Lunsford Fighting Off Revenge Porn

Albemarle County Commonwealth Attorney Denise Lunsford has filed a request with a Missouri court for an ex parte order of protection against a prominent attorney, who posted “nude and semi nude photos” of her to Twitter. The attorney, David Cosgrove, dated Lunsford when they were law students together 25 years ago. Lunsford, who is not married, started dating Cosgrove again last year, but broke it off to return to her long-time partner. In a response to Lunsford’s court filing, Cosgrove confessed to posting the images, but claimed that she “knowingly and voluntarily gave or allowed Mr. Cosgrove to take the images.” (Lunsford says that she didn’t know that most of the photos had been taken.) Last month, in an e-mail to Lunsford, Cosgrove confessed to “doing you harm” and that “I deeply regret my hazy and crazy actions.” Lunsford says that Cosgrove became angry when she broke up with him, which is when he started posting the images, in which he identified her by name; Cosgrove says, in his apparent defense, that he’s an alcoholic. The Daily Progress and NBC-29 both have stories about this.

There’s a large, growing world of so-called “revenge porn” on the internet, with several websites dedicated to letting men share private images of their exes to humiliate them. Just today the New York Times published a long story about efforts to enact state and federal legislation to outlaw this practice. What once would have been a couple of Polaroids reclaimed at the end of a relationship are now impossible to ever remove from somebody else’s possession with any degree of confidence.

Where things get weird is with CBS-19’s story. According to CBS-19, Cosgrove is now alleging that Lunsford is just trying to silence him, so that he can’t tell people that she “watch a movie in her home with her child present” (CBS-19’s words), and that disgraced—and wanted—former Board of Supervisors member Chris Dumler was present as well. Why in the world a woman can’t watch a movie in her own home, I have no idea, but perhaps CBS-19 will clear that up. (Note that there appears to be nothing about an an ex parte order of protection that would have prevented Cosgrove from making such allegations, although I’m not an attorney.) Given that Cosgrove has confessed to posting revenge porn of Lunsford, sharing images that may well be 25 years old, it’s difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt with this new claim.

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