Ohio man is first to be federally convicted for deepfake porn

An Ohio man became the first person to be convicted under a 2025 federal law on revenge porn that also made publishing pornographic deepfakes a crime, federal prosecutors announced on April 7.

James Strahler II, 37, of Columbus, Ohio, pleaded guilty on April 7 to cyberstalking, producing obscene visual representations of child sexual abuse and publication of digital forgeries.

Strahler had at least 10 victims, including children, according to a criminal complaint filed in the US District Court of Southern Ohio.

Federal prosecutors said in a news release that his was the first conviction for “publication of digital forgeries”, a federal charge from the Take It Down Act, which criminalises the non-consensual sharing of sexually explicit images of others and requires companies to remove them.

The law calls for prison sentences of up to two years for the depiction of adults or three years for that of minors. It was not immediately clear how severe of a sentence Strahler might face or when he would face sentencing.

Mrs Melania Trump, the US First Lady, supported the law’s passage. She spoke at a roundtable on Capitol Hill and appeared alongside US President Donald Trump when he signed the Bill into law. After signing, he handed her the pen to do the same.

Mr Dominick S. Gerace II, the US attorney for the Southern District of Ohio, said in the news release: “We will not tolerate the abhorrent practice of posting and publicising AI-generated intimate images of real individuals without consent.”

A woman contacted police in Hilliard, Ohio, north-west of Columbus, after she and her mother started to receive texts, voicemail messages and obscene photos from unknown numbers, according to an FBI agent in the criminal complaint.

Some messages included rape threats from Strahler, according to the complaint.

The woman, who was not identified, said some of the photos were nude pictures she never knew had been taken of her, the agent said. Other images showed her face morphed onto AI porn, the agent said. Some of the AI content portrayed her having sex with other people, including her father, the agent said.

She called local police, and when they contacted Strahler, he admitted to sending the content, according to the criminal complaint. He was arrested and jailed, and an order of protection was enacted.

Three months later, two of the woman’s co-workers reported receiving similar photos.

The authorities obtained a search warrant and seized Strahler’s phone April 21, 2025. He was told to not contact the woman, her co-workers or her family.

In total, Strahler had created more than 700 photos of real victims and animated people and uploaded them to a site dedicated to child sex abuse materials, the prosecutors said.

An analysis of Strahler’s phone also showed he had similarly harassed two ex-girlfriends and their mothers, the FBI agent said in the criminal complaint.

Child sex abuse materials depicting two boys were also found on his phone, the FBI agent said.

Another local police department, the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office, arrested Strahler around June 12, 2025, and found him with another phone.

He was found to have over 2,400 images and videos on his phone flagged as depicting nudity, child sexual abuse material or violence, the prosecutors said.

On April 8, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called the conviction under the Take It Down Act “a huge achievement for the first lady”.

And Mrs Trump wrote on social platform X: “Thank you US Attorney Dominick S. Gerace II for protecting Americans from cybercrimes in this new digital age.” NYTIMES