If someone drops your nudes online without your consent, what rights — if any — do you have in Kentucky? 

What about AI-generated deep fakes meant to look like you? Revenge porn? Even — as hundreds of Kentucky girls and women, including a sitting GOP state representative, recently experienced — grabbing your fully clothed pictures from social media and uploading them, still without your knowledge or permission, to a porn site? 

Some Kentucky lawmakers are trying — and have been trying — to clarify, codify and bolster your rights, should something like that happen to you. 

Here’s a look at where things stand, and what could be up for discussion in the 2026 legislative session.

‘Sextortion’ now a crime in Kentucky

Kentucky made revenge porn — basically sharing your nudes or other intimate images without your consent — a crime in 2018. 

And earlier this year, “sextortion” — when someone obtains either real or fake explicit images of you and threatens to release them publicly unless you meet their demands — became a felony in Kentucky with the passage of Senate Bill 73. 

“Sexual extortion is one of the most dangerous and rapidly growing crimes targeting young people today. It is calculated, it is cruel and it thrives on fear and silence,” bill sponsor Sen. Julie Raque Adams (R-Louisville) told a Senate committee in February. “Too many kids today are being manipulated into situations that they don’t know how to escape from.”

The bill also requires schools to help students and their families understand the dangers around sextortion. 

SB 73 passed both chambers unanimously and was signed into law by Gov. Andy Beshear in mid-March. It will go into effect at the end of June. 

‘Right of Publicity’ bill struggles 

Another bill aimed at giving Kentuckians more rights over their images, however, didn’t pass during the 2025 legislative session.

Sen. Amanda Mays Bledsoe (R-Lexington) filed Senate Bill 7, which she dubbed the “Right of Publicity Act.” Basically, it sought to codify a person’s property rights over images of their unclothed body, and set up parameters around how said rights could be transferred or terminated. 

SB 7 would’ve also allowed Kentuckians who had their nudes used without their consent to sue whomever shared them for at least $10,000 per violation, per person. 

The bill also paid special attention to computer-generated images, building on Bledsoe’s — and the legislature’s — work around targeting artificial intelligence. 

“This is about personal dignity, privacy, and control,” Bledsoe said in March. “Technology moves faster than the law, and artificial intelligence has made it possible to fabricate completely false images with terrifying accuracy. No Kentuckian—not a public figure, not an ordinary citizen, and certainly not a child—should have to fight to reclaim ownership of their likeness.”

SB 7 easily cleared the Senate on a unanimous vote, but ultimately stalled in the House and didn’t become law. 

Federal legislation gets passed

Congress passed something similar in April with the Melania Trump-backed TAKE IT DOWN Act. That stands for Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks. 

It prohibits someone from sharing intimate images of you online — both actual photos and AI-created ones — without your consent. It also requires online platforms to remove the images within 48 hours of a victim requesting them to take them down. 

Bledsoe celebrated its passage, adding on specific praise for Kentucky Congressman Brett Guthrie for his work “advancing protections for victims of digital exploitation” at the federal level.

“As a mother and a legislator, I know how urgent it is to modernize our laws to meet the threats of a rapidly changing digital world, especially when it comes to protecting our children and families from image-based abuse and exploitation,” Bledsoe said in a statement. 

She continued to say the federal-level action “builds on the momentum we’re seeing at the state level. 

“It sends a powerful, united message: personal privacy and human dignity must be protected in our fast-moving digital world.”

A state rep’s real-time experience and what could come in 2026

More than 300 Kentucky girls and women recently discovered someone had been pulling their photos from social media and posting them to a porn site. And, allegedly, he had been doing so for years. 

One of them was 33-year-old GOP Rep. Samara Heavrin from Leitchfield. 

Saying she was “deeply disturbed” by the situation, Heavrin wrote in a Facebook post that “many of the photos were of clothed women.” (In an interview with KET, Heavrin said her photos got pulled from her personal Facebook page and included stuff like a picture of her and her dog posing for their Christmas card.)

But, she added on Facebook, “the horrific comments posted by users of the website are something that will take years for these women to overcome. This behavior is unacceptable.”

On KET, Heavrin described Kentucky’s legal landscape around situations like her’s as “a really gray area.

“Our law reads that it’s not — I don’t want to say it’s fair game, but if you post something on the internet, there’s not really any laws that protect people from it being put on a pornographic website.”

She plans on using her role as the House Families and Children Committee Chair to look at what state lawmakers could do.

“I plan on exploring legislation that would require consent of the individual for photographs of them to be placed on pornographic or explicit websites,” she wrote on Facebook. “We must hold predators accountable for their actions.” 

Kentucky’s next legislative session doesn’t start until early January 2026, but its interim session — a time where lawmakers gather to discuss pressing topics and potential pieces of legislation, but can’t pass anything — kicks off June 3. As a committee chair, Heavrin will oversee and set the agenda for the Families and Children meeting every other month.

“What I want to do is be able to prevent this from happening again,” she said on KET, “and unless we have a hard conversation about it and make real policy changes, it will happen again.”