Book Review: Nobody’s Victim

“I operate my firm, C.A. Goldberg, PLLC, with one fundamental rule: if one of my clients has been harmed, somebody must pay. It’s as simple as that.”

This quote is from the beginning of Carrie Goldberg’s book Nobody’s Victim. Goldberg tells the story of how she came to be an advocate for people (mostly women and girls) who are the victims of Internet-facilitated stalking, harassment, and abuse.

Unlike many other cyber crime books in the past decade, this is not about lone hackers, government agents, and classified secrets. There are no hackers attacking governments or corporations. This is not the world of spy thrillers, but a world where the enemy is an ex-boyfriend, or an everyday person who uses the anonymity of the Internet to let their worst impulses run free. This book is about using the Internet to commit the types of crimes that bullies and abusers have perpetrated for years. This is horror made personal.

Goldberg began her career in law first as a caseworker for Holocaust survivors, then as a lawyer for legally incapacitated adults. After breaking out of an abusive relationship with an ex who stalked her, she began her own law firm to represent people who had survived the same things she had.

“I stopped seeing myself as a victim and reclaimed my control. That year I discovered the transformative power of fighting back.” 

Goldberg recalls the torment that her clients have been put through and details the many loopholes in (or lack of enforcement of) laws that predators take advantage of. Here we see a world where law has not caught up with technology. We see that people age 25 and under are navigating a world that their parents don’t even comprehend, where intimate photos can be distributed in ways that were unimaginable 25 years ago.

I admit that reading this book and writing this review was painful. Reading these horrifying stories was, to use the understatement of the year, not fun. But nothing can be solved unless it is faced.

This book will give you lots of details on laws surrounding consent, the Internet, and the responsibility of web hosting services and social media networks. For example, consider Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This law has traditionally been used to protect website owners and social media networks from liability for what their users publish. But Goldberg argues that tech companies use this law not to encourage free speech, to allow criminal activity to flourish. If social media companies are not held liable for the actions of toxic users, then they have no real incentive to ban them.

Nobody’s Victim is a tough book; reading the stories of her clients was painful. There are people who lives get turned upside down, children left unprotected by communities that should be looking out for them, and I couldn’t help but feel enraged. Yet, there is hope, steely-eyed resolve, and some victories in this book, too. My favorite victorious story was Goldberg’s retelling of the time her firm tracked down a blackmailer on Facebook and, in her words, “sent the offender a scathing cease and desist letter as a housewarming gift.”

With that, I will let Carrie Goldberg have the last word:

“The world is filled with assholes, trolls, psychos, and pervs. These are the monsters who make us feel weak. But we don’t have to be victims. And we don’t need to fight alone.”