Her face was deepfaked onto porn. When police wouldn't help, she did her own investigation

When 22-year-old Taylor got a Facebook message from a friend with a link, she clicked. 

She couldn't believe what she saw: her own face staring back at her in a hard-core porn video. 

Taylor had been deepfaked, her face digitally pasted onto someone else's body. Her likeness appeared in several videos that had been posted using a Pornhub profile impersonating her with her real name, college and hometown. 

In the documentary Another Body, Taylor (whose name and face have been changed to protect her identity) takes viewers on her search to uncover who created and posted the videos. 

As she investigates, she makes an astonishing discovery: she's not the only student from her college who's been targeted with deepfake porn. And she soon realizes that no one is safe from this growing threat — celebrities, politicians, classmates, colleagues and friends are all at risk.

"I want to find out who did this because I want to know why," she says in the film. "I want to know what was going through their head when they decided to do this."

Most jurisdictions lack deepfake laws

After Taylor discovers the videos online, she calls the police, who struggle to understand what had happened. Initially, the detective assigned to the case thinks someone has put real pornographic videos of Taylor online.

"I was like, 'No, someone put my face on porn online,'" Taylor says. "[The officer] seemed really confused as to why that's wrong.… He asked, 'What have you done to cause someone to do this to you?'…

"After a couple weeks, I had called him again, and he said that it's disgusting what happened, but the person had a right to do it. Like, they didn't break any laws, so they had a right to do that."

They didn't break any laws, so they had a right to do that.

Taylor reaches out to lawyer Adam Dodge, founder of EndTAB (Ending Tech-Enabled Abuse). He explains that there are no laws that address deepfakes in Taylor's state, and no federal laws in the U.S. "I trained 500 judges last year on deepfakes, and I would say in excess of 90 per cent of them had never heard of a deepfake before," he says.

Deepfakes typically don't fall within the parameters of non-consensual pornography laws because it's not the victim's body. 

So lawyers and advocates look for other ways to prosecute, such as false personation. However, since people can easily remain anonymous online, it's often difficult to catch the people behind deepfakes. 

"Usually the investigations I see where they are able to catch somebody, there's, like, a second where they didn't have their VPN on. And that is the tiny hole in that anonymous shield that [the authorities] are able to get through … and prove who that person is."

Taylor was not the only one

As Taylor digs deeper, she discovers that Julia (also a pseudonym), another student from her college, has also been targeted. 

They figure the culprit must be someone they both know. The two women have dealt with misogyny and harassment in their male-dominated engineering program before, and determined to uncover who's behind the videos, they take the investigation into their own hands. They dive headfirst into the underground world of deepfake technology and discover a society of men terrorizing women. 

As Taylor and Julia whittle down their list of suspects to two — people they know and who would understand deepfake technology — they discover that at least four more women in their circle have been targeted by the same person.

"The fact that the group of women is this big, it scares me because I have a gut feeling that we haven't even found all of them," Taylor says.

Only one person links all of these women: Mike, a former close friend, whose obsessive demands for their attention turned sinister. It turns out Mike's deepfake accounts get millions of views.

But he's protected by the anonymity of the internet. 

"I think it's disgusting that he's not going to face any repercussions," Julia says. "His future female co-workers and female friends have no idea that he's done this. And I think that's really dangerous for the people around him." 

Taylor also learns that Mike created 28 deepfake porn videos of YouTuber Gibi, with over 500,000 views, and she shares this with Gibi in a video call. "I know so many people personally that this has happened to, but it's not being talked about for fear of safety, for fear of embarrassment, for fear of, you know, being misunderstood," Gibi says. "So I think I'm very tired of ignoring it."

In November 2022, Gibi spoke out about deepfakes in a YouTube video. "Today, I need to talk about something uncomfortable," she said. "There is a lot of porn of me on the internet.… My face has been digitally plastered countless times over other people's naked bodies to create sex content that I never consented to.… It has felt hopeless and honestly unsafe to ever speak out. However, I am relieved to finally be talking about this, with some support." 

Hundreds of thousands of videos, and countless woman affected

After her experience, Taylor gave anonymous testimony during a White House meeting about deepfakes and how to change the laws around them. 

In her video testimony, she said, "What I want you to understand about deepfakes is that there are [countless] women being affected by this right now.

"You may not be able to see them, but the impacts are very real and very serious."

Watch Another Body on CBC Gem.