An Ohio Man Was the First to Be Convicted Under a Deepfake Abuse Law

In January 2025, a woman contacted police in Hilliard, Ohio, to report that she and her mother had been receiving harassing calls and texts. The messages contained intimate images, including AI-generated sexual deepfakes. It turned out James Strahler II was the culprit—and he had additional victims.

From December 2024 to June 2025, Strahler harassed at least six women with nude images and sexualized deepfakes. Among the deepfakes he made were a video of a woman having sex with her father and pornographic content manipulated to add children's faces. He sent videos to one woman's boss and co-workers and posted some content online.

On June 23, 2025, federal charges were filed against Strahler. Instead of going to trial, in April 2026 he pleaded guilty to cyberstalking, producing obscene visual representations of child sexual abuse and publication of digital forgeries. The publication conviction was due to the Take It Down Act, which criminalized the nonconsensual sharing of intimate images, including AI-created sexual deepfakes, when it became law in May 2025. An announcement of Strahler's conviction from the United States Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of Ohio noted he was the first person convicted under the Take It Down Act.

When local police first spoke to Strahler, he admitted to sending the content. He was charged with several misdemeanors on January 5, 2025, but didn't remain behind bars for long. Kristen Winter, an Ohio detective who worked on the case before federal law enforcement stepped in, tells A&E Crime + Investigation that "at that time, we didn't have a sextortion law. The charge was dissemination of illicit images, which is a misdemeanor of the first degree."

After his release, Strahler continued to stalk his first victim. In April 2025, police seized his phone and discovered he'd been targeting other women. In June, additional women told law enforcement they'd received AI-generated images that used their faces. Strahler was again arrested on June 12.

As Strahler had continued terrorizing victims, the Take It Down Act was signed into law by President Donald Trump on May 19, 2025. The law criminalized the nonconsensual sharing of sexual images, including sexual deepfakes—exactly what Strahler had been doing. Federal authorities took over his case and, on June 23, 2025, filed charges against him.

For the Take It Down Act charges he pleaded guilty to, Strahler could receive up to two years for distributing intimate images of adults without consent and three years for sharing deepfakes of minors. As of April 28, 2026, Strahler is a federal inmate in Youngstown, Ohio, while awaiting sentencing.

Elizabeth Jaffe, a professor at John Marshall Law School, believes Strahler's conviction under the Take It Down Act should discourage similar crimes. "The publicity surrounding this guy and what he did, I do think that that becomes a deterrent," she tells A&E Crime + Investigation.

John Jay College of Criminal Justice Assistant Professor Adam Scott Wandt, who says he's seen horrific cases of people being targeted by sexually abusive deepfakes, agrees that coverage of Strahler's case could help avert future victimization. "Somebody might think twice before going and doing this," he tells A&E Crime & Investigation. Wandt adds that the case may serve as an example for federal prosecutors navigating similar incidents.

Jaffe also notes that Strahler being convicted for distributing deepfakes will increase awareness of a relatively new issue. "There's still a whole slew of the population that either don't know what a deepfake is or haven't encountered them," she says.

The amount of sexually abusive deepfakes on the internet has been growing for years. Cybersecurity firm Security Hero shared in a 2023 report that online deepfake videos had increased 550% since 2019, with deepfake pornography making up 98% of these videos and women being targeted in 99% of them. At the end of 2025 and early in 2026, deepfake nude images of thousands of women were publicly posted on the social media site X (formerly Twitter) following user requests for the Grok AI tool to "nudify" photos.

The United States Attorney's Office announcement about Strahler's conviction stated he "had installed more than 24 AI platforms and more than 100 AI web-based models on his phone." Using these for deepfakes is only going to become more common and easier, Wandt notes. "We have not experienced even the beginning of the potential of these tools to cause harm."

To address deepfake proliferation, the Take It Down Act also requires social media sites to remove non-consensually shared intimate images and deepfakes within 48 hours of receiving a report. Websites had until May 19, 2026, a year after the law was signed, to set up a process for notice and removal. Wandt states that most companies affected by this provision, such as Meta, Snapchat and TikTok, should be able and willing to comply.

However, "not every federal prosecutor could prosecute every case that comes to them, because this behavior is too pervasive," Wandt says of criminal prosecutions under the Take It Down Act. "Not only is there an additional need for state laws, there is a primary need for state laws." When establishing their own laws, Wandt encourages states to follow the standard set by the Take It Down Act, saying, "This law's amazing. It was needed, and I am very glad that it was passed."