The Senate passed the DEFIANCE Act by unanimous consent in January. Six months later, it is still sitting in the House Judiciary Committee, where it has not moved since being referred there in May 2025. 

The DEFIANCE Act, formally known as the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act, would give anyone depicted in nonconsensual sexually explicit deepfakes the right to file a civil lawsuit against the people who produced it, distributed it, solicited it, or possessed it with the intent to distribute it. Damages could reach $250,000, and the statute of limitations would run for ten years. It wouldn’t create liability for the platforms where deepfakes were shared, just the individuals who make and distribute them, leaving Section 230 protections intact. 

Democrat Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who co-wrote the bill with Republican Representative Laurel Lee of Florida, pointed to the House Judiciary Committee as the bottleneck. The bill cleared one of the most polarized legislative bodies in modern American history without a single dissenting vote in the Senate, but it can’t even get a floor vote in the House. 

What makes this bill so unique is the truly bipartisan support behind it. Ocasio-Cortez and Lee don’t agree on much, and neither do Democrat Dick Durban and Republican Lindsey Graham, who spearheaded the bill in the Senate. Graham, who suddenly passed away last week, made the passage of this legislation one of his priorities in his last months. Even celebrities are supportive of this bill, including Paris Hilton. She spoke at the January press conference calling for the House to act. She framed her support in terms of her own experience, having had a private video shared without her consent when she was only nineteen years old. She described it not as a scandal but as abuse, occurring at a time when no laws existed to protect her.

Seventeen-year-old Francesca Mani, a New Jersey high school student who became a confirmed victim of AI-generated deepfakes at only 14, also spoke at the January event. When this happened to her in 2023, her school told her no applicable laws existed, and no accountability was possible. She responded by saying she would bring them into law, and the teen has been a fierce advocate for the cause. While all fifty states have some sort of deepfake law now, the federal civil rights to sue would give victims even more power. 

And Mani is not alone. AOC noted at the January press conference that 90 percent of all deepfake images generated by AI have been nonconsensual pornographic deepfakes, and that 90 percent of those targeted women. One in eight teenagers in the United States knows a friend who has been targeted. And these platforms know it’s happening. That’s why xAI recently brought a lawsuit against a Grok user who generated CSAM. In the process of that suit, it was revealed that the company made more than 73,000 reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 2026. This is the scale of the problem the DEFIANCE Act is designed to address, at least partially. 

For adult creators, the current legal landscape means that when someone takes your photos and converts them into fake explicit content, your options are limited. DMCA takedowns address distribution on platforms that cooperate but don’t touch the creators. While some state laws provide criminal penalties, the right to sue the creator of these deepfakes isn’t as common. The DEFIANCE Acgt would fix that. 

Every month the bill sits in the House Judiciary Committee is another month that content creators, public figures, and ordinary citizens absorb the cost of the problem that the US Senate unanimously agreed to address. The House Judiciary Committee has the authority to schedule a markup and move the bill forward, but they won’t do it. 

Maybe it’s time to ask your representative why.