Episode Details

Someone is told that if they leave, the photos go public. So they stay. Attorney Lindsay Lieberman calls that sextortion, and she points out it runs on the same mechanism as any other coercive control: the threat does the work, so the person making it never has to follow through.

Lindsay Lieberman is a New York attorney who has spent over a decade representing people harmed by sexual violence and cyber sexual abuse, including image-based abuse, sextortion, and AI-generated content. She works across state lines, trains other law firms and their staff in trauma-informed practice, and teaches cyber safety in schools, colleges, and Greek organizations. She does law enforcement trainings as well, because the criminal side of this consistently runs behind the technology.

She does not handle divorces. What she does is join a divorce or custody case as a consultant and co-counsel so the family law attorney has somebody who can put the offense in context for a judge who may never have seen one. In this episode she and Lisa get into how content and identifying information get published together so the harm keeps renewing itself, how families and whole communities absorb the shame alongside the person who was targeted, and why the outdated question about why someone created the content in the first place still surfaces in these cases. They also cover a pattern Lindsay says gets missed entirely: men are frequently the ones caught in online sextortion scams, and they are the least likely to ask anyone for help.

The conversation turns to how lawyers treat the people who hire them. Lindsay's standard is that nobody should walk out of a law firm feeling worse than when they walked in, and she is candid that this is not something law school teaches. Lisa describes clients who arrive on their third or fourth attorney, much of that down to how they were spoken to during years of litigation. Lindsay explains free consultations, contingency lawsuits, and what she can do for someone who mainly wants to understand their options rather than file anything at all. It closes on prevention, and why she spends her time in classrooms.

As always, this is strategic education, not legal or mental-health advice for your specific situation.

🎓 What you'll learn

• What cyber sexual abuse covers, and how sextortion functions as coercive control
• Why identifying information posted alongside an image is what makes the harm ongoing
• How AI-generated content puts people at risk who never created anything themselves
• How an attorney who handles these crimes works alongside your divorce lawyer
• Why police and family courts struggle with this evidence, and what that means for you
• How men get caught in online sextortion scams, and why so few of them report it
• What trauma-informed lawyering is, and why it changes how a case goes
• Free consultations and contingency cases: how this representation actually gets paid for

⏱️ Chapters
0:00 Intro
1:00 What "revenge porn" actually means, and how the laws lag behind
5:00 Sextortion, and the harm that reaches families and communities
9:00 When restraining orders don't stop it, and bringing in outside counsel
13:00 Why divorce attorneys need help with these cases
15:00 AI-generated content, and why police struggle to investigate
19:00 Coercive control, and why the legislation is contested
23:00 The fear of hiring a lawyer, free consults, and contingency cases
27:00 Trauma-informed lawyering, and clients on their third attorney
35:00 Men, sextortion scams, and the shame that stops reporting
39:00 Prevention, and teaching cyber safety to the next generation

Keep going 💜
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📘 Been There Got Out: Toxic Relationships, High-Conflict D