. Senator Ted Cruz sits down with Justin Alan Hayes to share the remarkable journey behind the Take it Down Act, now federal law, that's changing lives across America.

At the heart of this legislation is the story of Elliston Berry, a 15-year-old Texas high school freshman who discovered AI-generated deepfake nude images of herself circulating throughout her school. The devastating revelation came with another blow—there was no legal recourse because these artificially generated images fell outside existing child pornography laws. "It is hard to be a teenager. It's really hard to be a teenage girl right now," Cruz reflects, speaking as a father of two teenage daughters. "But if you can imagine all of your friends in ninth grade believing they're looking at naked pictures of you..."

This legislative gap prompted Cruz to create the Take it Down Act, which criminalizes sharing non-consensual intimate images (both real and AI-generated) and establishes a framework requiring platforms to remove such content within 48 hours of notification. The bill's journey represents a rare moment of unity in Washington—drafted with Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar, passing unanimously in the Senate, and ultimately receiving crucial support from First Lady Melania Trump, who helped secure its passage through the House.

The law empowers victims with a straightforward process: contact the platform hosting unauthorized intimate content, and they must remove it within 48 hours or face legal consequences. As Cruz explains, "It shouldn't take a sitting US senator making a phone call to get action." Using existing notice-and-takedown mechanisms already familiar to tech companies, the law gives victims the ability to take their lives back.

Have you or someone you know been affected by non-consensual intimate images? Share this episode to spread awareness about this powerful new legal protection and join the conversation about protecting dignity in our digital world.

Chapter Markers

0:00 Introduction to Voices for VoicesⓇ

1:30 Meeting Senator Ted Cruz

2:24 The Problem of Non-consensual Images

4:04 Elliston's Story and Creating the Act

7:23 Bipartisan Support and First Lady's Role

11:06 How to Use the Take it Down Law

12:35 Voice of the Year Award Presentation

#TedCruz #VoiceOfTheYear #2025 #DeepfakeAbuse #VictimProtection #DigitalSafety #TechEthics #MediaLiteracy #CyberecurityAwareness #PoliticalLeadership #SocialJusticeAdvocacy #OnlineHarassmentPrevention #InnovationInPolicy #EmpowerVictims #LegislativeAction #presidenttrump #firstladymelaniatrump #melaniatrump #donaldjtrump #TechnologyAndSociety #justiceforsurvivors #justice4survivors #VoicesforVoices #VoicesforVoicesPodcast #JustinAlanHayes #JustinHayes #help3billion #TikTok #Instagram #truth #factoverfictionmatters #transparency #VoiceForChange #HealingTogether #VoicesForVoices316

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Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes:

Hey everyone, thank you for joining us on another episode of the Voices for Voices TV show and podcast. I'm your host. Founder of Voices for Voices, Justin Alan Hayes. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode, as well as our over 300 episodes where we cover topics from human trafficking survivors to keeping people safe at home from abuse, of being taken, from just really awful situations, and we want to just help people and the gentleman that we have on our show today, not only are we going to be lucky enough to ask him a couple questions, but we're going to be presenting him with our 2025 Voices for Voices Voice of the Year because of his patriotism, supporting the strength at the border for Americans, the strength at the border for Americans, human trafficking survivors, prosecuting them, as well as the Take it Down Act, which is now the Take it Down law, and you may know if you have watched any of our or listened to any of our episodes.

Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes:

Listen to any of our episodes. We have had Ms. Elliston Berry on, where she shared her story about basically showing up to school one day and you know, whispers were going on and she wasn't sure what was happening and found that somebody in her hometown at her school in Aledo, Texas, went and used an AI program and turned a couple of her innocent photos into what we call these deep fake nude photos, and it is so powerful to hear her story, and she's not the only one that this has happened to. There are many others across the country, and that's part of the big reason why we want to welcome Senator Ted Cruz from the great state of Texas to the show.

Senator Ted Cruz:

Well, Justin, thank you very much and thank you for your leadership. Thank you for speaking out, thank you for using your voice, using your time, using your energy to, number one, fight for victims, but the number two, to fight to hold violators accountable. This is, you know, we have seen on the Take it Down Act. We've seen an explosion of non-consensual intimate images. Roughly 95% of the non-consensual intimate images online are targeting women or teenage girls, and it's both real. You know so-called revenge porn. Sometimes you have two people in a consensual relationship, the relationship goes sour and one or the other decides okay, I'm going to get back at my former partner and put out either explicit pictures or explicit videos. I think that's a grotesque violation of privacy. Nobody has the right to do that to somebody else.

Senator Ted Cruz:

And then as you noted, the more recent incarnation of this is using AI to create deep fakes. You know it used to be. If you Photoshop someone's head on a body, it looked pretty fake from the get-go. Now it is not difficult at all to create deep fakes that nobody can tell are not real images. And Ellison, as you've noted, I've gotten to know her well. She's a 15-year-old girl, lives in North Texas, in Aledo, and what happened to her and her mom, Anna? She woke up one morning and her friends were texting her these pictures that had been sent all around her school. She was a freshman in high school.

Senator Ted Cruz:

Look, I'm the father of two teenage girls. It is hard to be a teenager. It's really hard to be a teenage girl right now. But if you can imagine all of your friends in ninth grade believing they're looking at naked pictures of you.

Senator Ted Cruz:

I mean that, and she was in tears, she was crushed. But the maddening thing is there was no consequence. It was not against any law, it was not considered child pornography. If you send around pictures of a naked 14 year old, that's child pornography. But because it was a deep fake, it was not considered child porn because it was an artificial image. And so there was no remedy and so I drafted the Take it Down Act.

Senator Ted Cruz:

Actually, elliston is the reason for the Take it Down Act because she and her mom they called my office. She's a Texan and as a constituent she complained and she said look, you're my senator, can you help me? And I want to this girl. And I said that's terrible, what can we do about it? And we drafted the Take it Down Act. It does two things. Number one, it makes it a crime, it makes it a felony to share nonconsensual intimate images, either real or deepfake. So it captured the hole in the law where deepfakes did not fall within the definition of child porn. But number two, it gives victims a legal right to remove that content from online.

Senator Ted Cruz:

And you know, a second part of this story is when we introduced the bill, I invited Ellison and her mom to come to DC and another teenage girl from New Jersey, Francesca Mani, who was also 14, had the same thing happen to her within weeks of Ellison. Both of them were very close to the same time, virtually the identical thing happened to both of them, and I was sitting talking with Ellison and her mom and this was nine months after the incident happened and I asked her, I said what happened to the pictures, and she said well, it is the most frustrating thing. They're still up and and, and ellison's mom said she had called snapchat over and over and over again she'd emailed and just ran into a brick wall, went nowhere and and I said that's ridiculous.

Senator Ted Cruz:

I turned to my staff. I said I want you to get the ceo of snapchat on the phone today. I want those pictures down today. Within two they pulled them down. But you know what? It shouldn't take a sitting US senator making a phone call to get action, and so what the Take it Down Act does is it creates a legal right If you are a victim and you notify a tech platform. You have on your platform images of me.

Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes:

They are non-consensual intimate images you do not have my permission. The tech platform has now a federal legal obligation to take that what's real and what's not real. But what makes the most difference from your position as a US Senator US Senator, this Take it Down Act. Not only was it a Take it Down Act in the state of Texas, but as you brought it here to Washington, it became a bipartisan topic, which, as we know, is kind of hard to work through that on certain other areas, and so can you just talk a little bit about how bipartisan this was.

Senator Ted Cruz:

Sure. So I teamed up with Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, and Amy and I are friends, we've worked together on a lot of matters and so we drafted it together, we introduced it together and last year she and I passed it through the Senate and we got it passed unanimously, 100 to nothing. Unfortunately, last year we did not succeed in getting it through the House. The House did not take it up, and so it didn't become law. And then this year, with the new Trump administration, we had a really beneficial development, which is the First Lady Melania Trump heard about it and she got very interested in it. And so the first lady reached out and called me and said hey, can I help? This is an important topic. I want to help and look, obviously the first lady being engaged is really beneficial, yeah, so I invited melania to come to the capitol and we did a round table, uh, and we did a round table. I invited ellison was there, francesca was there, invited a number of victims, uh, to come and just share their story and for the First Lady to hear it. But I also invited the Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the House and the relevant committee chairman to all come and the First Lady asked them will you move this through the House? And they committed on the spot absolutely we will. And so Melania's involvement really helped elevate it. There was never meaningful opposition to it in the House, it was just a question of there are lots of competing priorities and so it's hard to get floor time. And so when the First Lady leaned in, house leadership committed we'll move it.

Senator Ted Cruz:

And so the Senate passed it, the House passed it and then President Trump signed it, and I'll tell you so there was a big signing ceremony in the Rose Garden and many of the and it's actually very cool because the president signed the bill and then he handed it to Melania and she signed it. Oh, and I suspect I don't know this for a fact, but I feel pretty confident it's the only bill in history that's been signed by the first lady. In fact, some of the folks in my office said well, wait, does that like? Does that imperil its legality? I said, no, look, as long as the law is signed by the president, anyone else can sign it and it doesn't make it not a law, but she with the signing. So there's, if you walk in to the entrance of the White House, one of the entrances of the White.

Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes:

House there's a whole wall of pictures and the picture right by the front door is a picture of Melania signing the Take it Down Act. Incredible, yeah, that is that scene watching that ceremony in the Rose Garden, seeing the non-president Trump sign that making that a federal law, as well as the First Lady, melania, and then seeing you and Elliston and others. And it was a beautiful day and it was very fitting for that type of ceremony to happen. So if somebody feels like they have been taken advantage of that the Take it Down Act or Take It- Down Law impacts them in some sort of way.

Senator Ted Cruz:

What should they do? Well, if you have, if there's a non-consensual intimate image of you that has been posted, whether real or a deep fake. Number one anyone who creates that image or posts that image has committed a crime and they can be prosecuted federally. It's a felony. But number two if you're the victim, you can contact whatever platform. If it's Facebook, if it's X, whatever it's on, you can contact them and notify them. This is me, it's an intimate image and you do not have my consent and under the law, they have 48 hours to remove the image. And what we did it was actually. It was a clever idea One of the lawyers on my staff came up with.

Senator Ted Cruz:

So there's an existing legal mechanism from another law that's called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and that's been law for a long time and what it provides is it concerns copyrighted and trademark material. So if you tweet out a song from the Lion King, they'll pull that down within hours. You can't send it out, so we took. So every tech platform has an office that's called a notice and takedown office and if you notify them, hey, that's trademarked, that's copyrighted, they'll pull it down. We use this identical enforcement mechanism.

Senator Ted Cruz:

And then we said all right, we're going to use that same notice and take down. You notify them. They have a legal obligation to take it down, and so this empowers you to be able to remove these images online.

Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes:

That's amazing. Thank you so much for all that you do, for sitting down with us, for all that you do for sitting down with us, and we would love, as an organization, to present to you our 2025 Voice of the Year Award, which last year Elliston got and the year prior, tyrus got. And so, senator Ted Cruz, thank you so much for all the work you do, not just for Texans, but for all of us Americans.

Senator Ted Cruz:

Well, it's truly a privilege, and thank you again for giving the voice to people who so often feel voiceless, because it is powerful and when you empower people, it gives them the ability to take their lives back.

Voices for VoicesⓇ, Justin Alan Hayes:

Absolutely. Thank you so much, appreciate it. It gives them the ability to take their lives back. Absolutely, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Senator Ted Cruz, voice of the Year recipient, senator of the great state of Texas, join us on another episode of the Voices for Voices TV show and podcast. And again, please share, like, follow, subscribe, give us a thumbs up and until next time, please be a voice for you or somebody in need. Thank you, thank you.

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