I was deepfaked in porn videos having sex with various men

Release time：2024-05-21 15:24:14 Source：International Insights news portal

A woman has revealed how she 'genuinely wanted to be dead' after finding deepfake porn videos of of her having sex with various men online - only to discover they had been shared by her best friend. 

The woman in her mid-20s, from Cambridgeshire, who is going by the pseudonym Jodie, spoke about her traumatic ordeal, to BBC Sounds' File on 4, revealing how it started in 2019 with fake dating profiles and progressed to deepfake porn videos. 

In 2021, Jodie, who was a teenager at the time, was sent a link to a porn website from an anonymous email account, which led her to explicit images and a video of what appeared to be her.

Her face had been digitally added onto another woman's body - known as a 'deepfake'.

Initially dismissed by the police, she turned detective herself and eventually discovered the person responsible was one of her best friends Cambridge University student Alexander Woolf, then 26 - who was the 2012 winner of the BBC's Young Composer of the Year.

She figured out the person next to her in the picture, who had been cropped out, was her best friend Alex Woolf and he was the only other person who had this snap

Woolf had a double first in music from Cambridge University and won BBC Young Composer of the Year 2012, he also appeared on Mastermind in 2021 (pictured in 2018)

A woman in her mid-20s, from Cambridgeshire, who is going by the pseudonym Jodie, revealed on BBC Sounds File on 4 that her best friend deepfaked porn videos of her having sex with various men online

He came to know many of his victims whilst he was a student at the university and although he was not employed as a teacher, he supervised some students on an occasional basis at one college at the Faculty of Music.

Jodie's ordeal began in 2019 when she discovered that her name and photos were being used on dating apps without her consent. 

She said: 'When I had first gone to sixth form college people had started messaging me on Facebook Instagram and saying people had been using my social media photos on dating apps.

'I thought it's a risk that people take when they use social media and sometimes they had my real name. Sometimes it was other people's names but it always had my location my real age.

'The more that it happened the more I felt that this person did actually know who I was. I think that's probably the first time that I felt a bit concerned about who was doing this.'

In May 2020, during the UK's lockdown, Jodie was first alerted by a friend to a number of Twitter accounts that were posting pictures of her, with captions implying she was a sex worker. 

Snaps, which were taken from her private social media account, where posted on Twitter by handles such as 'slut exposer' and 'chief perv.' 

One caption next to an image of Jodie in a bikini, which her mother took while they were on holiday, read: 'What would you like to do with little teen Jodie?'

She said: 'A lot of the captions were comparing the front of my body, the back of my body. I'm going through a lot of these accounts and I'm also finding countless images of other people that I know.'

File on 4 approached Woolf for a statement and he said there are 'no excuses for what I did nor can I adequately explain why I acted on these impulses so despicably at that time'

Jodie began to contact the other women in the pictures to warn them and together they discovered even more Twitter accounts posting their images.  

She said: 'I thought that was as bad as it could ever get, I didn't know that it was going to get so much worse.'

A few months later it only appeared to get worse after an anonymous emailer got in touch with Jodie to share a worrying Reddit post. 

The email read: 'Sorry to remain anonymous, but I saw this guy was posting pics of you on creepy subreddits. I know this must be really scary.'

A user had posted photos of Jodie and two of her friends, numbering them one, two and three and inviting others to take part in a game: 'Which of these women would you have sex with, marry or kill.'

Six weeks later, the same emailer got in touch again but this time about the deepfakes he found online. 

She recalled: 'My whole body was hot and I just let out a scream because I knew that  this could genuinely ruin my life and I was screaming and crying, violently scrolling through my phone and I realised what it was and it was just someone having sex with me. In that moment I genuinely wanted to be dead.' 

The images and a video appeared to show Jodie having sex with various men in explicit positions.

However, when she saw the one of the deepfake porn photos, she recognised the original image of herself standing in front of King's College, Cambridge.

Jodie remembered it being taken, but it wasn't posted on her social media account. 

She figured out the person next to her in the picture, who had been cropped out, was her best friend Alex Woolf and he was the only other person who had this snap.  

She said: 'I know instantly who it is, I knew that it had been cropped and that the person who was cropped out was my best friend Alex. 

In 2021, Jodie, who was just a teenager at the time, was sent a link to a porn website from an anonymous email account on the site she found explicit images and a video of what appeared to be her

In August 2021, Woolf, 26, was convicted of taking images of 15 women, including Jodie, from social media and uploading them to pornographic websites

The composer was given a 20-week prison sentence, suspended for two years and ordered to pay each of his victims £100 in compensation

'I just felt my whole world fall away from me just the most enormous sense of betrayal and humiliation. I just felt like my whole life was over because if he could do this to me, someone who I loved, who I thought loved me too.

'I just thought anyone could do this to me, I relived every conversation that we had where he had comforted me, supported me, been kind to me, and I just knew that it was all a lie, and he knew the impact that it was having on my life so profoundly and yet he still did it.' 

In August 2021, Woolf, 26, was convicted of taking images of 15 women, including Jodie, from social media and uploading them to pornographic websites.

He was given a 20-week prison sentence, suspended for two years and ordered to pay each of his victims £100 in compensation.

Woolf had a double first in music from Cambridge University and won BBC Young Composer of the Year 2012, he also appeared on Mastermind in 2021. 

File on 4 approached Woolf for a statement, which read: 'There are no excuses for what I did nor can I adequately explain why I acted on these impulses so despicably at that time.

'Please know that I write with a deep and enduring feeling of shame and remorse for my actions and their consequences, I am truly sincerely sorry.'

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