Dignity is the default.

I was in college the first time I heard the parable of the river.

A village keeps pulling drowning people from the water, one after another, but there continue to be more victims and the village can't keep up. When my professor asked what we would do, my first thought wasn't to stand on the bank pulling people out. It was to run upstream, find what was causing the destruction, and stop it. That was the moment I understood how I was built. Going as far upstream as possible is my calling when it comes to solving complex human problems.

For nearly twenty years I've followed that instinct into the fight to end sexual exploitation, because I believe every person is born with inherent dignity, and I've made defending it my life's work.

Going upstream means refusing to accept that harm is inevitable. When everyone said to just parent better or keep kids off screens, I went to the platforms, devices, and apps where our kids actually are. I demanded parental controls that work, safer default settings, and safety by design, and got some of the world's largest corporations to change, including Google, Netflix, Apple, and Meta.

When survivors couldn't get their abuse taken off the world's largest pornography site, I didn't chase the videos one by one. I went upstream, to the money. We convinced Visa, Mastercard, and Discover to stop processing payments for the site, and within days more than ten million videos came down. I also started a law center that filed the first class-action lawsuit against them, and against other platforms profiting from sexual abuse and exploitation.

And while others focus on supporting the survivor of sex trafficking after the harm is done, I go after the sex buyers and the people who profit from the abuse and keep the cycle turning.

When I saw survivors with no legal right to have their intimate images removed, I went further upstream still, to the law itself. It took years of building an unlikely, bipartisan coalition, but in 2025 the TAKE IT DOWN Act became federal law, giving survivors the right to have non-consensual images removed within 48 hours.

Laws matter. But I've learned they aren't enough. A right means little if the systems to enforce it don't exist. So I've gone to the furthest upstream place I know: building. With Protect Privacy AI and the Digital Identity Foundation, I'm building the infrastructure the laws assume already exists. And I'm advising some of the biggest platforms building the AI systems our kids already use, helping them get it right too, so that this time we get ahead of the harm before it scales.

People told me most of this couldn't be done. It was. That's what keeps me running upstream: the proof, again and again, that we don't have to accept the world as it is. We can change the systems that break people's dignity, and build ones that protect it by default.