I’m haunted after finding deepfake pornography of myself, says TV presenter Cathy Newman
TV presenter Cathy Newman says she is haunted by finding deepfake pornography of herself.
An investigation by her Channel 4 News found 250 British stars had faces or bodies superimposed on X-rated images.
Cathy, 50, was shown a digitally manipulated clip of herself and said: “I decided to be my own case study.
“I hadn’t seen it before we started filming and thought, ‘Well, we cover gruesome stories — it will be water off a duck’s back’.
“But I found myself keeping on returning to the images.
“It was haunting.
“The worst thing is not knowing who created this, and why.”
Ex-Love Islander Cally Jane Beech, 33, said she called police over a faked image but was told there was little they could do.
She said: “I was just contacted out of the blue and someone said ‘There’s an explicit image of you’, and I said ‘Well, that can’t be true’, because I knew I hadn’t taken anything like that.
“And they said ‘It’s on Google’, so I asked them to send me the link so I could have a look, opened it and, to my surprise, there was there an image of me.
“I knew it wasn’t real because I had the original photo and it was for an underwear campaign – but the underwear wasn’t there.”
A new law aims to target the creators and sharers of deepfakes.