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 A...