Scope of this entry
This record covers category D at the level of statute, charge, and enforcement outcome only. The conduct is described in the Justice Department releases linked below. It is not reproduced here, and nothing about the production of the material is set out.
What the statute added
The TAKE IT DOWN Act was signed in May 2025 as Public Law 119-12. Its criminal provisions cover non-consensual publication of intimate visual depictions and create a distinct offence for publishing a digital forgery of an identifiable person, with separate subsections for adults and minors.
The Act expressly excludes from its intimate-depiction offence material constituting child pornography under 18 U.S.C. § 2256 or obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children under 18 U.S.C. § 1466A. Those remain prosecutable under the older statutes.
That exclusion is visible in the charges here. The digital forgery count corresponds to the adult victims. The obscenity count corresponds to material involving minors and rests on law that predates the Act by two decades. The Act is therefore best read as closing a gap for adult victims, not as the instrument reaching the child-related conduct — a distinction the coverage of this case generally does not draw.
Open question: which conduct the forgery count covers
The Justice Department places the harassment campaign between December 2024 and June 2025. The Act was signed in May 2025. On its face, most of the conduct period predates the statute, which would leave only a narrow window in which the forgery count could operate without a retroactivity problem.
The charging document would resolve this, and this record has not obtained it. Until then the entry does not assert how the count was framed. Anyone citing this case as a precedent on the Act’s reach should read the information or indictment first.
Enforcement sequence
The case reached federal authorities only after the local response had already run and failed. Secondary reporting describes state misdemeanour charges filed in January following the first complainant’s reports, release, continued conduct, and further misdemeanour charges in April before federal arrest in June 2025.
If that sequence is accurate, the interval between first report and federal intervention is the operationally significant number in this case, and it is not stated in either Justice Department release. It is recorded here as reported rather than confirmed.
Investigation involved the Hilliard Police Department, the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office, the FBI Cincinnati Division, and the Maryland AI and Synthetic Media Threats Task Force. The appearance of a dedicated synthetic media task force in a case of this kind is itself worth tracking.
Record
Pleaded guilty 7 April 2026 before Chief U.S. District Judge Sarah D. Morrison, Southern District of Ohio. Sentenced 8 September 2026 to 180 months. Aggregate volume cited at sentencing: more than 700 files posted, with roughly 2,400 further files flagged on his device.
Open — the charging document has not been obtained. Statutory framing of the forgery count, and the timing question above, remain unresolved in this record.