Fighting for Justice

By Robyn Ross, Photo by Serena Bolton Photography

By the time Reena and Sandeep Mander called their local adoption agency in 2016, the British couple had gone through several unsuccessful rounds of fertility treatment. But a staff member turned them away. The agency, the social worker told them, had primarily white children waiting for adoption and preferred to place them with white parents instead of the Manders, who are of Indian descent.

Suspecting they had been discriminated against, the Manders sued the agency and the regional government council that oversaw it. Their legal team at London-based McAllister Olivarius included Honza Cervenka ’13, who had interned at the firm before coming to Macalester and returned after graduation. In 2019, the Manders triumphed: a judge awarded damages that included the expenses the couple had incurred to adopt a child from the United States. Adoption agencies across the United Kingdom took note and refined their own practices. 

For Cervenka, this was the best possible result: the party he represented won, and the victory prompted the transformation of a larger system. 

“Some of the most satisfying outcomes in my work have been using litigation on behalf of one or two clients to effect broader change,” he says. 

Now a senior associate at McAllister Olivarius, Cervenka has created change by fighting for victims of workplace discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual abuse, in both the United Kingdom and the United States. 

Cervenka grew up in Ostrava, Czech Republic, a former mining and industrial center near the country’s border with Poland. For his last two years of high school, he attended United World College of the Adriatic in Italy, where the experience of living and studying with an international student population prompted him to consider the United States for college. One day, a poster on the wall caught his attention: Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan ’61, it said, was an alumnus of Macalester College. Cervenka was impressed by this endorsement and decided Mac was a good fit because of its liberal arts curriculum and urban location.

At Mac, he majored in international studies and music, taking multiple courses with professors Nadya Nedelsky and Mark Mazullo. He sang with the concert choir, completed a conducting honors project, and even considered conducting as a career. Cervenka also interned in St. Paul with Jeff Anderson and Associates, a law firm that specializes in child sex abuse cases, particularly those involving clergy. He came to understand the complexity of the investigative work as well as how meaningful it could be to hold institutions accountable. After graduation, he returned to McAllister Olivarius as a paralegal and earned his degree from the University of Law.

One area of his legal practice is image-based sexual abuse, the release of a person’s intimate photos without consent. Although such abuse has been called “revenge pornography,” Cervenka says that term is misleading: “revenge” implies that the victim did something to merit retribution, and “pornography” suggests the images were created for public consumption. The person who leaks the photos may be a former partner, to whom the victim sent the pictures, or a stranger who hacks an account. The perpetrator might send them to the victim’s friends and coworkers or post them to a pornography website. These days, perpetrators can use artificial intelligence to create deceptively realistic digital forgeries using only a person’s headshot and an AI-generated body. 

The abuse causes grave personal and professional harm. “The effects of this crime are lifelong and debilitating, in some instances,” Cervenka says. “It’s such a fundamental betrayal of trust.” The challenge is compounded because, even if the images are removed from one website, they can continue to surface elsewhere. A 2019 study suggested one in twelve US adults has been a victim.

Cervenka quickly realized the limitations of the law around image-based sexual abuse. Criminal law generally classifies the abuse as a misdemeanor, and websites have immunity from civil liability for third-party content. Laws about the crime vary across state and national borders, making it difficult to pursue a perpetrator in a different jurisdiction. Sometimes the victim doesn’t even know who leaked the images. 

“We should all be a lot more worried that a frighteningly easy way to completely ruin someone’s life is, for the most part, practically impossible to get justice for,” he says. 

Even when true justice is elusive, Cervenka works to get the images removed from the internet. Sometimes the most effective approach has been leveraging copyright law. When a victim took the photos themself, they own the copyright and have legal grounds to demand their removal from pornography websites.

Cervenka says the European Union and Australia have made the greatest strides toward combating the crime. He has advocated for legislative change in the UK, such as holding websites responsible for harmful content posted to them. And he urges reconsideration of the attitudes toward sexual expression that lead to shaming and blaming of the victims, who are usually women. “There’s still so much stigma associated with being a victim of this crime,” he says.

In the meantime, he continues to represent people who have been violated or discriminated against by an institution that current law can hold accountable.

“I like representing the Davids rather than the Goliaths,” he says. “I take a lot of satisfaction from taking on the fight of others and saying, ‘What happened to you was awful. It’s illegal. Let’s see what we can get you in terms of a sense of justice.’”  

Robyn Ross is a writer in Austin, Texas.