Sam Cole (2:59)

At first, Taylor can't actually grasp what she's seeing. Her brain tries to file it under Internet weirdness.

Taylor Klein (3:07)

My first thought was like, okay, maybe this is some spam, like some bot created this, like a person didn't do this. And then as we started looking at like the profiles, because there were multiple of them, they just seemed so specific to me that it became clear that a person was actually behind this.

Sam Cole (3:29)

What Taylor means by specific is that whoever had posted these videos had also shared details about her. They'd posted her name, her real one, the name of her school, even her hometown.

Taylor Klein (3:43)

It really started to hit of like, no, this is like real. Who did this?

Sam Cole (3:51)

A disturbing trend on social media struck one of the world's biggest stars this week.

Taylor Klein (3:57)

Fake explicit images of Taylor Swift have flooded social media.

Adam Dodge (4:01)

Sexually suggestive ads appearing to show celebrities like Emma Watson and Scarlett Johansson, even though the images of the stars are completely fake.

Sam Cole (4:13)

At first, deepfake porn was mostly of celebrities, people who live online or whose image is already out there. And that made it easy for some to shrug it off. Sure, deepfake porn wasn't great, but it was just one of the many landmines that came with being famous. But however flimsy you might find that reasoning, it's also no longer true.

Taylor Klein (4:36)

Teachers, social workers, nurses, moms, teenagers.

Narrator/Host (4:40)

It's a professor, it's a politician, it's

Taylor Klein (4:44)

the mayor of a small town in Denmark. There is no woman in the world who is safe from this technology.

Sam Cole (4:50)

And Taylor Klein, an engineering student living in Anywhere usa, was about to find out the only way to stop the person deep faking her was to hunt them down herself. I'm Sam Cole. This is understood. Deepfake Porn Empire Episode 2 so youo've Been Deepfaked. At this point, I've talked to dozens of people who've been the targets of non consensual deepfake porn. And there are certain things their experiences have in common. Discovery, violation, bewilderment, fear, rage. And a desire to act. To do something. For Taylor, that went like this.

Taylor Klein (5:37)

The first instinct is like, okay, well what are we supposed to do? Something has happened. Something without my consent has been posted online. What do I do? I guess I call the police and see what they can do. May 22, 2020 Police assignments recorded I got a message saying that there was

Sam Cole (6:01)

take pornographic videos with me online and

Taylor Klein (6:03)

I'm honestly not sure what to do. Yes. Do you know who might have done this? We have no idea. It's kind of iffy because it's not a crime that's, like, happening for this. I'm really not quite sure. Phone number. I don't know what I expected to happen. I think in my very sheltered, very privileged mind, I was expecting them to be like, yep, we'll handle it. We'll figure out who did this, and we will let you know when we do. And that got destroyed pretty quickly.

Sam Cole (6:41)

In the weeks that followed. As Taylor waited to hear from the police, she tried to go on as normal. But every time she passed the campus, saw friends, or even just lay in bed trying to fall asleep, the deepfakes kept circling in her mind.

Taylor Klein (6:56)

In those first couple of weeks, I was terrified. I mean, the first thing is, like, I had no idea who did this. I had no idea the motivation. But then also, like, I had no idea who had seen it. So, like, what do they think of it? Do they think that it's real? Do they want to, like, find me? Like, it's. There was a lot of unknowns and a lot of fear surrounding all of it.

Sam Cole (7:20)

Finally, Taylor got a phone call from the police.

Taylor Klein (7:23)

The detective was trying to. To discuss the case and, you know, was, like, asking if someone had put porn of me online. And I said, no, they just put my face on. On someone else's body. And he was having trouble understanding, like, what the problem was, and I had to, like, kind of walk him through it and explain, like, I did not consent to this. Then he made some weird comments of, like, I'm gonna have to, like, really examine this closely, and just made me feel real, real uncomfortable. Yeah, it was just a weird, weird conversation.

Sam Cole (8:01)

But then on top of the weirdness, the detective told her something else, something she was not expecting.

Taylor Klein (8:09)

He said, this is, like, basically, it's not good that it happened, but they had a right to do it. Like, it wasn't illegal.

Sam Cole (8:18)

What was your reaction to hearing him say that?

Taylor Klein (8:22)

It felt like a gut punch. When he told me that whoever did it had a right to do it. It kind of just. It made me feel very alone.

Sam Cole (8:35)

When I talk to people who aren't familiar with the world of deepfake porn, this is usually the thing that floors them. The legal void. When Taylor found out she'd been deep faked back in 2020, the laws were scattershot. In the US where she lives, only a handful of states had begun introducing any kind of recourse for targets. It wasn't until the spring of 2025 that Congress passed the Take It Down Act. The act makes it a crime to knowingly publish or threaten to publish intimate images, including AI generated deep fakes without consent. But the law has its problems, including issues with enforcement and potential overreach with real free speech concerns. Meanwhile, in the vast majority of places, including most of Europe and all of Canada, there was not then and is not yet a criminal law covering the non consensual creation and distribution of synthetic sexual images in Canada. At the end of 2025, Justice Minister Sean Frazier introduced the Protecting Victims Act. If it passes, it will make distributing non consensual sexual deepfakes a criminal offense as of early 2026. The bill is currently making its way through Parliament. But so far, targets of deepfake porn have mostly had to rely on a patchwork of other laws, so called revenge porn statutes, child sexual abuse laws, and occasionally civil and privacy torts. And so it was under those conditions that in 2020, Taylor went looking for legal help.

Taylor Klein (10:13)

Hi, Adam, I don't know if you have. Do you have a pseudonym that I should use or.

Adam Dodge (10:17)

So nice of you to ask. No, you can just call me Adam. It's fine.

Sam Cole (10:21)

Adam Dodge is a lawyer and the founder of ntab. It stands for End Technology Enabled Abuse. He spoke to Taylor in the documentary Another My AI Nightmare. You'll hear clips from the film throughout this episode.

Taylor Klein (10:34)

I called the state police and they basically told me, you know, we can't do anything for you. We're not going to do anything for you.

Adam Dodge (10:41)

I'm not surprised, but I'm sorry to hear that's happened. So, with respect to non consensual pornography laws, deepfakes typically don't fall within the parameters of those laws because it's not the victim's body. That's why we typically look for other ways. False impersonation or credible impersonation.

Sam Cole (11:02)

False impersonation. If Taylor could show that the person making deep fakes of her had pretended to be her multiple times, she could potentially go after them for that. And whoever deepfaked Taylor, they'd made one serious mistake. By using her real name and posting her school and hometown on the pornhub profiles, they'd made it look as if the profiles were hers, like she'd made them. But even then, the person deep faking Taylor could be nearly impossible to prosecute for a whole different reason. Okay, remember the streamer cutie Cinderella? When she was deepfaked in 2023, she made a threat.

Taylor Klein (11:47)

And the person that made that website. I'm going to fucking sue you. I promise you with every part of my soul, I'm going to fucking sue you?

Sam Cole (12:00)

When I talked to her a few days later, I asked her about that. You said in that video that you were planning to sue the guy. Are you still like planning to pursue that?

Julia (12:11)

I've talked to three lawyers and there's

Taylor Klein (12:14)

nothing to do really. We can't find a way to sue

Julia (12:19)

him because he is anonymous. So I guess there's no repercussions for the person who made it. And that is awesome.

Sam Cole (12:26)

Yeah, that's so bleak. Like there are laws against revenge porn and like non consensual pornography and there are laws in a couple states about deepfakes, but it's like they don't do anything unless you know who you're suing. A lot of these sites are like in other countries, you know, they're completely anonymous. People are hiding behind like layers of VPNs. What are you going to do? I don't know.

Julia (12:45)

It feels like swimming upstream with a harpoon. Rda, you.

Sam Cole (12:52)

Even if you go after them, the people making deepfake porn can be nearly impossible to find. And for QT as a celebrity, the possibilities of who could have done it were nearly endless. There was no way she could take on that hunt herself. But Taylor, as a private citizen, maybe she could. So at this point, you realize the cops are not going to help. I think a lot of people would just say, okay, well, you know, I guess that's a thing that's happening to me. But you took a totally different route. Did you kind of decide, like, this is now in my hands.

Taylor Klein (13:27)

I don't know if it was as much of like a, I'm going to find who did this. I think it was more of like a what else am I going to do, you know, like, I didn't have any other options, but I'm not just going to like sit here and take it. And then especially I think it was game changing. Finding Julia.

Adam Dodge (13:51)

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Taylor Klein (14:55)

Okay, so really all I have to say right now is. Holy. This is crazy.

Sam Cole (15:02)

It's the summer of 2020 when Taylor grabs her phone and hits record because something insane has happened.

Taylor Klein (15:08)

About 20 minutes ago, I found out that I know the other girl who this is happening to.

Sam Cole (15:16)

In a group chat, Taylor had told some of her friends about the deepfakes. And one of them was like, wait, you too? Because his girlfriend was also getting deep faked.

Taylor Klein (15:28)

That person was Julia. And I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute. It was like a full stop. It can't just be like a weird coincidence if the same thing is happening to me is happening to her. We both know who did this.

Sam Cole (15:40)

Julia is also a pseudonym. She and Taylor did their undergrads together. They lived on the same floor during first year, an engineering floor for people in similar majors.

Taylor Klein (15:51)

I was one of only a couple women who graduated in my class in electrical engineering to the like 50 to 100 men. Like, the gender breakdown wasn't even close. I lived with a bunch of guys and only guys in my suite my junior and senior year. So I had to kind of make myself be more okay with hearing lewd jokes that targeted women. I had to deal with a lot more of like not being taken seriously because I was a woman. So in that type of tech culture, having fallouts with men was not a super uncommon thing. So there were a couple of people that it that could have been.

Sam Cole (16:31)

Right away, Julia and Taylor started talking, comparing notes, and piecing together who could be behind the deep fakes.

Taylor Klein (16:39)

We knew with the nature of deepfakes and where the technology was at that time that it had to be someone who had the know how to create this and also someone who had the motivation to do this. So it really narrowed it down to like, okay, it has to be like one of three people.

Sam Cole (16:54)

Those people, Taylor calls them Bobby, Mike and Alex.

Taylor Klein (17:00)

First up, Bobby, who had been posting some really concerning content on Instagram. Just abnormal. So that was a little bit of

Sam Cole (17:10)

a red flag behind door number two, Mike.

Taylor Klein (17:14)

Mike was roommates with Julia's boyfriend and he wanted to move out from the dorm because Julia and her boyfriend were there all the time.

Sam Cole (17:25)

So that caused a bit of tension. And then there was number three Alex,

Taylor Klein (17:30)

who was very confrontational and very, like, aggressive.

Sam Cole (17:37)

Back when Taylor spoke to the lawyer Adam Dodge, he'd told her that if she was going to try to go after this guy, there was something she and now Julia would need to do.

Taylor Klein (17:48)

Basically, find as much evidence as we could, which involved going to the corners of the Internet that I never want to see again.

Sam Cole (17:58)

So she and Julia got on a call to go hunting for evidence.

Julia (18:04)

How are you? Am I rotated? Yeah, one second.

Taylor Klein (18:08)

Sorry.

Julia (18:08)

I have the rotator lock on. Okay. Yeah, there we go.

Sam Cole (18:13)

Taylor's first step was to grab screenshots of the pornhub profiles. And her boyfriend emailed the site and had those taken down. But the videos didn't originate on pornhub. Taylor's logic was simple. If she could figure out where they were coming from, then maybe she and Julia would be able to find clues about who was making them. So their next stop was 4chan.

Taylor Klein (18:35)

I don't know if Julia had seen 4chan before. I know I hadn't really. But Julia's boyfriend knew more about 4chan and was able to kind of point us in the right direction a little bit.

Julia (18:46)

Kevin, do you remember what the 4chan archive was that we used? It's just called 4chansearch.com.

Sam Cole (18:52)

4chan is a forum where people post short videos and images, plenty of it. Porn. So it seemed like a good place to start.

Julia (19:02)

What the fuck?

Taylor Klein (19:04)

So it looks like what this thread is, is people editing. Come onto people's faces.

Julia (19:12)

That's a new one.

Taylor Klein (19:15)

That's the thing with trying to do this type of stuff is, like, you come across stuff that you don't.

Julia (19:19)

Wait, I found it.

Taylor Klein (19:23)

Like the picture.

Julia (19:25)

Like the deep fake. Have you ever heard Mike or Bobby use the word chicken? No.

Taylor Klein (19:36)

Never take screenshots of that. Okay.

Sam Cole (19:40)

And it's as they're searching 4chan, finding deepfakes of themselves, that Taylor and Julia found something else entirely.

Taylor Klein (19:49)

Wait, I. I know her. Yeah, I know her.

Julia (19:53)

Who?

Taylor Klein (19:54)

She went to our school. And that's where we found our images and also other images of women we knew.

Julia (20:00)

I found Vanessa. Where? Here, let me share my screen.

Taylor Klein (20:03)

Where's Vanessa?

Julia (20:05)

Okay, see, look at this is definitely her.

Taylor Klein (20:07)

That's for sure. Vanessa.

Julia (20:09)

And there's Nina. Oh, God.

Sam Cole (20:12)

Which one?

Julia (20:12)

Wait, there's a second one of Nina further down. There's three pictures of Nina. This one's Nina, too.

Sam Cole (20:20)

Whoever had done this wasn't just targeting Taylor and Julia. They were going to systematically after women from their engineering school.

Taylor Klein (20:31)

What was going through my head at that moment was Just like, this is so much bigger than I expected. There are so many more people involved than I ever thought would be. At first I thought it was just me that this had happened to. And I really only felt that fear for myself. And then just understanding the real scope of it and really how whoever did this viewed women, I think just fueled that anger for all of the women involved who we also had to to let know that this happened to.

Sam Cole (21:06)

When I talk to deepfake targets, they describe this particular terror that comes with finding out about the deepfakes through someone else. Because it means that while they're finding out that this has happened to them, they are simultaneously discovering that other people have already seen the videos. Maybe lots of people have seen them. Taylor is one of the few people I know who has been on both sides of this.

Taylor Klein (21:31)

I know how I felt in the moment when I found out that I had been deep faked. I just felt so violated and horrible. And I. I to know that I had to. That Julia and I had to tell these women that this happened to them. I just wanted to handle it in as sensitive of a way as possible.

Sam Cole (21:51)

So they decided to start a group chat, almost a support group. And Taylor and Julia sent a message.

Taylor Klein (21:57)

Hey, I understand this is really strange that you're even getting this message. And you know, we. This is not pleasant. We don't want to have to be like, sending you this, but we want you to know, like, what happened. I think as soon as we told them, we tried to just like say, we have this information. Please let us know if you want this information.

Sam Cole (22:17)

And this was the information they had that the deepfakes existed, that whoever was behind them was almost certainly someone they'd all gone to school with. And a username.

Taylor Klein (22:31)

We saw the username K Relish.

Julia (22:36)

So possible that this Krelish is his username because it seems like he's posting like most of these pictures.

Sam Cole (22:44)

K Relish had been posting deepfakes all over. And when they narrowed down their search to just his posts, Taylor found what she needed. A clue in a familiar face.

Taylor Klein (22:56)

Oh, my God. That's Sadie. That's Sadie. That's. That's the. That's Mike's friend.

Julia (23:00)

Where, where, where?

Sam Cole (23:01)

Go.

Taylor Klein (23:02)

It's Krell. Go, Go down about halfway down the page. That's her. That is.

Julia (23:06)

That's her. Can you like, put it.

Taylor Klein (23:09)

And that's her again.

Julia (23:11)

It's definitely him. Then there's no way.

Taylor Klein (23:14)

Oh, my God. Sadie didn't go to our college. She went to high school with Mike and So that in our minds was like, okay, well, someone who has no connection to us other than Mike. That was the light bulb moment where we were confident that Mike was the person behind this.

Sam Cole (23:37)

Mike, Julia's boyfriend's old disgruntled roommate. So Taylor says that back when Mike got annoyed that Julia had been around too much, he'd started looking for a new place to live. And the person he moved in with.

Taylor Klein (23:51)

We start living together. And Mike and I are incredibly close.

Sam Cole (23:56)

Yeah, Taylor.

Taylor Klein (24:02)

Mike felt like an ally. Mike was someone who I felt like I could really trust. I felt very safe with him. I didn't feel like I had to keep as much of a wall with him. I felt like I could just be myself and just be goofy and innocent with him. He was always a really good friend.

Sam Cole (24:25)

But then things soured. Engineering school was hard. Taylor was feeling the strain, living away from home, the long hours, the brutal competition. And it seemed that Mike was having trouble too.

Taylor Klein (24:40)

He had struggled with some mental health issues previously, and I think he felt like I was someone that he could confide in. I was a friend that he could turn to for support. But I started providing support in a way that I no longer felt comfortable doing. It just felt like a bad situation.

Sam Cole (25:01)

Taylor encouraged Mike to see a professional. She told him that she was barely more than a kid, too. Told him she was struggling herself, that she didn't know how to help him. But Taylor says he kept coming to her.

Taylor Klein (25:15)

It got to a point where, like, I wasn't able to, like, get my work done. I wasn't able to do what I needed to do to take care of myself. Like, it totally became about him. He, like, he would knock on my door and, like, just sit there for a long time talking, and I didn't know how to handle the situation. And after expressing to him multiple times that I thought I was not the right person to talk to about this, I think I eventually just kind of lost it and kind of just, like, yelled at him in front of our friends. It was a really tense moment where I just lost my temper a little bit.

Sam Cole (25:53)

Some friendships might bounce back. People apologize, sort themselves out, move on. But not this one.

Taylor Klein (26:04)

We still had to see each other. But that friendship was over. Things were never the same after that.

Sam Cole (26:12)

But, like, did you ever imagine that this would be the response?

Julia (26:15)

Though?

Taylor Klein (26:17)

I would never have expected him to make deep faith porn of me. Even in my wildest anxieties, I could not have predicted that this would be the result. Frankly, I didn't think that he would betray someone at that level. I've thought about this a lot, and I think he thought this was justified. Maybe he felt like he had been wronged. But I have to believe that the reason that he actually went that route and violated all of us women so deeply is that he was unwell.

Sam Cole (26:52)

And this. This is something else I hear from Targets. It's almost a hope that the person who did this just wasn't. Well, they weren't in their right mind because the alternative explanation is so much more disturbing.

Taylor Klein (27:09)

And it's totally possible that he is just a monster. You know, that's the scary thing.

Sam Cole (27:17)

Taylor and Mike stopped living together after that year. She moved on. She'd assumed Mike had too.

Taylor Klein (27:25)

Finding the deep fakes and realizing there was a whole other side to a person that I thought I knew really well was incredibly difficult to cope with. I reached out to Sadie and let her know what we had found. She did not seem surprised. So that was kind of the final nail in the coffin that we were fairly certain that Mike did this. He's the only person that has the capability and the motivation to do this to all of these women. Like, there was just too much circumstantial evidence.

Sam Cole (28:00)

With her evidence, Taylor managed to get the state police to chase a false impersonation charge. But to prosecute, they needed more proof.

Taylor Klein (28:09)

They tried to figure out, like, is there, like, an IP address that they can track to this person? Unfortunately, they couldn't because Mike used a VPN every time he did anything. So they weren't able to, like, get definitive proof that it was him.

Sam Cole (28:25)

In the end, the police just went straight to him.

Taylor Klein (28:29)

They ended up just calling Mike to basically just, like, tell him what they think he did and what they had been up to. And basically, like, that they couldn't find any conclusive evidence that it was him, but that they were aware that this had happened and that if, you know, basically it can't happen again. They said that he never. He never admitted to making the deep fakes, but he also never denied doing it. And then at the end of the conversation, he thanked them for their handling of the situation. The police officer that I spoke to, he, like, thanked them, which seems pretty, pretty damning if you ask me. It felt violating all over again because I was like, oh, you're just telling me that he's getting away with it and that you basically had a conversation to acknowledge that he was getting away with it. And so that felt pretty icky.

Sam Cole (29:25)

And that was it. The police closed the case.

Taylor Klein (29:29)

I've never heard from Mike I haven't heard from Mike since. Nothing.

Sam Cole (29:33)

We reached out to him. We never heard back. In all of this, there was something else that Taylor found in her hunt. That user, K Relish, had been posting on 4chan, and he had been uploading to the Tube sites, Pornhub, XHamster. But he'd also been active somewhere else, just Googling.

Julia (30:00)

Krelish and I already have, like, stuff coming up.

Taylor Klein (30:02)

Yeah, it looks like he used to have a profile on something called MrDeepFakes.com

Sam Cole (30:09)

MrDeepFakes.com I had never seen a site

Taylor Klein (30:14)

that was so focused on deepfakes and in a really sick, gross way, felt like a community of deep fakes and people who wanted to create deep fakes. We found what looked like an instruction manual, complete with, like, graphs, and it looked super like a professional style report on how to create deepfakes. It was wild because it felt like we were like stumbling into, like, the inner workings of what he was doing, what seemed kind of like the center of all of it,

Sam Cole (30:52)

because that's exactly what it was. The site Taylor had just stumbled onto, MrDeepFakes.com was ground zero. A hub for users like Krelish to learn and teach others how to make non consensual deepfake porn of tens of thousands of women fakes that then spread all across the Internet. And four years later, on the other side of the world, a Danish reporter was going to start her own hunt. Not for one guy making deepfake porn, but for the person behind the biggest deepfake porn website in the world, Mr. Deepfakes himself.

Taylor Klein (31:35)

We saw this guy and we thought,

Narrator/Host (31:36)

this can't possibly be the guy.

Julia (31:38)

And it really gave me the creeps.

Adam Dodge (31:40)

This is some guy holed up somewhere in a basement. Maybe he works in a morg.

Julia (31:44)

We have to, like, turn and flip the spotlight. We have to put his face on the front page.

Sam Cole (31:51)

That's next time on Understood. Deepfake Porn Empire. Deepfake Porn Empire is written and produced by our showrunner, Acey Rowe, and me, your host, Sam Cole. In this episode, you heard archival tape from BBC Channel 4 News, NBC News. And a huge thank you to filmmakers Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlin, who put us in touch with Taylor. The archival tape, you heard of Taylor in this episode, including her conversations with Julia, came from their documentary film Another My AI Nightmare. The show is produced by Arman Agbali. Our sound designer is Julian Uzieli. Veronica Simmons is our story editor, and our executive producer is Nick McKay. Blokos. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to check out earlier seasons of understood. Season 5 was hosted by my friend Cory Doctorow. It tells the story of how decades of international policy failures took the Internet from a futuristic wonderland to what he now calls the Enshiternet. He explores how it happened and whose fault it is on Understood Season five. Who broke the Internet? You can listen to that wherever you're listening to me now. Just scroll back in your Understood feed and make sure to follow us while you're at it.

Adam Dodge (33:26)

For more cbc podcasts, go to cbc ca podcasts.