Molly Reynolds joins podcast, says Canada is “making progress” judicial recourse around revenge porn but work still to be done

Counsel Molly Reynolds sat down with The Ways We Are Podcast, to talk about protecting your name and maintaining personal privacy in public spaces.

In episode six of the podcast, Molly shares some of her experience as a lawyer dealing with personal privacy violation, specifically in relation to revenge porn, saying it “gets a lot scarier, unfortunately, and sadder.”

Molly explains “it is so heavily gendered. It’s pretty much only women that I hear from.”

“What we’ve seen for example, is when these things get posted on pornography websites,” Molly said.

“It’s not that hard to get the image taken down, or a video, if that’s the case.

“There are tools [so] that people can do that on their own, but often times the record is still there, so the page is still there and you might not be able to see an image but it may be a really graphic subject line and the person’s name and their university or their parents’ names and that footprint stays there.

“The harm that you can feel and humiliation or anxiety that you can feel just from having your body out there against your consent—he long-term consequences of that—I think are worse when it’s associated with that type of identifying information because people know it’s you.”

But Molly said Canada is making process on the judicial recourse around revenge porn.

“The first thing that I always say is that it is a terrible recourse. It is a terrible path to have to take. It’s slow, it’s really out of your control and it usually doesn’t fix the main problem,” she said.

“For the last about four years, it’s actually a criminal offence to post or share images of people in an intimate context without their consent. But… to do that you have to go to police,” which she still sees issues with because of victim blamings and police resources.

The podcast further discusses, along with Molly’s expertise, the burden that is often put on women to take more extreme measures to protect their privacy.

For more information on privacy see the relevant practice page.