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, in force by August 1, 2026. Every article I’ve seen about it treats that as new protection for people whose voices and faces are being faked. It isn’t. It’s a definition inside a criminal statute, and it gives a victim no cause of action at all.

Work the whole map and it’s 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 shows up in nine sections; the only one 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 can’t reach a fabrication by their very structure. 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’s the map. Here’s how to read it.

Start with what the fake was actually used for

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:

Look at what’s missing from that table. There’s no row for the fake made to humiliate you, to settle a score, to make you look ridiculous to your neighbors, or to get posted because someone thought it was funny. That case is the gap, and I’ll come back to it.

Two of the three privacy torts can’t 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. For a synthetic likeness, what matters is narrower, and it knocks out 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 isn’t true. Whatever it shows, it isn’t a fact about you that got disclosed. It’s a fabrication about you that somebody 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, stuff the person published himself: a video, a podcast appearance, a company bio photo, a voicemail greeting. Gathering what someone put on the internet isn’t an intrusion into his seclusion. Where the source material really was taken from somewhere private (a hacked cloud account, a stolen phone, a clinic file), intrusion is live, and it’s live no matter what was later built out of the material. Plead it when the facts support it. It’s not the ordinary case.

That leaves one.

Does appropriation actually fit a cloned voice?

Yes. Appropriation was never about your face. It’s about the value of your identity.

Here’s 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’s all 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’re consistent.

The key idea 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 showing up 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 isn’t required. This is the part people get wrong, and it’s the part that matters. Judge Ericksen said 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 has to be knowing and purposeful. Wagner puts 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’s 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. Someone clones a mother’s son’s voice and calls her at 2 a.m. saying he’s in jail and needs bail money. Every element is there, 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 a mother puts in her son’s voice is the entire engine of the fraud. There’s no commercial-use problem, because commercial use isn’t required. There’s 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 fake endorsement video. So is the synthetic account opened in your name and face.

Three real problems remain, and a defendant leads with them.

Voice isn’t “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 doesn’t 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. What you’re working with is federal-district-court doctrine predicting state law. In front of a Minnesota judge, that cuts both ways.

There’s 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. That’s the realistic recovery in most of these cases, and it’s worth a fraction of what a statute would pay. Put it next to the $100,000 civil penalty the Legislature attached to a fabricated sexual image and you can see the problem.

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

There’s no statute. There’s never been a statute. And whether the common law supplies one is genuinely open: a federal court said 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.

Take 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 it in its ordinary sense: press releases, promotional budgets, hearing notices, trademark-dilution factors, prejudicial pretrial coverage. The twenty-fifth proves the point. 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.” In exactly one place, Minnesota law admits that a person’s identity carries commercial value, and it does it 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 like New York Civil Rights Law §§ 50–51 — a contrast a federal judge in this district drew more than fifty years ago. It’s the same 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 he 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. That’s 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 a different animal from the privacy right: “The right to publicity protects pecuniary, not emotional, interests.” Id. And the policy behind it, the court said, sits closer to trade-name protection, which Minnesota does recognize.

Judge Morris Sheppard Arnold dissented, and his objection has aged into the strongest 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 picking the privacy branch and passing on the property branch. I don’t read it that way, since Lake expressly declined to reach any merits. But I wouldn’t tell a client the question is settled, because it isn’t.

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 court drew the line between advertising and expression. If a fake is built out of footage someone else lawfully owns and it’s used as expression rather than as an ad, expect a preemption motion.

The 2026 amendment is criminal only. Here’s what it’s 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 doesn’t), so a default in Minn. Stat. § 645.02 supplies the date: August 1, 2026, or July 1 if chapter 97 counts as an act having appropriation items. Either way, it was in force by August 1. If you pull up the Revisor’s page for § 609.527, you’ll 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’s real. It’s also all 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 has 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 like that for a forged likeness.

Still, it gives a victim two things that 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 all depends on somebody getting convicted.

A police report you’re entitled to. Subdivision 5(a) provides that a person who reasonably suspects identity theft may start 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, where filing false information subjects the filer to criminal penalties, is what 15 U.S.C. § 1681a(q)(4) defines as an “identity theft report.” That’s 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 doesn’t document about AI-assisted fraud is worked through separately.

So the 2026 amendment’s civil value is indirect, and it’s real. It puts a fake 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 one 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’s 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. People usually describe this one 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, so no damages. Against someone “about to violate” or “in the course of violating” — nothing for a dissemination that’s already done. 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’s the only provision written for fake video that lets the person depicted ask a court to stop it, and it’s 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 isn’t 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 protected the categories that made headlines and 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 isn’t coming back, and a count pleading it is a liability

Minnesota flatly 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’s a description of a synthetic video. It isn’t a Minnesota cause of action.

Lake was explicit, and it decided the question rather than putting it off. 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’s 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’s the doorway, and it isn’t 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 anyone could 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 wouldn’t 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 fake video that shows a person doing something disreputable communicates a false factual assertion about him as surely as a sentence would. That’s a defamation claim, and it comes with defamation’s damages, which are far better than appropriation’s. It also comes with defamation’s whole apparatus of privileges, fault standards, and the anti-SLAPP statute that now sits on 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 in federal court than in Minnesota

If the fake 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’s 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 circuit’s formulation traces back through the Ninth Circuit’s decision in the Tom Waits voice-imitation case, and that’s no accident: sound-alike advertising is where this doctrine was built. A synthetic endorsement sits squarely within the language. The proof burden is real, though. 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, doesn’t get past 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’s no damages provision anywhere in the section. And the private-attorney-general route doesn’t fill the hole: § 8.31, subdivision 1, lists 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 got to the same place 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 doesn’t reach this.

So the Minnesota commercial claim is an injunction with a shot at fees. 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.

Look at what’s not on that list. There’s no general Minnesota right to demand that a platform remove a fake 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’s described in detail here. And the copyright takedown people reach for next isn’t 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 fake was built from a photo you took of yourself or a recording you made, you’re 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 so does the lever.

The fallback everyone asks about is intentional infliction of emotional distress, and it’s 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. Don’t plead it as filler.

The gap, in plain terms

Put everything above together and the hole is easy to see. Minnesota gives a person a real, well-funded claim if the fake is sexual. It gives a candidate and a depicted individual a narrow injunction if the fake 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 fake video made to humiliate you, the cloned voice used against your parents, the synthetic clip that circulates in your industry until you can’t 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 open question whether “likeness” includes a voice, and a live preemption defense if the fake was built from someone else’s copyrighted footage. That’s thin. The amendment the Legislature passed in May is genuinely useful on the criminal side, and it didn’t thicken the civil side by a word.

Here’s what I’d plead today for a client whose voice or face was faked, 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’s 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 to make a convincing fake of a person is now ordinary. The civil law this state has to answer it is one undeveloped tort and three statutory keyholes. That’s a problem for the Legislature, not for litigation, and until it gets fixed, the plain 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, 319, 226 N.W.2d 921 (1975) (“Minnesota has never recognized, either by legislative or court action, a cause of action for invasion of privacy, even though many other states have done so”; cited at 303 Minn. 319 in both Lake and the Ventura dissent). 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: Caselaw Access Project archive, static.case.law. 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 (no civil action 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 effective dates: August 1, and July 1 for an act having appropriation items); § 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), Revisor’s session law text, 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, Revisor’s court rules text, 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.