Minnesota has two deep-fake statutes, they came out of the same 2023 bill, and most people who have heard of either one have heard of the wrong one for their problem. The one in the news is Minn. Stat. § 609.771, the criminal election-deepfake law challenged on First Amendment grounds by a satirist, by X Corp., and by xAI; I wrote about that fight, and about why it is genuinely hard, in an earlier piece in this series. This piece is about the other one — Minn. Stat. § 604.32, a civil cause of action for the nonconsensual dissemination of a fabricated intimate image. Different chapter, different subject, different remedy: that one is about elections and prosecutors, this one is about a private person suing a private person for money.
They were sections 1 and 2 of the same act, 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 58, and section 3 of that act added a criminal counterpart at § 617.262. All three took effect August 1, 2023. In 2024 the Legislature went back into chapter 58's election provision and amended three of its subdivisions. It has never returned to § 604.32 — not in 2024, not in 2025, not in the 2026 regular session. The provision with the money in it is the one nobody has touched and, so far as the public record shows, the one nobody has talked about.
What the claim actually requires
Subdivision 2 does not read like most statutes. It does not say who may sue. It says a cause of action exists when three things are true:
(a) A cause of action against a person for the nonconsensual dissemination of a deep fake exists when:
(1) a person disseminated a deep fake with knowledge that the depicted individual did not consent to its public dissemination;
(2) the deep fake realistically depicts any of the following:
(i) the intimate parts of another individual presented as the intimate parts of the depicted individual;
(ii) artificially generated intimate parts presented as the intimate parts of the depicted individual; or
(iii) the depicted individual engaging in a sexual act; and
(3) the depicted individual is identifiable:
(i) from the deep fake itself, by the depicted individual or by another individual; or
(ii) from the personal information displayed in connection with the deep fake.
Read clause (1) again, because it is narrower and broader than people assume at the same time. The knowledge the statute requires is knowledge of one fact: that the depicted individual did not consent to public dissemination. On its face the text does not require that the person who posted it knew the image was fabricated, and it does not require intent to harm, a motive, a relationship, or a demand for money. Whether a court reads an implicit scienter requirement into it is an open question, and no Minnesota court has answered it.
The definition of "deep fake" in subdivision 1(b) covers a still photograph and a sound recording, not only video, and it turns on two findings. The item has to be "so realistic that a reasonable person would believe it depicts speech or conduct of an individual". And its production has to have been "substantially dependent upon technical means, rather than the ability of another individual to physically or verbally impersonate such individual." The two findings are joined by "and", so both are required. A convincing human impersonator is outside the statute no matter how realistic the result. Unsophisticated software is inside it — but only if what it produced still clears the realism test.
Then subdivision 2(b) closes the door a defendant reaches for first:
(b) The fact that the depicted individual consented to the creation of the deep fake or to the voluntary private transmission of the deep fake is not a defense to liability for a person who has disseminated the deep fake with knowledge that the depicted individual did not consent to its public dissemination.
That sentence exists because the first thing a defendant says is that the plaintiff sent it in the first place. The Legislature took that answer away in advance.
What a court can order
Subdivision 3 is the reason this section matters, and it is worth reading in full rather than in summary:
The court may award the following damages to a prevailing plaintiff from a person found liable under subdivision 2:
(1) general and special damages, including all finance losses due to the dissemination of the deep fake and damages for mental anguish;
(2) an amount equal to any profit made from the dissemination of the deep fake by the person who intentionally disclosed the deep fake;
(3) a civil penalty awarded to the plaintiff of an amount up to $100,000; and
(4) court costs, fees, and reasonable attorney fees.
Four things about that. The phrase "all finance losses" is the Legislature's own, and it reads the same way in the enrolled session law as it does in the Revisor's posted text — it is not a transcription error on anyone's part downstream. The $100,000 is a civil penalty paid to the plaintiff, on top of actual damages, not a cap on damages. Item (2) reaches profit, which is the provision aimed at the people who monetize this material rather than merely post it. And every one of the four sits under "may award", not "shall award" — including the attorney fees, which I will come back to, because a discretionary fee award and a mandatory one are different products when a lawyer is deciding whether to take a case.
Subdivision 4 lets a court issue a temporary or permanent injunction or restraining order "to prevent further harm to the plaintiff", and backs it with a civil fine of up to $1,000 per day for failing to comply. Subdivision 5 is one sentence and it is the most humane sentence in the section: "The court shall allow confidential filings to protect the privacy of the plaintiff in cases filed under this section." Shall. Subdivision 8 lets the case be filed where the defendant or plaintiff resides, where the deep fake was produced, reproduced, or stored — or, if the plaintiff participates in the address confidentiality program established by chapter 5B, in "the jurisdiction of the plaintiff's designated address".
Subdivision 7 says that "[a] court has jurisdiction over a cause of action filed pursuant to this section if the plaintiff or defendant resides in this state." That is written to reach an out-of-state poster on the strength of a Minnesota plaintiff's residence. Whether it actually solves personal jurisdiction over a defendant who has never set foot here is a constitutional question the sentence does not address, and one no Minnesota court has taken up.
The clock, and the thing the statute forgot to say
Subdivision 9 is nine subdivisions' worth of careful drafting and then this:
In a civil action brought under subdivision 2, the statute of limitations is tolled until the plaintiff discovers the deep fake has been disseminated.
That is a real and appropriate rule — this is an injury a person routinely learns about months or years late, from a stranger. But notice what the sentence does not do. It tolls the statute of limitations without ever saying which one. Section 604.32 contains no limitations period of its own. The general statutes supply two candidates that point in different directions: § 541.05, subd. 1(2) gives six years for an action "upon a liability created by statute, other than those arising upon a penalty or forfeiture or where a shorter period is provided by section 541.07", and § 541.07(2) gives two years for an action "upon a statute for a penalty or forfeiture, except as provided in sections 541.074 and 541.075" — neither of which is this one. Section 604.32, subd. 3(3) calls its own headline remedy a "civil penalty". A person in this situation is therefore looking at a claim whose deadline depends on how a court characterizes the remedy she is asking for, and I found no decision characterizing it. This is not a close reading for its own sake. It is the single cheapest thing the Legislature could fix.
Seven ways out, plus the one that matters most
Subdivision 6(a) lists seven circumstances in which no person shall be found liable: dissemination for a lawful criminal investigation or prosecution; dissemination for or in connection with reporting unlawful conduct; dissemination in the course of seeking or receiving medical or mental-health treatment, where the image is protected from further dissemination; a commercial setting for the legal sale of goods or services, including artistic products, where the depicted individual knew a deep fake would be created and disseminated commercially; a matter of public interest, where dissemination serves a lawful public purpose, the disseminator clearly labels the item as a deep fake, and acts in good faith to prevent further dissemination; legitimate scientific research or educational purposes, on the same labeling and good-faith conditions; and dissemination for legal proceedings consistent with common practice, or protected by a court order barring further dissemination.
Those are defensible carve-outs, and the labeling-plus-good-faith conditions attached to the public-interest and research exceptions are better drafted than most. Then comes the paragraph that decides who a plaintiff can actually sue:
(b) This section does not alter or amend the liabilities and protections granted by United States Code, title 47, section 230, and shall be construed in a manner consistent with federal law.
Section 230 stays where it is. The platform that hosted the image is not the defendant this statute hands anyone. The defendant is the person who posted it — and identifying that person, and then collecting from that person, are two separate problems the statute does not solve. Subdivision 6(c) at least preserves everything else: "A cause of action arising under this section does not prevent the use of any other cause of action or remedy available under the law."
Taking it down is now a federal question
Since § 604.32 was written, Congress built the piece Minnesota's statute deliberately left alone. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, Pub. L. 119-12, § 3 (May 19, 2025), added 47 U.S.C. § 223a, which required covered platforms — websites and apps that primarily host user-generated content, or that make nonconsensual intimate depictions available in the regular course of business — to stand up a notice-and-removal process within one year of May 19, 2025, to post clear and conspicuous plain-language notice of it, and, on a valid request, to remove the depiction "as soon as possible, but not later than 48 hours after receiving such request" and to "make reasonable efforts to identify and remove any known identical copies of such depiction." A failure to comply reasonably is treated as a violation of an FTC rule against unfair or deceptive acts or practices, and the FTC enforces it. The one-year deadline has passed.
That federal law reaches fabricated images by name. "Digital forgery" is defined at 47 U.S.C. § 223(h)(1)(B) as an intimate visual depiction "created through the use of software, machine learning, artificial intelligence, or any other computer-generated or technological means, including by adapting, modifying, manipulating, or altering an authentic visual depiction, that, when viewed as a whole by a reasonable person, is indistinguishable from an authentic visual depiction of the individual." Section 223(h)(3) makes knowingly publishing one a federal crime, punishable by up to two years where the subject is an adult and three where the subject is a minor, with threats to publish separately punishable.
So the practical division is this: removal is a federal, FTC-backed administrative process, and money is a state cause of action. There is also a federal civil claim, 15 U.S.C. § 6851, enacted in 2022, with liquidated damages fixed at $150,000, fees, and express authority for a court to protect a plaintiff's pseudonym. Whether § 6851 reaches a fabricated image is a genuine question — it defines "depicted individual" as "an individual whose body appears in whole or in part in an intimate visual depiction and who is identifiable by virtue of the person's face, likeness, or other distinguishing characteristic, such as a unique birthmark or other recognizable feature, or from information displayed in connection with the visual depiction" — and the whole point of a deep fake is that the body is not the plaintiff's. I went looking for a court that has resolved it. My search came back empty and so did its control, which means the search proved nothing, and I am not going to dress up a failed query as a finding.
So who has used section 604.32?
This is the claim I had to test hardest, because "nobody uses it" is exactly the sort of statement that is easy to write and hard to earn.
It has never been amended. I pulled Table 2 — the Revisor's table of Minnesota Statutes new, amended, or repealed — for the 2024, 2025, and 2026 regular sessions and searched each for "604.32". Zero hits in all three. The section's own version list shows one entry of legislative action, in 2023, with editorial updates only in 2024 and 2025, and the section carries no amendment banner. To confirm the searches were working rather than silently failing, I ran controls in the same files: § 515B.3-113 appears once in the 2026 table and § 126C.10 twice, both of which I already knew had been amended this year, and § 609.771 appears three times in the 2024 table — subdivisions 2, 3, and 4, all by 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 112. The searches work. The Legislature amended the election-deepfake provision and left the civil one alone.
No Minnesota appellate opinion in the database uses the phrase. In CourtListener's opinion database, a search of the Minnesota Supreme Court and Court of Appeals for "deep fake" returns zero results, and for "deepfake" as one word, zero. The control returns six Minnesota appellate opinions filed since January 1, 2024 containing the statutory phrase "intimate parts", so the index holds Minnesota decisions in this subject area; the zero is not a broken query. Every operative subdivision of § 604.32 uses the words "deep fake", so an opinion applying it would almost certainly contain them — that inference is mine, not a database result, and I am labeling it as an inference.
The closest thing to a Minnesota judicial mention of this body of law is in State v. Plancarte, a 2025 Minnesota Supreme Court decision about the indecent-exposure statute, where Justice Hennesy's concurrence cites § 617.262, subd. 1(f) in passing for its definition of "intimate parts". That is a case about § 617.23, not about a fabricated image.
The only litigation document anywhere in the database that names § 604.32 was filed in Florida. Searching the full text of federal court filings for the statutory phrase "nonconsensual dissemination of a deep fake" returns two documents, both versions of the same amicus brief in Pete v. Cooper, No. 1:24-cv-24228 (S.D. Fla.), filed December 23, 2025 and January 9, 2026. The brief argues that the First Amendment does not bar injunctive relief against sexual deep fakes, and it cites Minn. Stat. §§ 604.32 and 617.262 in a string of state statutes alongside Hawaii, Idaho, Michigan, and Virginia. Minnesota's civil remedy appears in the federal record as an example somebody else pointed to — not as a claim anyone was pressing.
And here is the part I cannot close. CourtListener holds exactly three Minnesota state courts: the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals, and the Attorney General's published opinions. (It also carries the federal District of Minnesota and that court's bankruptcy court, neither of which hears a claim under a Minnesota civil statute like this one.) It holds no Minnesota state district court, and state district court is where a § 604.32 claim gets filed. So an empty appellate record is consistent with filings that settled, were dismissed, or were never appealed.
The state's own records do not close the gap either. Minnesota Court Records Online covers all Minnesota district courts, but its Case Search accepts a name, a case number, a citation number, or an attorney — not a statute and not a cause of action — and its Document Search requires a case number before it will return anything. There is no public way to ask Minnesota how many times § 604.32 has been pleaded. What I can state is precisely this: no published Minnesota decision has ever construed it, and no member of the public can count the filings, because the state does not publish a figure that would let them.
What a remedy on paper cannot do
Here is the honest part, and it cuts against the piece.
A private right of action needs three things that a statute cannot supply. It needs a plaintiff willing to put a name on a public filing about the worst thing that has happened to them. It needs a defendant who can be identified and who can pay — and this material is often posted anonymously, behind a platform that subdivision 6(b) expressly declines to reach, so the platform is not an alternative defendant and unmasking the poster is a piece of litigation before the case is a case. And it needs a lawyer who will take it, which for most people means a lawyer who can be paid out of the result, under a fee provision that says "may award".
Subdivision 5 partially answers the first of those, and I want to give the drafters the credit: a court shall allow confidential filings. That is more than most states give. But a confidential filing is not the same thing as a pseudonymous caption, the subdivision does not say which is required, and it does not tell a plaintiff whether a name stays sealed once the case is over. The federal experience suggests how much that question weighs on people: of the 97 federal cases in CourtListener's filings index whose documents reference 15 U.S.C. § 6851's phrase "intimate visual depiction", 51 are captioned in the name of a Doe, and another nine use initials, as of September 19, 2026. That result set is a keyword search and includes false positives, so treat it as the shape of the thing rather than a docket census. The shape is unmistakable.
Section 604.32 is a well-drafted statute. It is not, on this record, a functioning remedy, and the difference between those two is not a drafting problem. It is a plaintiff, a defendant, a lawyer, and a number nobody publishes.
What we can do
Put the limitations period in the statute. Subdivision 9 tolls a deadline it never names, and §§ 541.05 and 541.07 point at six years and two depending on how a court characterizes a remedy the statute itself labels a "civil penalty". One sentence fixes it. Until someone writes that sentence, the first contested motion in the first real case will be about the clock instead of the conduct.
Say who may bring the action. Subdivision 2 says a cause of action "exists when" — it never says the depicted individual may bring it. Every other operative subdivision assumes a "plaintiff". Naming the person who holds the claim, and saying whether a parent, guardian, or representative may bring it for a minor or an incapacitated adult, costs nothing and removes a threshold fight. The federal civil statute does this expressly at 15 U.S.C. § 6851(b)(1)(B); Minnesota's does not.
Make the fee award mandatory for a prevailing plaintiff, and say what "confidential filings" means. Discretionary fees plus a probably-insolvent defendant is how a cause of action stays theoretical. And subdivision 5 should specify whether a plaintiff may proceed under a pseudonym in the caption, on what showing, and what happens to the name if the case is lost. Those two amendments do more for access to this remedy than raising the $100,000 penalty ever would.
Publish the count. State Court Administration should report annual district-court civil filings by the statute pleaded, for § 604.32 and for every other private right of action the Legislature creates. A legislature that enacts a remedy and then cannot find out whether anyone used it is legislating blind, and the fix is a reporting line, not a study. Right now the only honest answer to "is this working?" is that nobody in Minnesota can tell you.
Route people to the federal takedown process, in plain language, from a state page. The 48-hour removal duty under 47 U.S.C. § 223a is the fastest relief in this area and it is a form, not a lawsuit. The Attorney General's consumer division already publishes plain-language guides on narrower subjects. One page explaining what a covered platform must do, what a valid request has to contain, and where to complain to the FTC when a platform ignores it would reach far more Minnesotans than any civil docket ever will.
Minnesota wrote a good statute in 2023 and then stopped paying attention to it. The election provision got amended, challenged in federal court, and taken to the Eighth Circuit. The one written for a private person got nothing — no amendment, no decision, and no number.
First the facts. Then the fix.
Sources
Every statutory quotation here was taken from raw fetched text, not from a summary or a paraphrase. Minn. Stat. § 604.32 was pulled from revisor.mn.gov and read in full, all nine subdivisions: the "deep fake", "depicted individual", "intimate parts", "personal information", and "sexual act" definitions in subdivision 1; the three-element cause of action and the consent-is-not-a-defense paragraph in subdivision 2; the four damages items in subdivision 3, including the civil penalty of up to $100,000 and "court costs, fees, and reasonable attorney fees"; the injunction authority and the $1,000-per-day civil fine in subdivision 4; the one-sentence confidential-filings mandate in subdivision 5; the seven liability exceptions, the section 230 preservation clause, and the non-exclusivity clause in subdivision 6; the jurisdiction sentence in subdivision 7; the venue provision and its chapter 5B address-confidentiality reference in subdivision 8; and the discovery tolling sentence in subdivision 9. The section's History line reads "2023 c 58 s 1", and I pulled the session law: 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 58 (H.F. 1370), whose title recites that it establishes "a cause of action for nonconsensual dissemination of deep fake sexual images", "the crime of using deep fake technology to influence an election", and "a crime for nonconsensual dissemination of deep fake sexual images", coding new law in chapters 604, 609, and 617 — sections 1, 2, and 3 respectively. Each of the three sections carries its own EFFECTIVE DATE clause; section 1's reads "This section is effective August 1, 2023, and applies to dissemination of a deep fake that takes place on or after that date." The phrase "all finance losses" in subdivision 3(1) appears identically in the enrolled session law and in the Revisor's posted text. The criminal counterpart at § 617.262 and the limitations sections § 541.05 and § 541.07 were pulled raw from revisor.mn.gov as well; § 541.05, subd. 1(2) and § 541.07(2) are quoted from that text.
The amendment history was checked three ways. The Revisor's Table 2 ("Minnesota Statutes New, Amended, or Repealed") was downloaded as the official PDF for the 2024, 2025, and 2026 regular sessions and searched for "604.32": zero hits in each. Controls run in the same files returned hits — § 515B.3-113 once in the 2026 table, § 126C.10 twice, and § 609.771 three times in the 2024 table (subdivisions 2, 3, and 4, by 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 112) — confirming the search itself was functioning. Section 604.32's version list on revisor.mn.gov shows a single entry of legislative action (2023, new) with editorial-update-only publications in the 2024 and 2025 editions, and the section page carries no amendment banner.
Litigation was searched on CourtListener. In the opinions index: "deep fake" and "deepfake" restricted to the Minnesota Supreme Court and Court of Appeals each returned zero, against a control of six Minnesota appellate opinions filed since January 1, 2024 containing "intimate parts"; the statutory phrase "nonconsensual dissemination of a deep fake" returned zero opinions in any court. In the federal filings index that phrase returned two documents, both the same amicus brief in Pete v. Cooper, No. 1:24-cv-24228 (S.D. Fla.) — docket 262-1, entered December 23, 2025, and docket 295, entered January 9, 2026 — whose argument headings and table of authorities I read directly and which cites "Minn. Stat. §§ 604.32, 617.262 (2023)" among Haw. Rev. Stat. § 711-1110.9, Idaho Code § 18-6606, Mich. Comp. Laws § 752.383, and Va. Code § 18.2-386.2. State v. Plancarte, No. A23-0158 (Minn. Apr. 30, 2025), was read for its reference to § 617.262, subd. 1(f), which appears in Justice Hennesy's concurrence in a case decided under the indecent-exposure statute, § 617.23. The Doe-caption figure comes from enumerating the full 97-case result set for a filings search requiring both "6851" and "intimate visual depiction", run 2026-09-19: 51 captions contain "Doe" and nine more use initials. CourtListener's court list confirms it holds three Minnesota state courts — the Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals, and Minnesota Attorney General Reports — plus the federal District of Minnesota and its bankruptcy court, and no Minnesota state district court.
Minnesota Court Records Online was read directly at publicaccess.courts.state.mn.us: the Case Search page offers Name, Case Number, Citation Number, and Attorney as its search types, the Document Search page states that a case number must be entered to return documents, and the site's own Terms and Conditions state that "[c]ase records are displayed for all Minnesota district (trial) courts" subject to the remote-access restrictions of Rule 8, subd. 2 of the Minnesota Rules of Public Access to Records of the Judicial Branch.
Federal law was pulled raw from uscode.house.gov: 15 U.S.C. § 6851 (Pub. L. 117-103, div. W, title XIII, § 1309, Mar. 15, 2022, 136 Stat. 929), for the "depicted individual" and "intimate visual depiction" definitions, the right of action and representative-plaintiff provisions in subsection (b)(1), the $150,000 liquidated-damages and fee provision in (b)(3)(A)(i), the anonymity provision in (b)(3)(B), and the exceptions in (b)(4); 47 U.S.C. § 223a (Pub. L. 119-12, § 3, May 19, 2025, 139 Stat. 59), for the one-year deadline to establish a notice-and-removal process, the notice requirement, the 48-hour removal duty and identical-copies language, the good-faith liability limitation, and FTC enforcement under section 18(a)(1)(B) of the FTC Act; and 47 U.S.C. § 223(h), for the "digital forgery" definition at (h)(1)(B), the "intimate visual depiction" definition at (h)(1)(E) (which adopts the 15 U.S.C. § 6851 definition), the digital-forgery offense at (h)(3), the penalties at (h)(4), and the threat provisions at (h)(6)(B). The codification note to § 223a identifies the enacting statute as the "Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks Act, also known as the TAKE IT DOWN Act", and states that it was enacted as part of that Act "and not as part of the Communications Act of 1934 which comprises this chapter."
Four things I could not establish. First, whether 15 U.S.C. § 6851's civil action reaches a fabricated image, given that it defines "depicted individual" as one "whose body appears in whole or in part" in the depiction: my CourtListener searches pairing "6851" with "digital forgery" and with "deepfake" both returned zero, but so did the control pairing "6851" with "intimate visual depiction" in the same opinions index — the control failed, so the zero proves nothing and I draw no conclusion from it. Second, I could not run a full-text keyword search of the 2026 session laws; the Revisor's session-law search returns a script-driven page that curl cannot read, so the no-amendment finding rests on the three Table 2 PDFs, the section's version list, and the absence of an amendment banner. Third, mncourts.gov returned HTTP 403 to every request, so I could not check whether the Judicial Branch's published statistical reports break civil filings out any further than MCRO's search fields do; if such a report exists, the fourth fix above is already partly satisfied and I would want to correct this. Fourth, I have no count of § 604.32 filings, demand letters, or settlements, and no way to get one — which is the finding, not a gap in the research. Separately, I did not read the Eighth Circuit's February 9, 2026 decision in Christopher Kohls v. Keith Ellison, No. 25-1300, and I take no position here on the current posture of any challenge to § 609.771; that statute is the subject of the earlier article linked above, not of this one. This piece describes public law for a general audience. It is not legal advice, it is about no client or matter of mine, and reading it creates no attorney-client relationship. It runs longer than the series' usual 1,100-to-1,400 words because nine subdivisions, seven exceptions, and a three-part negative could not be stated honestly in fewer. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.