Someone Cloned Your Voice or Your Face. In Minnesota You Have One Real Claim — and It Is Not the New Statute.

The Minnesota Legislature wrote “forged digital likeness” into the identity theft statute this year, effective August 1, 2026. Every article I have seen about it treats that as new protection for people whose voices and faces are being fabricated. It is not. It is a definition inside a criminal statute, and it gives a victim no cause of action at all.

Work the whole map and the picture is worse than the headline and better than the despair. Minnesota has no right-of-publicity statute — I ran the word “likeness” through the 2025 edition of the statutes and it appears in nine sections, and the single one of them that gives a person any right in his own reaches only children in monetized video. Of the three invasion-of-privacy torts the supreme court recognized in 1998, two are structurally incapable of reaching a fabrication. The third — appropriation — fits a cloned voice better than most lawyers assume, for a reason that has nothing to do with celebrity. And no published Minnesota appellate decision has applied it in the twenty-eight years since it was created.

That is the honest map. Here is how to read it.

First sort what was actually done with the fabrication

Every question in this area turns on what the wrongdoer was using you for. Four answers cover almost everything, and each one lands in a different statute or tort:

Notice what is missing from that table. There is no row for the fabrication made to humiliate you, to settle a score, to make you look ridiculous to your neighbors, or to be posted because someone thought it was funny. That case is the gap, and I will come back to it.

Two of the three privacy torts cannot reach a fabrication at all

Lake v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 582 N.W.2d 231 (Minn. 1998), recognized three branches and refused a fourth. The general framework — the facts, the dissent, the publicity element, the limitations problem — is worked through in full here. What matters for a synthetic likeness is narrower, and it eliminates two branches before you start.

Publication of private facts requires a private fact. The supreme court described the branch as filling “a very narrow gap in tort law — to provide a remedy for the truthful but damaging dissemination of private facts, which is nonactionable under defamation rules.” Bodah v. Lakeville Motor Express, Inc., 663 N.W.2d 550, 557 (Minn. 2003). A deepfake is not true. Whatever it depicts, it is not a fact about you that was disclosed; it is a fabrication about you that was manufactured. The tort protects the private-and-true. A synthetic video is public-and-false. Wrong shelf entirely.

Intrusion upon seclusion requires an intrusion. The tort reaches one who “intentionally intrudes, physically or otherwise, upon the solitude or seclusion of another or his private affairs or concerns * * * if the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person.” Lake, 582 N.W.2d at 233. The raw material for a voice clone or a face swap is, almost always, material the person published himself — a video, a podcast appearance, a company bio photo, a voicemail greeting. Gathering what someone put on the internet is not an intrusion into his seclusion. Where the source material was in fact taken from somewhere private — a hacked cloud account, a stolen phone, a clinic file — intrusion is live, and it is live independent of what was later built out of the material. That is worth pleading when the facts support it. It is not the ordinary case.

That leaves one.

Does appropriation actually fit a cloned voice?

Yes — and the reason is that appropriation was never about your face. It is about the value of your identity.

Start with the element, in the supreme court’s own words:

Appropriation protects an individual’s identity and is committed when one “appropriates to his own use or benefit the name or likeness of another.”

— Lake v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 582 N.W.2d 231, 233 (Minn. 1998) (quoting Restatement (Second) of Torts § 652C)

That is the whole of it. Lake reviewed a Rule 12 dismissal and said so in terms: “Therefore, without consideration of the merits of Lake and Weber’s claims, we recognize the torts of intrusion upon seclusion, appropriation, and publication of private facts.” Id. at 235. It defined no elements. Everything a plaintiff has to prove came from the federal courts sitting in Minnesota, and they are consistent.

The operative concept is taking advantage of the value attached to a person’s identity. Magistrate Judge Erickson put it directly in Kovatovich v. K-Mart Corp., 88 F. Supp. 2d 975 (D. Minn. 1999), where a discharged pharmacist’s name kept appearing on her former employer’s customer solicitation letters: “To tortiously appropriate an individual’s name, one must appropriate for the purpose of taking advantage of that individual’s name, or reputation.” Id. at 986–87. And quoting the Fifth Circuit: “[T]he appropriation tort does not protect one’s name per se; rather, it protects the value associated with that name.” Id. at 986.

Two features of that rule decide the deepfake question.

A commercial purpose is not required. This is the part people get wrong, and it is the part that matters. Judge Ericksen stated it flatly in Wagner v. Gallup, Inc., 989 F. Supp. 2d 782 (D. Minn. 2013): “a commercial purpose is not required and appropriation may occur even though the benefit sought is not a pecuniary one.” Id. at 791. Judge Davis had already applied that principle in Faegre & Benson, LLP v. Purdy, 367 F. Supp. 2d 1238 (D. Minn. 2005), holding a defendant in contempt for registering a domain name built on a lawyer’s well-known pseudonym. The court quoted the Restatement comment that appropriation applies “when the defendant makes use of the plaintiff’s name or likeness for his own purposes and benefit, even though the use is not a commercial one, and even though the benefit sought to be obtained [is] not a pecuniary one,” and found the benefit in the traffic — the defendant had taken the name “for his own purposes and benefit — to mislead internet users into visiting Purdy’s web site when they are actually seeking Hinderaker’s web site.” Id. at 1248.

The taking must be knowing and purposeful. Wagner states the requirement in one sentence: “the tort is an intentional one and requires knowing appropriation of the plaintiff’s name or likeness for the purpose of accruing to the defendant’s benefit the commercial or other value associated with the name or likeness.” 989 F. Supp. 2d at 791. That is where casual misuse falls out. Wagner discusses an unpublished court of appeals decision in which childhood photographs were posted to social media without consent and the claim failed because nothing in the complaint showed the posting was for the purpose of appropriating a benefit from the “reputation, prestige, social or commercial standing, public interest or other values of the plaintiff’s name or likeness.” Id. at 792.

Now apply that to the case that actually walks in the door. A person clones a mother’s son’s voice and calls her at 2 a.m. saying he is in jail and needs bail money. Every element is present and none of it is a stretch. The caller used the son’s identity. He used it knowingly and on purpose. And he used it precisely because of the value attached to it — the trust that a mother places in her son’s voice is the entire mechanism of the fraud. There is no commercial-use problem, because commercial use is not required. There is no fame problem, because the tort protects the value of an identity to the person exploiting it, not the identity’s market price.

The executive-impersonation wire fraud is the same analysis with a corporate victim. So is the fabricated endorsement video. So is the synthetic account opened in your name and face.

Three real problems remain, and they are what a defendant leads with.

Voice is not “name or likeness” on the face of the Restatement, and no Minnesota case has decided it. The formulation Lake adopted says “name or likeness.” It does not say voice. I read “identity” — the word the supreme court itself used to describe what the tort protects — as broad enough to carry a voiceprint, and the Eighth Circuit has at least tolerated the framing: in Ventura v. Titan Sports, Inc., 65 F.3d 725 (8th Cir. 1995), the jury found that the defendant had exploited Ventura’s “name, voice or likeness” as a commentator on other merchandise, and set $8,625.60 as compensation for it. Id. at 728. But no Minnesota appellate decision holds it, and a defendant will argue the omission is deliberate. Plead the face and the voice separately and plead identity as the protected interest.

The tort has produced almost no Minnesota law. Wagner said so in 2013 — “since the Minnesota Supreme Court first recognized the tort in its Lake decision in 1998, the case law in the Minnesota courts has not yet been significantly developed.” 989 F. Supp. 2d at 791 — and searching the published Minnesota decisions since Lake for any application of the appropriation branch turned up nothing. The doctrine you are working with is federal-district-court doctrine predicting state law. That cuts both ways in front of a Minnesota judge.

There is no money in it beyond your actual harm. Appropriation is a common-law tort. No statutory damages, no per-violation multiplier, no fee shifting. Wagner held that a plaintiff may recover for emotional distress under the Restatement’s damages provision and that the plaintiff’s own testimony can carry it, 989 F. Supp. 2d at 792–93 — which is the realistic recovery in most of these cases, and which is worth a fraction of what a statute would pay. Compare the $100,000 civil penalty the Legislature attached to a fabricated sexual image and the shape of the problem is obvious.

Does Minnesota have a right of publicity? Nobody can tell you for certain

There is no statute. There has never been a statute. And the question whether the common law supplies one is genuinely open — a federal court answered yes in 1970, the Eighth Circuit predicted yes in 1995 over a dissent, and the Minnesota Supreme Court has never said a word about it.

The statutory negative first, because that half is solid. Searching the 2025 edition of Minnesota Statutes returns zero sections containing the phrase “right of publicity” and zero containing “publicity rights.” The word “publicity” appears in 25 sections, and 24 of them use the word in its ordinary sense — press releases, promotional budgets, hearing notices, trademark-dilution factors, prejudicial pretrial coverage. The twenty-fifth proves the point rather than undercutting it. Minn. Stat. § 81A.23, subd. 7, part of the Revised Uniform Athlete Agents Act, defines an “endorsement contract” as an agreement under which a student athlete is employed or paid “to use on behalf of the other party any value that the athlete may have because of publicity, reputation, following, or fame obtained because of athletic ability or performance.” Minnesota law acknowledges in exactly one place that a person’s identity carries commercial value, and it does so to regulate the agent who brokers it — not to give the athlete a claim against anyone who takes it. The word “likeness” appears in nine sections: the state seal, court seals, cannabis packaging and advertising rules, an edible-cannabis prohibition, a fair-campaign-practices rule about items displaying a candidate’s name or likeness, a transit-crime definition of an identification document, and the child-labor statute discussed below. Only that last one gives a person any right in his own likeness, and it reaches only a minor featured in monetized video. Minnesota has never enacted anything resembling New York Civil Rights Law §§ 50–51 — a contrast a federal judge in this district drew more than fifty years ago. This is the same legislative pattern I traced in the biometric context, where the state regulates fingerprints and faceprints in seventeen scattered sections and has no biometric privacy act at all. Minnesota legislates around the body without legislating the body.

The common-law half is where it gets interesting. In Uhlaender v. Henricksen, 316 F. Supp. 1277 (D. Minn. 1970), Judge Neville enjoined a board-game maker from using major league ballplayers’ names and statistics, and did it on a property theory rather than a privacy theory:

It is this court’s view that a celebrity has a legitimate proprietary interest in his public personality. A celebrity must be considered to have invested his years of practice and competition in a public personality which eventually may reach marketable status. That identity, embodied in his name, likeness, statistics and other personal characteristics, is the fruit of his labors and is a type of property.

— Uhlaender, 316 F. Supp. at 1282

That was 1970 — twenty-eight years before the Minnesota Supreme Court recognized any privacy tort, and five years before Hendry v. Conner, which both the Lake dissent and the Ventura dissent read as saying that Minnesota had never recognized one.

Twenty-five years after Uhlaender, the Eighth Circuit had to decide the question to resolve Jesse Ventura’s quantum meruit claim against the WWF’s parent. It found nothing to work with: “The parties have identified, and we have discovered, no case in which the Minnesota Supreme Court has either accepted or rejected the tort of misappropriation of publicity rights.” Ventura, 65 F.3d at 729. It predicted anyway: “We believe that the Minnesota Supreme Court would recognize the tort of violation of publicity rights.” Id. at 730. Its reasoning was that the publicity right is different in kind from the privacy right — “The right to publicity protects pecuniary, not emotional, interests.” Id. And its policy, the court said, is closer to trade-name protection, which Minnesota does recognize.

Judge Morris Sheppard Arnold dissented, and his objection has aged into the strongest counter-argument a defendant has:

I do not think that a right of publicity exists under Minnesota law. … [I]t is highly significant that, in the year 1995, when everyone not only wants his or her fifteen minutes of fame but the concomitant television rights as well, no Minnesota state court has yet discovered a right of publicity in Minnesota law.

— Ventura, 65 F.3d at 736 (Arnold, J., dissenting)

Lake came down three years later and said nothing about a right of publicity. It recognized appropriation as a privacy tort, whose Restatement damages measure is mental distress. A defendant will argue that Lake answered Ventura by choosing the privacy branch and declining the property branch. I do not read it that way — Lake expressly declined to reach any merits — but I would not tell a client the question is settled, because it is not.

One federal limit is settled, and it bites. In Dryer v. National Football League, 814 F.3d 938 (8th Cir. 2016), retired players sued over game footage in NFL Films productions. The Eighth Circuit held their publicity claims preempted by 17 U.S.C. § 301(a): “When a right-of-publicity suit challenges the expressive, non-commercial use of a copyrighted work, however, that suit seeks to subordinate the copyright holder’s right to exploit the value of that work to the plaintiff’s interest in controlling the work’s dissemination.” 814 F.3d at 943. The line the court drew is between advertising and expression. If a fabrication is built out of footage someone else lawfully owns and is deployed as expression rather than as an advertisement, expect a preemption motion.

The 2026 amendment is criminal only. Here is what it is still worth.

The Legislature passed Laws 2026, chapter 97 — S.F. No. 4760 — a public safety act whose Article 3 is captioned “IDENTITY THEFT; FINANCIAL CRIMES”. Section 3 of that article amends Minn. Stat. § 609.527, subd. 1, to add a definition:

“Forged digital likeness” means any video recording, motion-picture film, sound recording, electronic image, or photograph, or any technological representation of speech or conduct substantially derivative thereof that: (1) was created, adapted, altered, or modified in a manner that was substantially dependent upon technical means; (2) misrepresents the appearance, speech, or conduct of the individual; and (3) is so realistic that a reasonable person would believe it depicts the image or speech of an actual individual.

— Laws 2026, ch. 97, art. 3, § 3

The same section rewrites “identity” to mean “any name, voice or likeness, number, or data transmission that may be used, alone or in conjunction with any other information, to identify a specific individual or entity,” and inserts “a forged digital likeness” into the enumerated list. Article 3, section 3 carries no effective-date clause — section 4 of the same article does, and section 3 does not — so it took effect under the default in Minn. Stat. § 645.02 on August 1, 2026. Anyone reading the Revisor’s page for § 609.527 will see the pre-amendment text of subdivision 1 under a banner noting the change; the session law is the operative language.

Now, what this does and does NOT do.

It makes a cloned voice an “identity” for purposes of the crime in subdivision 2 — “A person who transfers, possesses, or uses an identity that is not the person’s own, with the intent to commit, aid, or abet any unlawful activity is guilty of identity theft and may be punished as provided in subdivision 3.” That is real. It is also the whole of it. Section 609.527 runs through subdivisions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5a, 5b, 6, 7, and 8, and none of them creates a civil action. Neither does the rest of Article 3, which contains four sections in total — two administrative-subpoena amendments, the § 609.527 definitions, and a criminal limitations amendment. The amendment is criminal only. And the drafters plainly knew how to write a civil remedy when they wanted one: elsewhere in the same act they made a person who sells a decommissioned law enforcement vehicle without stripping its insignia liable for damages and a $2,500 civil penalty. They wrote nothing of the kind for a forged likeness.

Two things it gives a victim anyway are worth more than they look.

A restitution floor. “The court shall order a person convicted of violating subdivision 2 to pay restitution of not less than $1,000 to each direct victim of the offense.” § 609.527, subd. 4(b). And subdivision 4(c) requires the court, on written request, to hand a direct victim a certified copy of the complaint, the judgment of conviction, and an order setting forth the facts and circumstances of the offense — at no cost. That order is the closest thing Minnesota has to a judicial declaration that you were the one impersonated. It is entirely dependent on somebody being convicted.

A police report you are entitled to. Subdivision 5(a) provides that a person who reasonably suspects identity theft may initiate an investigation by contacting the law enforcement agency where he lives, “regardless of where the crime may have occurred.” That agency “must prepare a police report of the matter, provide the complainant with a copy of that report,” and may investigate or refer. Now that a cloned voice is an identity under subdivision 1, that report is available to a voice-clone victim — and a report to a law enforcement agency, the filing of which subjects the filer to criminal penalties for false information, is what 15 U.S.C. § 1681a(q)(4) defines as an “identity theft report.” That is the document that triggers the federal blocking obligation in 15 U.S.C. § 1681c-2. The federal machinery a victim actually uses is set out in the identity theft victim’s guide, and what the federal data does and does not document about AI-assisted fraud is worked through separately.

So the 2026 amendment’s civil value is indirect and it is real: it puts a fabricated voice inside a criminal statute whose reporting subdivision generates the paper that federal consumer law runs on.

Three statutes let a depicted individual walk into court, and each is a keyhole

Sexual imagery — Minn. Stat. § 604.32. A depicted individual may sue for the nonconsensual dissemination of a deep fake realistically depicting intimate parts or a sexual act, where the disseminator acted “with knowledge that the depicted individual did not consent to its public dissemination.” Subd. 2(a)(1). The remedies in subdivision 3 run to general and special damages including mental anguish, disgorgement of any profit, “a civil penalty awarded to the plaintiff of an amount up to $100,000” and “court costs, fees, and reasonable attorney fees” — plus, under subdivision 4, an injunction and a fine of up to $1,000 per day for violating it. This is by an order of magnitude the strongest likeness claim in Minnesota law, and it is covered in full alongside its criminal counterparts and the federal takedown duty. If your facts fit § 604.32, stop reading this article and go read that one.

Elections — Minn. Stat. § 609.771. This one is usually described as a crime, and it is, but subdivision 4 does more than that:

A cause of action for injunctive or equitable relief may be maintained against any person who is reasonably believed to be about to violate or who is in the course of violating this section by: (1) the attorney general; (2) a county attorney or city attorney; (3) the depicted individual; or (4) a candidate for nomination or election to a public office who is injured or likely to be injured by dissemination.

— Minn. Stat. § 609.771, subd. 4

Read the limits. Injunctive or equitable relief — no damages. Against someone “about to violate” or “in the course of violating” — nothing for a completed dissemination. And the underlying prohibition in subdivision 2 requires dissemination without consent, with intent to injure a candidate or influence an election result, inside a defined window: within 90 days before a political party nominating convention, or after absentee voting opens before a presidential nomination primary or a regular or special primary or general election. Outside that window, or without that intent, subdivision 4 gives you nothing. Outside the sexual-imagery lane it is the only provision written for fabricated video that lets the person depicted ask a court to stop it, and it is open a few months every other year.

Minors in monetized content — Minn. Stat. § 181A.13. The child-labor chapter carries the only unqualified likeness-removal right in Minnesota law:

Content containing the likeness of a child must be deleted and removed from any online platform by the individual who posted the content, the account owner, or another person who has control over the account when the request is made by a minor age 13 or older whose likeness appears in the content, or by an adult who was under the age of 18 when their likeness was used in the content.

— Minn. Stat. § 181A.13, subd. 5

Subdivision 4(a) adds a civil action “for damages, injunctive relief, and any other relief the court finds just and equitable to enforce this section.” The section applies where a minor is engaged in “the work of content creation” as subdivision 1 defines it — a 30-percent-of-compensated-video threshold, measured over 30 days, with a compensation trigger — so it is not a general right to have your childhood photographs taken down. Laws 2024, ch. 103, § 4.

Three statutes, three keyholes: sexual imagery, election windows, and monetized child content. That pattern tells you what the Legislature has actually decided. It has protected the categories that generated headlines and has left the general case alone. Which of Minnesota’s three overlapping privacy regimes reaches a company that collected or lost the recordings in the first place is a separate question, and a company-side one.

False light is not coming back, and a count pleading it is a liability

Minnesota affirmatively rejected false light publicity and has never revisited it. This is the single most common mistake I see in this area, because false light is the tort that feels like it was written for deepfakes: publicity given to a matter that places a person before the public in a false light, highly offensive to a reasonable person. That is a description of a synthetic video. It is not a Minnesota cause of action.

Lake was explicit, and its disposition was a disposition, not a deferral — the supreme court affirmed the dismissal of the false-light count:

Thus we recognize a right to privacy present in the common law of Minnesota, including causes of action in tort for intrusion upon seclusion, appropriation, and publication of private facts, but we decline to recognize the tort of false light publicity.

— Lake, 582 N.W.2d at 236

The reasoning was First Amendment reasoning: “to the extent that false light is more expansive than defamation, tension between this tort and the First Amendment is increased.” Id. at 235. It is set out at length in the invasion-of-privacy piece. What matters here is that the holding has held. The court of appeals restated it within three months — Special Force Ministries v. WCCO Television, 584 N.W.2d 789, 793 (Minn. Ct. App. 1998) (“The court declined to recognize the tort of false light publicity because it was concerned about the increased tension between the First Amendment and the tort of false light publicity, which is similar to defamation but more expansive.”) — and again five years later in Robins v. Conseco Finance Loan Co., 656 N.W.2d 241, 244 (Minn. Ct. App. 2003), which described Lake as having “declined to accept false light publicity as a fourth cause of action.” Searching the published Minnesota decisions from 2003 forward, exactly three mention false light, and the most recent is Larson v. Wasemiller, 738 N.W.2d 300 (Minn. 2007) — which cites Lake’s refusal as an illustration of the framework a plaintiff would have to satisfy to get a new tort recognized:

In deciding whether to recognize a common law tort, this court looks to (1) whether the tort is inherent in, or the natural extension of, a well-established common law right, (2) whether the tort has been recognized in other common law states, (3) whether recognition of a cause of action will create tension with other applicable laws, and (4) whether such tension is out-weighed by the importance of the additional protections that recognition of the claim would provide to injured persons.

— Larson, 738 N.W.2d at 304

That is the doorway. It is not closed. A plaintiff with the right record could argue that generative fabrication is exactly the “additional protection” factor four contemplates, and that Lake’s premise — that defamation absorbs nearly all false-light claims — was written before it was possible to manufacture a photorealistic depiction of a person doing something he never did. I think that argument gets made in this state within a few years. I would not build a case on it today.

Plead defamation instead. Lake itself supplies the translation: “Defamation requires a false statement communicated to a third party that tends to harm a plaintiff’s reputation.” Id. at 235. A fabricated video that depicts a person doing something disreputable communicates a false factual assertion about him as surely as a sentence would. That is a defamation claim, and it comes with defamation’s damages — which are far better than appropriation’s — and defamation’s whole apparatus of privileges, fault standards, and the anti-SLAPP statute that now sits over the top of it. All of that is treated here. Two practical consequences: the anti-SLAPP motion is coming if the fabrication touches anything a defendant can characterize as public expression, and the limitations period is two years under Minn. Stat. § 541.07(1), which is shorter than most people assume.

The commercial lane pays better federally than it does in Minnesota

If the fabrication was used to sell or endorse something, two doors open and only one of them has money behind it.

Federal law — the Lanham Act. Section 43(a)(1)(A) reaches anyone who uses in commerce any word, term, name, symbol, or device, or any false designation of origin or false or misleading representation of fact, which

is likely to cause confusion, or to cause mistake, or to deceive as to the affiliation, connection, or association of such person with another person, or as to the origin, sponsorship, or approval of his or her goods, services, or commercial activities by another person

— 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a)(1)(A)

Anyone who believes he is or is likely to be damaged may sue. This is federal law, and it is the standard vehicle for a false-endorsement claim. The Eighth Circuit reads the provision to prohibit “false representations concerning the origin, association, or endorsement of goods or services through the wrongful use of another’s distinctive mark, name, trade dress, or other device.” Dryer, 814 F.3d at 944 (internal quotation marks omitted). The formulation the circuit adopted traces back through the Ninth Circuit’s decision in the Tom Waits voice-imitation case, which is not an accident — sound-alike advertising is where this doctrine was built. A synthetic endorsement is squarely within the language. The proof burden is real: Dryer required evidence that the challenged statements are literally false or that they implicitly convey a false impression, are misleading in context, or are likely to deceive consumers, and it held that survey evidence of consumer misunderstanding, standing alone, does not clear summary judgment. Id.

Minnesota law — the Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which has no damages remedy. A fabricated endorsement fits § 325D.44, subd. 1, several times over: clause (2), “causes likelihood of confusion or of misunderstanding as to the source, sponsorship, approval, or certification of goods or services”; clause (3), the same as to “affiliation, connection, or association with, or certification by, another”; and clause (5), which reaches a representation “that a person has a sponsorship, approval, status, affiliation, or connection that the person does not have”. Subdivision 2(a) removes two obstacles: “a complainant need not prove competition between the parties or actual confusion or misunderstanding.”

Then read the remedy. Section 325D.45, subdivision 1, gives “[a] person likely to be damaged by a deceptive trade practice of another” an injunction, and adds that “[p]roof of monetary damage, loss of profits, or intent to deceive is not required.” Subdivision 2 allows costs to the prevailing party and attorney fees only where the defendant “has willfully engaged in the trade practice knowing it to be deceptive.” There is no damages provision anywhere in the section. And the private-attorney-general route does not fill the hole: § 8.31, subdivision 1, enumerates the laws whose violation supports a subdivision 3a damages action, and its list runs from §§ 325D.01 to 325D.07, to §§ 325D.09 to 325D.16, and then jumps to §§ 325D.49 to 325D.66 — skipping the Deceptive Trade Practices Act at §§ 325D.43 to 325D.48 entirely. A federal court reached the same conclusion in Kovatovich, holding that a non-consumer plaintiff whose name had been used could proceed under § 325D.44 while her Consumer Fraud Act and false-advertising claims failed for lack of consumer standing — and noting that “any claim that the Plaintiff may have under Section 325.44 would not allow for the recovery of damages.” 88 F. Supp. 2d at 986 n.4. The private attorney general statute is worth understanding on its own terms, but it does not reach this.

So the Minnesota commercial claim is an injunction with a fee possibility. Sue federally if you can get there.

What actually gets the thing taken down

Damages are the wrong first question. Most people who call me about this want the video gone, and Minnesota’s takedown levers are these and only these:

• § 604.32, subd. 4 — a temporary or permanent injunction, plus a civil fine of up to $1,000 per day for violating the order. Sexual imagery only.
• § 609.771, subd. 4 — injunctive or equitable relief, election window only, and only against conduct about to occur or in progress.
• § 181A.13, subd. 5 — mandatory removal on request, for content featuring you when you were a minor engaged in monetized content creation.
• § 325D.45, subd. 1 — an injunction against a deceptive trade practice, if the fabrication is being used commercially.
• A common-law injunction ancillary to an appropriation or defamation claim, which requires you to file a lawsuit and win a motion.

Notice what is not on that list. There is no general Minnesota right to demand that a platform remove a fabricated depiction of you. The 48-hour federal notice-and-removal duty enacted in 2025 covers intimate visual depictions, including digital forgeries, and nothing else; it is described in detail here. And the copyright takedown that people reach for next is not yours to send unless you own the source material: a notification under 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A) must carry the signature of “a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed” and a statement under penalty of perjury to that effect. If the fabrication was built from a photograph you took of yourself or a recording you made, you are that owner and the notice is available. If it was built from a news clip, a podcast appearance, or a company headshot, the copyright belongs to someone else and the lever belongs to them.

The fallback everyone asks about is intentional infliction of emotional distress, and it is the weakest thing on this page. Minnesota recognizes the tort — Hubbard v. United Press International, Inc., 330 N.W.2d 428 (Minn. 1983), adopted the Restatement formulation and set out four elements: “(1) the conduct must be extreme and outrageous; (2) the conduct must be intentional or reckless; (3) it must cause emotional distress; and (4) the distress must be severe.” Id. at 438–39. The conduct must be “so atrocious that it passes the boundaries of decency and is utterly intolerable to the civilized community.” Id. at 439. The supreme court warned in the same breath that “[t]he operation of this tort is sharply limited to cases involving particularly egregious facts.” Id. Hubbard itself reversed a jury verdict that had included $115,000 in punitive damages. Plead it where the facts are genuinely outrageous. Do not plead it as filler.

The gap, stated plainly

Assemble everything above and the hole is easy to describe. Minnesota gives a person a real, well-funded claim if the fabrication is sexual. It gives a candidate and a depicted individual a narrow injunction if the fabrication is electoral, in season. It gives a former child content creator a removal right. It gives a business or an endorser a federal false-endorsement claim and a state injunction without damages.

For everything else — the fabricated video made to humiliate you, the cloned voice used against your parents, the synthetic clip that circulates in your industry until you cannot get hired — you have a 1998 common-law tort with no elements supplied by any Minnesota appellate court, no statutory damages, no fee shifting, an unresolved question whether “likeness” includes a voice, and a live preemption defense if the fabrication was built from someone else’s copyrighted footage. That is thin, and the amendment the Legislature passed in May, while genuinely useful on the criminal side, did not thicken it by a word.

Here is what I would plead today for a client whose voice or face was fabricated, in this order: appropriation of identity, pleading the taking as knowing and purposeful and pleading name, likeness, and voice separately; defamation, if the fabrication asserts anything false about the person, with the two-year clock calendared from publication; § 604.32 if any part of the material is sexual; § 609.771 if the timing and intent fit; § 1125(a)(1)(A) and § 325D.44 if there is any commercial use; and intrusion upon seclusion if the source material was taken from somewhere private rather than scraped from something public. Then, entirely outside the lawsuit: a report to local law enforcement under § 609.527, subd. 5, a certified copy of that report, and the federal identity-theft block under 15 U.S.C. § 1681c-2 that the report unlocks.

The technology that makes a convincing forgery of a person is now ordinary, and the civil law of this state that answers it consists of one undeveloped tort and three statutory keyholes. That is a legislative problem, not a litigation problem, and until it is fixed the honest advice to a Minnesotan is that the criminal report will often move faster than the lawsuit.

Madgett Law, LLC represents Minnesota clients whose identities have been used without permission — fabricated audio and video, impersonation accounts, misuse of a name or likeness in advertising, and the defamation and privacy claims that travel with them — and pursues the takedowns, injunctions, and law enforcement reports that go with them. If a recording or video of you exists that you never made, send us a message or call 612-470-6529.

Sources: Cases — Lake v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 582 N.W.2d 231 (Minn. 1998), at 232 (procedural posture; reversal as to intrusion, appropriation, and publication of private facts and affirmance as to false light publicity), 233 (the Restatement formulations of intrusion upon seclusion and appropriation; “Appropriation protects an individual’s identity and is committed when one ‘appropriates to his own use or benefit the name or likeness of another’”), 235 (“without consideration of the merits of Lake and Weber’s claims”; refusal of false light and the First Amendment reasoning; “Defamation requires a false statement communicated to a third party that tends to harm a plaintiff’s reputation”), and 236 (holding sentence declining false light publicity). Bodah v. Lakeville Motor Express, Inc., 663 N.W.2d 550, 557 (Minn. 2003) (publication of private facts provides “a remedy for the truthful but damaging dissemination of private facts”). Special Force Ministries v. WCCO Television, 584 N.W.2d 789, 793 (Minn. Ct. App. 1998) (restating Lake’s refusal of false light). Robins v. Conseco Finance Loan Co., 656 N.W.2d 241, 244 (Minn. Ct. App. 2003) (Lake “declined to accept false light publicity as a fourth cause of action”). Larson v. Wasemiller, 738 N.W.2d 300, 304 (Minn. 2007) (four-factor test for recognizing a new common-law tort; describing Lake’s refusal of false light). Hendry v. Conner, 303 Minn. 317, 226 N.W.2d 921 (1975), is named in the text only as it is characterized inside Lake and inside the Ventura dissent, both of which cite it at 303 Minn. 319; it was not independently retrieved and no claim is made about its text beyond what those two opinions say of it. Hubbard v. United Press International, Inc., 330 N.W.2d 428, 438–39 (Minn. 1983) (four elements of intentional infliction of emotional distress) and 439 (“so atrocious that it passes the boundaries of decency and is utterly intolerable to the civilized community”; “The operation of this tort is sharply limited to cases involving particularly egregious facts”). Federal decisions applying or predicting Minnesota law — Uhlaender v. Henricksen, 316 F. Supp. 1277 (D. Minn. 1970), at 1279 (distinguishing misappropriation from the right to be let alone) and 1282 (celebrity’s “legitimate proprietary interest in his public personality”; identity “is the fruit of his labors and is a type of property”). Ventura v. Titan Sports, Inc., 65 F.3d 725 (8th Cir. 1995), at 728 (jury finding that defendant exploited Ventura’s “name, voice or likeness”), 729 (no Minnesota Supreme Court case accepting or rejecting misappropriation of publicity rights), 730 (“We believe that the Minnesota Supreme Court would recognize the tort of violation of publicity rights”; “The right to publicity protects pecuniary, not emotional, interests”), and 736 (Morris Sheppard Arnold, J., dissenting: “I do not think that a right of publicity exists under Minnesota law”; “no Minnesota state court has yet discovered a right of publicity in Minnesota law”). Kovatovich v. K-Mart Corp., 88 F. Supp. 2d 975 (D. Minn. 1999), at 986 (Restatement § 652C; quoting Matthews v. Wozencraft, 15 F.3d 432, 437 (5th Cir. 1994): the tort “does not protect one’s name per se; rather, it protects the value associated with that name”), 986 n.4 (§ 325D.44 claim viable for a non-consumer but “would not allow for the recovery of damages”; §§ 325F.67 and 325F.69 claims dismissed for lack of consumer standing), and 986–87 (“To tortiously appropriate an individual’s name, one must appropriate for the purpose of taking advantage of that individual’s name, or reputation”). Faegre & Benson, LLP v. Purdy, 367 F. Supp. 2d 1238 (D. Minn. 2005), at 1247 (quoting Lake and Kovatovich) and 1248 (Restatement § 652C cmt. b, “even though the use is not a commercial one, and even though the benefit sought to be obtained [is] not a pecuniary one” — the reported text reads “in” for “is”; appropriation of a pseudonym “for his own purposes and benefit — to mislead internet users”). Wagner v. Gallup, Inc., 989 F. Supp. 2d 782 (D. Minn. 2013), at 791 (commercial purpose not required; “requires knowing appropriation of the plaintiff’s name or likeness for the purpose of accruing to the defendant’s benefit the commercial or other value associated with the name or likeness”; Minnesota case law “has not yet been significantly developed”), 792 (Restatement § 652C cmt. d, “reputation, prestige, social or commercial standing, public interest or other values”), and 792–93 (damages under Restatement § 652H; plaintiff’s testimony sufficient at summary judgment). Dryer v. National Football League, 814 F.3d 938 (8th Cir. 2016), at 943 (Copyright Act preemption of right-of-publicity claims challenging expressive, non-commercial use) and 944 (Lanham Act § 43(a)(1)(A) false endorsement standard; survey evidence of misunderstanding insufficient). All case text read from the Caselaw Access Project archive at static.case.law, using the star-paginated HTML for pin cites. Minnesota statutes — Minn. Stat. § 609.527, subd. 1 (definitions; displayed by the Revisor in pre-amendment form under a currency banner), subd. 2 (crime), subd. 4(b)–(c) (restitution of not less than $1,000 to each direct victim; certified copies to the victim), subd. 5(a) (mandatory police report), and subds. 3, 5a, 5b, 6, 7, 8 (read in full to confirm no civil action exists anywhere in the section); § 604.32, subd. 2(a)(1)–(3) (elements), subd. 3(3) (civil penalty up to $100,000), subd. 4 (injunction; daily fine); § 609.771, subd. 1(c) (definition of “deep fake”), subd. 2(a)(1)–(3) (violation; intent and timing windows), subd. 3 (penalties), and subd. 4 (cause of action for injunctive or equitable relief by the attorney general, a county or city attorney, the depicted individual, or an injured candidate); § 181A.13, subd. 1 (when a minor is engaged in the work of content creation), subd. 4(a) (civil action for damages and injunctive relief), and subd. 5 (mandatory content removal on request); § 325D.44, subd. 1(2), (3), (5) (deceptive trade practices) and subd. 2(a) (no need to prove competition or actual confusion); § 325D.45, subd. 1 (injunction; no proof of monetary damage required), subd. 2 (costs; fees on a willful violation), and subd. 3 (remedies cumulative) — note that the section contains no damages remedy; § 8.31, subd. 1 (enumerated laws, which omit §§ 325D.43 to 325D.48) and subd. 3a (private remedies for violations of the laws referred to in subdivision 1); § 81A.23, subd. 7 (definition of “endorsement contract” in the Revised Uniform Athlete Agents Act); § 645.02 (default August 1 effective date); § 541.07(1) (two years for “libel, slander, assault, battery, false imprisonment, or other tort resulting in personal injury”), all from the 2025 Minnesota Statutes, Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Session laws — Laws 2026, ch. 97 (S.F. No. 4760), art. 3, § 3 (amending Minn. Stat. § 609.527, subd. 1, to add the definition of “forged digital likeness,” to insert “voice or likeness” into “identity,” and to add “a forged digital likeness” to the enumerated list; no effective-date clause, unlike § 4 of the same article), and art. 12, § 1, subd. 4 (enacting Minn. Stat. § 169.981; liability for damages and a $2,500 civil penalty for selling a law enforcement vehicle without removing its equipment and insignia — cited only as an example of a civil remedy the same act did write), read from the Revisor’s session law text at revisor.mn.gov/laws/2026/0/Session+Law/Chapter/97/; Laws 2024, ch. 103, § 4 (enacting Minn. Stat. § 181A.13). Court rule — Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c) (“Nonprecedential opinions and order opinions are not binding authority except as law of the case, res judicata or collateral estoppel, but nonprecedential opinions may be cited as persuasive authority”), amended effective August 1, 2020, read from the Revisor’s court rules text at revisor.mn.gov/court_rules/ap/subtype/rcap/id/136/. Federal law — 15 U.S.C. § 1125(a)(1)(A) (false designation of origin; likelihood of confusion as to affiliation, connection, association, sponsorship, or approval); 15 U.S.C. § 1681a(q)(4)(A)–(C) (definition of “identity theft report”); 15 U.S.C. § 1681c-2 (blocking of information resulting from identity theft); 17 U.S.C. § 301(a) (preemption, as applied in Dryer); 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A)(i), (vi) (elements of a takedown notification; signature and sworn statement of a person authorized to act for the owner of an exclusive right), all from uscode.house.gov.

Method note on the negatives. The statement that Minnesota has no right-of-publicity statute rests on full-text searches of the 2025 edition of Minnesota Statutes run through the Revisor’s own search service (queried directly at its JSON endpoint, api.revisor.mn.gov, because the search page renders client-side), and on reading every hit: “right of publicity” (0 sections), “publicity rights” (0), “publicity” (25 sections, none creating any right in a person’s identity; the nearest is § 81A.23, subd. 7, which defines a contract rather than a right), “likeness” (9 sections — §§ 1.135, 151.72, 181A.13, 211B.11, 342.06, 342.62, 342.64, 358.03, and 609.855), and “deep fake” (3 sections — §§ 604.32, 609.771, and 617.262). “Forged digital likeness” returns 0 sections in the 2025 edition, which is what one expects of language added by a 2026 session law that has not yet been folded into a published edition; the session law itself was read directly. The statement that no published Minnesota appellate decision has applied the appropriation branch since Lake, and that Minnesota courts have not recognized false light publicity since 1998, rests on searches of the Minnesota Supreme Court and Court of Appeals opinion index for the Restatement’s appropriation language and for “false light,” followed by retrieval and reading of every candidate from the Caselaw Access Project. Those index searches locate candidates; they do not prove a negative on their own, and unpublished court of appeals decisions are not binding authority in any event under Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c). Quotations from case text are taken from the Caselaw Access Project’s star-paginated pages; CAP’s optical character recognition intermittently drops the apostrophe in possessive forms, and those apostrophes have been restored. The only other alteration anywhere in a quoted passage is the bracketed “[is]” in the Restatement comment quoted from Faegre & Benson, where the reported text reads “in.”

This article is general legal information about Minnesota and federal law. It is not legal advice, reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship with Madgett Law, LLC, and whether any particular fabrication is actionable depends on facts this article cannot know — who made it, what it was used for, where the source material came from, and when it was published. No outcome is promised or implied.