A man who used artificial intelligence to create sexual images of women he knew and sent them to their colleagues and families has been sentenced to 15 years in prison, in the first case brought under the American law against non-consensual intimate imagery.
James Strahler II, 37, of Columbus, Ohio, was sentenced to 180 months by Chief US District Judge Sarah D. Morrison on Tuesday. He pleaded guilty in April to cyberstalking, producing obscene visual representations of child sexual abuse, and publication of digital forgeries.
The last of those charges falls under the Take It Down Act, the law enacted in 2025 that prohibits the non-consensual online publication of intimate images and AI forgeries, and requires platforms to remove such material within 48 hours of a valid report. The Department of Justice said Strahler was the first person in the country convicted under it.
What he did
Between December 2024 and June 2025, Strahler sent harassing messages to at least six adult women, including nude images of them that were both real and AI-generated, the department said.
He used AI to create pornographic videos showing at least one of the women having sex with her father, and sent them to her colleagues.
He contacted the women’s mothers and demanded nude photographs of them, threatening to circulate the images he had made of their daughters if they refused. He telephoned the women and left voicemail messages that were sexually explicit or threatened rape, and referred to their home addresses.
Strahler had installed more than 24 AI platforms and more than 100 web-based AI models on his telephone.
He also created obscene AI material depicting children, using the faces of boys from his own community, and posted more than 700 images of real and animated people to a website dedicated to child sexual abuse material. A further 2,400 images and videos on his telephone were flagged as depicting nudity, morphed child sexual abuse material or violence.
The case
The conduct was first reported to Hilliard Police and the Delaware County Sheriff’s Office before being referred to the FBI. Strahler was arrested on federal charges in June 2025.
“I’m proud of my Office’s prosecution of this case — the first in the Nation under the Take It Down Act,” said Dominick S. Gerace II, the US Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio. “Thanks to this new law, we can now show offenders like Strahler that they will not get away with producing and posting disturbing AI-generated content.”
Jason Cromartie, the FBI’s special agent in charge in Cincinnati, said the Act “was enacted to protect innocent victims from AI-generated deepfakes or intimate images shared online without permission”.
The prosecution was brought by assistant US attorney Emily Czerniejewski. The sentence was announced alongside officials from the Maryland AI and Synthetic Media Threats Task Force.