Deepfakes & Brooke’s Law

A deepfake can be created from a single public photograph, shared to thousands of followers within minutes, and nearly impossible to fully erase once it spreads. Florida’s response — Fla. Stat. § 836.13, substantially expanded in 2025 as Brooke’s Law — gives victims a private civil remedy that copyright law was never built to provide, backed by a platform takedown regime, a statutory damages floor, and mandatory attorney’s fees.

Our Miami litigation team represents individuals pursuing deepfake claims under Brooke’s Law, and platforms and accused individuals defending against them.

The Current Battlefield

How generative AI turned a meme format into a weapon

The exponential growth of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the past several years has prompted a new digital phenomenon popularly known as deepfakes. In its most basic form, a deepfake includes any type of digital image, video, or audio file that is generated or altered by generative AI to give the illusion that a real person is doing or saying something they never actually did. While this media has fueled a new wave of meme culture online, it has also been weaponized in ways that are extremely harmful to a person’s reputation — most disturbingly, in the creation of sexual deepfakes depicting real individuals appearing to engage in sexual acts, portrayed naked, or in compromising positions.

Although these deepfakes could in theory classify as a “work of authorship” under copyright law, that field is poorly equipped to help individuals who have been wronged by them, because in most scenarios the affected individual is not the author of the content and has no copyright to enforce. Florida’s Fla. Stat. § 836.13 — recently and substantially expanded under Brooke’s Law — has the infrastructure to offer a far more direct shield.

Florida’s Legal Response: From 2022 to Brooke’s Law

A narrow criminal statute becomes a full civil remedy

In 2022, Florida passed Fla. Stat. § 836.13 to address the promotion of sexual deepfakes, at the time criminalizing only the promotion of nonconsensual digitally altered sexual images as a third-degree felony. The statute was named and substantially expanded in 2025 through House Bill 1161, known as Brooke’s Law after Brooke Curry, a Jacksonville teenager whose AI-generated nude image circulated online while she was in high school and whose takedown requests were initially refused by the platforms hosting it. The Florida Legislature passed the bill unanimously, Governor DeSantis signed it on June 10, 2025, and its expanded provisions took effect October 1, 2025.

Brooke’s Law expanded civil liability to also cover the generation and solicitation of nonconsensual deepfakes — not just their promotion — and added the platform-takedown regime discussed below, with covered platforms required to have a compliant notice-and-removal process in place by December 31, 2025. A related but separate statute, House Bill 757, took effect the same day and specifically targets AI-generated child sexual abuse material as its own felony offense. Together, these updates give Florida individuals meaningfully broader avenues to seek protection from deepfake-related harm than the 2022 statute alone provided.

The Legal Infrastructure: Generation, Promotion & Solicitation

Three distinct acts, three distinct intent standards

Under the current statute, the generation, solicitation, or promotion of a nonconsensual deepfake are each third-degree felonies carrying criminal liability. The generation and promotion acts also give rise to civil liability, with a private right of action for the person depicted.

Notably, the generation act carries a less demanding intent requirement — willfulness alone — while the promotion act requires the act to be done willfully, maliciously, and with actual or constructive knowledge that the content was altered. That lower threshold for generation can serve as a real deterrent to the creation of deepfakes in the first place. Disclaimers stating that content is fake or nonconsensual are not a defense and do not relieve a person of criminal liability — and there is no indication a disclaimer would fare any better as a civil defense, since a disclaimed deepfake still violates the statute’s core prohibition.

Both the generation and promotion acts are treated as separate offenses, so multiple images or posts can each be counted separately — a structure that matters directly to the damages discussion below, since it means a single course of conduct spread across many posts can support multiple separate statutory recoveries. The statute also reaches out-of-state defendants where any element of the act, or any harm to the depicted person, occurs in Florida, giving Florida victims a real avenue to pursue conduct that touches the state even from an out-of-state actor.

The Remedies Fortress

Injunctive relief, a statutory damages floor, and mandatory fee-shifting

An aggrieved person may sue to prevent or remedy a violation of § 836.13, and recover injunctive relief, monetary damages, and attorney’s fees and costs.

A Live Illustration: Pete v. Cooper

In Pete v. Cooper, No. 24-24228-CIV-ALTONAGA/Reid (S.D. Fla.), recording artist Megan Thee Stallion (Megan Pete) sued online blogger Milagro Cooper for defamation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and promotion of a nonconsensual deepfake pornographic video of the artist. On December 1, 2025, a federal jury in Miami returned a verdict for the plaintiff on all counts, awarding $75,000 across the claims; the court subsequently entered final judgment at $59,000. Because Cooper was found liable for promoting the deepfake, Florida’s fee-shifting provision separately entitles the plaintiff to recover her attorney’s fees on that claim — reported to be expected to exceed $1 million, illustrating how the statute’s mandatory fee award can dwarf the underlying damages figure.

Platform Obligations & FDUTPA

A 48-hour takedown clock, backed by a second statute’s teeth

Brooke’s Law requires “covered platforms” — websites, online services, or applications that serve the public and primarily provide a forum for user-generated content in the regular course of their business — to establish a notice-and-removal process with “clear and conspicuous notice” of how to submit a takedown request. Once a valid request is submitted, the platform must remove the deepfake within 48 hours and make reasonable efforts to identify and remove known reproductions of it.

A covered platform that acts in good faith receives immunity, but a platform that fails to reasonably comply with a takedown request forfeits that immunity and is treated as having committed an unfair or deceptive trade practice under Florida’s Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act (FDUTPA) — a separate remedy track enforced through FDUTPA’s own damages and attorney’s fee provisions. This structure incentivizes platform compliance by conditioning immunity on good-faith conduct, while opening real liability exposure for platforms that drag their feet on a valid request.

Deepfakes in Florida: The Data

From a Jacksonville bedroom to a Miami federal courtroom

No single Florida agency yet publishes an aggregate count of deepfake incidents statewide, but the trajectory is visible in the events that have actually unfolded here — from the case that inspired the law, through its passage, to the first major civil verdict decided under it:

The broader national trend lines help explain why: the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline received more than 1.5 million tips linked to AI-generated child sexual exploitation content in 2025 alone — an increase of more than 2,000% over 2024 — and a RAND survey of K-12 school principals found that 13% reported an AI-deepfake-related bullying incident during the 2023–2024 or 2024–2025 school years, rising to 22% among high school principals specifically. Florida’s own state university system is tracking the same trend: researchers at the University of Florida’s Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research have documented rapidly improving deepfake quality and active online communities trading tips on generating this content, and report that victims have reached out to their team directly for help.

These figures are national and global in scope, not Florida-specific counts, and are presented here as context for the scale of the problem Brooke’s Law was built to address — not as a claim about the number of Florida victims specifically.

How Can I Fight Deepfakes?

Practical steps before, and immediately after, a case is filed

In the age of large language models, it is almost impossible to monitor every deepfake someone might create at any given time. But individuals can still take reasonable steps to protect their position and preserve evidence:

• Identify every actor in the chain, from the covered platform (facilitator) to the person who created the deepfake (orchestrator) to anyone who promoted it further (promoter) — each can carry separate liability under the statute.
• Capture the evidence immediately, taking screenshots and saving copies before a takedown removes the only record of the harmful content.
• Document the harm as it accrues, including viewership metrics, correspondence with platforms about takedown requests, and anything else that can substantiate reputational or emotional damages beyond the statutory floor.

Where This Fits: Copyright, Trademark, Enforcement & Defense

A deepfake claim rarely travels alone

A deepfake case frequently intersects with the rest of an IP and litigation practice, even though § 836.13 itself is a standalone state statute rather than a federal IP claim:

• Copyright: a deepfake is sometimes technically a “work of authorship,” but the depicted victim is rarely its author and typically has no copyright claim to assert — which is precisely why § 836.13’s civil remedy exists as a separate track. Our Copyright Matters materials discuss the related, but distinct, question of human authorship and AI-generated content under federal copyright law.
• Trademark and right of publicity: where a deepfake commercially exploits a public figure’s name, image, or likeness rather than simply depicting them, a right-of-publicity or unfair-competition claim may run alongside the § 836.13 claim; see our Trademark Matters page.
• Enforcement and defense: for a victim, pursuing a § 836.13 claim follows the same litigation discipline covered in our Litigation & Enforcement materials — moving quickly, documenting harm, and using the platform takedown regime as leverage. For a person or platform accused of generation, promotion, or noncompliance, defenses include lack of consent to generate a genuine depiction, lack of the required willfulness or malice, questions about whether the person is truly “identifiable,” and platform-specific good-faith compliance arguments — the same rigor we bring to any matter discussed in our Litigation Defense materials.

The Bottom Line

A young, fast-moving statute — and a fast-growing body of cases

The updated version of § 836.13 offers a considerably stronger framework for individuals to seek protection against not only the promoters of deepfakes, but the orchestrators and facilitators of this synthetic media as well. There is not yet extensive precedent construing the statute’s specific elements — including how courts will treat generative-AI tool providers as opposed to end users — but the statute’s novelty, combined with the size of the fee award in Pete v. Cooper, is likely to be a catalyst for more civil actions in 2026 and beyond. Our team can help victims pursue these claims and enforce their statutory rights, and can help platforms and accused individuals build a defense where a claim has been brought against them.

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