The day the news broke, Stephanie Hubig, the German minister of justice, went public with proposed legislation, long in the works, intended to protect the victims of digital abuse. The legislation would criminalize making or distributing A.I.-modified sexually explicit images without consent, an offense subject to two years’ imprisonment. She also called for technology platforms to disclose information about secretive social media accounts so that violators’ identities could quickly be revealed. Even deepfakes or impersonations that were not sexual in nature but caused reputational harm could be subject to prosecution under the legislation.
Fernandes was gratified that those in Parliament were paying attention, but the timing of the announcement about the legislation contributed to a powerful backlash. Commentators sympathetic to the AfD, Germany’s far-right, populist party, along with anti-establishment actors, privacy rights activists and other critics cast Fernandes, in thousands of posts on X, as colluding with Hubig to try to chip away, for example, at the right to be anonymous online.
Other commentators implied, on social media or in the press, that the madness of the crowd was undermining the presumption of innocence, that women were generalizing too broadly about all men as bad actors (“Throw Out Toxic-Femininity” was the headline of one story about Fernandes in a German magazine). Critics accused Fernandes of having posed practically nude anyway, of being a man-hater, an attention seeker, a bad mother.
It’s not uncommon for individuals who step forward with stories of sexual harassment or domestic violence to face a backlash in Germany, says Löffler, one of the reporters for Der Spiegel who broke the Fernandes story and who has published prominent #MeToo journalism. Until recent years, detailed reporting on accusations of domestic abuse or sexual harassment in Germany were rare, and when it did appear, it often provoked critiques from readers and commentators. “You might get feedback like, ‘Why do I need to hear about this private affair?’” she says. Only in recent years, Löffler explains, has there been more recognition that writing about these issues is an important way to expose abuses of power.
It is not only a cultural norm that has often muffled this sort of reporting in Germany. The German Constitution considers inviolate the right to dignity. That principle is understood there to include privacy and the right of “personality,” which is thought to be, at its core, the right to control one’s own image. Although the German Constitution also ensures the right to free speech, courts in Germany are forever balancing the two concerns, which has had a notable effect on the way that the German media operates. In the United States, a public figure who is trying to win damages against a media outlet must prove that it published false information and also showed “actual malice” in doing so. In Germany, public figures can bring charges of “insult” even if the facts reported are accurate, and courts are frequently asked to weigh in on whether a given piece of journalism is sufficiently important to the public interest to justify exposing the personal details it includes.
