The moral panic following Raffaella Spone’s ‘deepfake’ video spread around the world. She talks for the first time about being the centre of a story in which nothing was as it seemed …

Madi Hime is taking a deep drag on a blue vape in the video, her eyes shut, her face flushed with pleasure. The 16-year-old exhales with her head thrown back, collapsing into laughter that causes smoke to billow out of her mouth. The clip is grainy and shaky – as if shot in low light by someone who had zoomed in on Madi’s face – but it was damning. Madi was a cheerleader with the Victory Vipers, a highly competitive “all-star” squad based in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The Vipers had a strict code of conduct; being caught partying and vaping could have got her thrown out of the team. And in July 2020, an anonymous person sent the incriminating video directly to Madi’s coaches.

Eight months later, that footage was the subject of a police news conference. “The police reviewed the video and other photographic images and found them to be what we now know to be called deepfakes,” district attorney Matt Weintraub told the assembled journalists at the Bucks County courthouse on 15 March 2021. Someone was deploying cutting-edge technology to tarnish a teenage cheerleader’s reputation.

But a little over a year later, when Spone finally appeared in court to face the charges against her, she was told the cyberharassment element of the case had been dropped. The police were no longer alleging that she had digitally manipulated anything. Someone had been crying deepfake. A story that generated thousands of headlines around the world was based on teenage lies, after all. When the truth finally came out, it was barely reported – but the videos and images were real.

  • ShepherdPie
    11·
    7 months ago

    The vaping video was just one of many disturbing communications brought to the attention of Hilltown Township police department, Weintraub said. Madi had been receiving messages telling her she should kill herself. Her mother, Jennifer Hime, had told officers someone had been taking images from Madi’s social media and manipulating them “to make her appear to be drinking”. A photograph of Madi in swimwear had been altered: “Her bathing suit was edited out.”

    Madi wasn’t the only member of the Victory Vipers cheer team to have been victimised. In August 2020, Sherri Ratel had been sent anonymous texts accusing her teenage daughter, Kayla, of drinking and smoking pot. Noelle Nero had been sent images of her 17-year-old daughter in a bikini with captions about “toxic traits, revenge, dating boys and smoking”. These, too, were “all altered and shown as deepfakes”, Weintraub added.

    The anonymous sender had used “spoofing” software to disguise their identity behind an unknown number. The police had managed to trace it to the IP address of Raffaella Spone, a 50-year-old woman with no previous criminal record.

    That’s some heinous shit. I don’t see why anyone has any sympathy for this woman regardless of police incompetence.

    • fiercekitten@lemm.eeEnglish
      3·
      7 months ago

      Because the only thing Spone was convicted of was sending five texts. Apparently the texts weren’t threatening, they were sent to the moms so they would be aware of what their daughters were doing. We don’t even know if the intent of sending the texts was malicious or of concern. Spone didn’t create a deepfake video; the video was real.

      The kids receiving death threats is horrible, but who shared the video or texts outside of the group of kids and moms? Who put it online? The kids lied about what happened over and over again. The girls may not have meant to, but they and the police ruined Spone’s life.

      Unless I am misunderstanding something from the article?

      • ShepherdPie
        1·
        7 months ago

        Spone may not manipulate videos and images, but she definitely collects them. Still, she says she never sent them. “The charges were that she directly sent messages to the minors,” Birch adds. “That never happened. That’s the point.”

        But did she send messages to the gym and the parents? There is a long pause. “No,” Spone eventually says.

        I’m surprised to hear her say this, given Birch told the Washington Post Spone messaged the parents out of concern for what their daughters had put online. When I point this out, there’s another long pause. “If I said that, I said it,” Birch says, with a shrug. “It is what it is.”

        It sounds like this woman isn’t very truthful either. It seems like one of those cases where everyone involved is a shitty person.