Deepfake Porn Empire | E4: The Fake Porn Pharmacist

Summary

---

Understood: Deepfake Porn Empire

Episode 4: The Fake Porn Pharmacist

Host: Sam Cole / CBC
Date: March 10, 2026

---

Episode Overview

In the gripping final episode of Deepfake Porn Empire, host Sam Cole and a team of global investigative reporters close in on the Canadian kingpin behind the world’s most notorious deepfake porn site, MrDeepFakes.com. The episode tracks their high-stakes efforts to confront and identify “David Doe” both online and in real life, explores the impact of their reporting—including the shutdown of the website and consequences for Doe—and dives deep into emerging laws and global debates around nonconsensual synthetic pornography. This episode pushes listeners to consider the personal and societal costs of deepfake porn, the loopholes of current law, and what meaningful accountability could look like in the age of AI-fueled exploitation.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. From Virtual to Real: Tracking Down Mr. Deepfakes

• International Collaboration: The investigation began in Europe with Ida Herskind, Zachariah Hamid, and Ross Higgins of Bellingcat, who amassed extensive digital evidence linking “David Doe” to MrDeepFakes.com but could not confront him in person (01:23).
• CBC’s Involvement: Bellingcat reaches out to Eric Seto and the CBC investigation unit in Canada, handing over the baton to continue the chase on the ground in Toronto (02:59).
• Balancing Diligence & Caution: Eric describes his approach:

  “How do we kill a story? Just being a devil’s advocate, trying to find a reason why this isn’t a story.” (02:25)

2. The Confrontation

• Initial Outreach: CBC emails Doe at multiple addresses; read receipts show he opens messages but never replies (04:36).
• Direct Approach at Work: Unable to get a response by email, Eric attempts to hand-deliver a letter to Doe at his hospital pharmacy workplace, navigating physical and ethical challenges (05:32).
• First Encounter Description:

  “I was surprised at how kind of meek he was and truly not who you would expect to be the architect of the biggest deepfakes porn site in the world.” – Eric Seto (08:34)

3. Doe Disappears, the Site Goes Dark

• Doe Goes Off-Grid: Immediately after the confrontation, Doe and his family remove themselves from all social media (08:46).

• Stakeout Attempts: CBC engineers a classic stakeout but finds Doe has left; later, they trace him renting a house in Lisbon, Portugal via his Airbnb activity (11:01).

• Shutdown Notice:

  “On May 4, 2025, just weeks after Eric confronted David Doe in person, MrDeepFakes.com went dark.” (11:50) “A critical service provider has terminated service permanently. Data loss has made it impossible to continue operation.” (12:09)

• Emotional Impact of the Shutdown:

  “Of all the stories that I’ve done, of all the investigations I’ve done, I never experienced something where this had been a direct result impact like this.” – Sam Cole (12:52)
  “Having this platform being shut down was the greatest feeling ever.” – Ida Herskind (13:04)

4. Seeking Accountability

• Publishing the Story: With MrDeepFakes down, the team moves quickly to publish so Doe can’t disappear (13:32).
• Climactic Confrontation: After confirming Doe’s return to Toronto, Eric and the team pull off a tense early morning confrontation caught on camera. Doe refuses to speak:

  “All he wanted to say was, ‘I don’t want to be filmed.’... Isn’t that beautifully ironic?” – Ross Higgins (20:38)

5. Real Consequences

• Immediate Fallout:
  • Doe is fired from his pharmacist job, is under investigation by the College of Pharmacists (regulatory body), and faces calls for extradition by politicians in Denmark and the Netherlands (21:22).
  • However, as explained, in Canada, “it’s not illegal to create or share deep fake pornography” (22:06).

6. The Law’s Catch-Up—Canada and US Reactions

• Canadian Efforts (Bill C16):

  • New legislation is proposed to make nonconsensual sexual deepfakes a crime, with sentences up to 10 years (23:12).
  • Law Professor Susie Dunn critiques and contextualizes the scope and legal ambiguity:

    “The challenge is, is there’s not a lot of laws to compare it to... The government might have to circle back and change the language.” (24:03)

• US Take It Down Act (25:14—28:18):

  • Two-pronged: makes NCII criminal and creates a takedown system for victims.
  • Criticized by EFF’s Aaron Mackey for a sweeping takedown provision that risks abuse:

    “It may not actually help vindicate victims... but could also be used as a censorship regime.” (27:21)
    “Its broad terms can be used to take down a whole bunch of speech that isn’t NCII.” (27:59)

7. Who Is Left Out?

• Porn Workers’ Rights:

  “This is also a crime against the porn workers bodies... The biggest keyword here is consent.” – Ida Herskind (29:03)

• Victims’ Perspective:

  “That’s their property, that’s their work. So that’s money that’s being stolen from them and it’s my consent that’s being stolen from me. There’s no winners here.” – Taylor Klein (29:26)

8. The Uncertain Future

• Unclear Legal Outcomes:

  • Bill C16 remains in process.
  • No certainty Doe will ever face criminal consequences since his actions predated any relevant law.
  • When finally quoted (anonymously) in a prior interview:

    “Part of me is in denial about the impact... If laws come out and the laws are fair and right, we will follow the law.” – David Doe (impersonated, 31:09)

• Deepfake Porn’s Hydra Problem:

  “I don’t think anything can eliminate this problem entirely. It’s a Pandora’s box.” – Ross Higgins (32:11)

• AI Accessibility Threat:

  • Deepfake tools are now widespread and embedded in mainstream platforms (ex: X’s Grok bot, under UK investigation) (32:43).

• Victims’ Resilience:

  “Being able to show that we’re not just gonna let this happen to people goes deeper than just getting Mr. Deepfakes taken down... I think it shows that we as like society don’t think this is okay.” – Taylor Klein (33:44)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “How do we kill a story? Just being a devil’s advocate... could there be a gap in the research the Europeans had sent him? Could there be a different David Doe? Did all of this really actually line up?”
  — Eric Seto (02:25)

• “I was surprised at how kind of meek he was...”
  — Eric Seto, on first meeting David Doe (08:34)

• “All he wanted to say was, I don’t want to be filmed... Isn’t that beautifully ironic?”
  — Ross Higgins (20:38)

• “Of all the stories that I’ve done... I never experienced something where this had been a direct result impact like this.”
  — Sam Cole (12:52)

---

Important Timestamps & Segments

• 01:02–02:59 — Hand-off from Bellingcat to CBC; beginning of on-the-ground chase.
• 04:36–05:32 — Multiple email attempts; decision to visit Doe at his hospital workplace.
• 08:34–08:56 — First real-world confrontation with Doe.
• 10:31–11:01 — Discovering Doe is in Portugal; site’s sudden shutdown.
• 13:32–13:56 — Decision to publish and name Doe after site goes offline.
• 16:15–19:09 — Final, climactic garage confrontation.
• 21:22–22:06 — Real-world fallout: firing, investigation, but legal loophole in Canada.
• 23:12–24:35 — Explaining Bill C16 and its limitations.
• 25:14–28:18 — US Take It Down Act: pros, cons, and critiques.
• 29:03–29:41 — Who is not protected by new laws: porn workers and broader consent issues.
• 32:11–33:44 — “Pandora’s box”: why this fight is just beginning.

---

Tone & Language

The episode is a tense, human-centered investigation, combining methodical journalism with empathy for victims and measured hope for change. Speakers avoid sensationalism, instead emphasizing the psychological impact, the limitations of law, and the tenacity required to seek accountability in a world of rapidly evolving harm.

---

Conclusion

This landmark episode demonstrates the power—and the limits—of investigative journalism in the fight against technologically enabled abuse. While MrDeepFakes.com falls and its Canadian architect is exposed, the deepfake threat mutates and persists, challenging lawmakers and society to keep pace with the digital frontier. The story ends not with triumph, but with a call to vigilance, solidarity, and reform.

---

Transcript

[Sam Cole]

Close your eyes. Focus. Listen to work getting done with Monday dot com. Relax as AI does the manual work while your teams are aligned on a single source of truth. Feel the sensation of an AI work platform. So flexible and intuitive, it feels like it was built just for you. Notice you're limitless. Limitless, limitless. Now open your eyes. Go to Monday.com start for free. And finally, breathe. This is a CBC podcast. I didn't actually know that much about Mr. Deepfakes. I hadn't heard about the site before.

[Eric Seto]

This is Eric Seto. Eric is a senior reporter with the CBC's Visual Investigations Unit. That's how Ross Higgins at Bellingcat knew him.

[Ross Higgins]

We had a previous relationship with CBC and kind of absurdly, I said to my editor, do you think they'd be interested in this? Of course they're going to be interested.

[Sam Cole]

Bellingcat emailed us about a story they'd working on. It was an international collaboration about basically the most notorious deepfake porn site of the world. When they brought it to us, even just the initial email and we looked at the website, I was actually like, this is crazy.

[Eric Seto]

By this point, Ida Herskind, Zachariah, Hamid and Ross had done everything they could from behind computer screens in Europe. They had usernames, passwords, IP addresses, all of it. A pile of evidence that the person behind MrDeepFakes.com was David Doe. What they couldn't do was go and knock on his front door.

[Ida Herskind]

We were all sitting here in Europe and none of us could go to Canada and confront him.

[Eric Seto]

But Eric, based in Toronto, he could.

[Sam Cole]

They wanted help tracking David Dodo and wanted help getting answers and really getting a sense of why he did it, whether he feels remorse, whether he has anything to say to the victims that are on the website. So these are the things that they were asking us to do

[Eric Seto]

before signing on. Eric had to check things out himself. He's an investigative reporter, right? This story might have been crazy, but this was not the first time crazy things have landed in his inbox. And he has an opening question for when they do.

[Sam Cole]

How do we kill a story? Just being a devil's advocate, trying to find a reason why this isn't a

[Eric Seto]

story, Eric started doing his own digging. Could there be a gap in the research the Europeans had sent him? Could there be a different David Doe? Did all of this really actually line up?

[Sam Cole]

And there were so many links, like, it was so vast that for all the attempts of us going, okay, why is this not a story? It all always came back to David Doe.

[Eric Seto]

In Ontario, Eric and the CBC team write back, we're in.

[Sam Cole]

Just think of it as them handing us a baton and saying, this is the hunt. Right. How do we track him down?

[Eric Seto]

Since MrDeepFakes.com hit the scene, over 70,000 deepfake porn videos targeting thousands of people have been posted. Now, almost a year after Eda Herskind started her investigation in Copenhagen, the digital chase is over and on the ground. In Toronto, the real world chase is on. I'm Sam Cole and this is the final episode of Deepfake Porn Empire, Episode four, the Fake Porn Pharmacist.

[Sam Cole]

So I'll read just a bit of what our letter was and I'll read you some of the allegations. So we said to David Doe, I'm a journalist at the CBC working in conjunction with.

[Eric Seto]

If you're leveling these kinds of allegations at someone, you can't just show up at their house with a camera. You need to give them ample chances to respond first. So the first step was for Eric and his team to send David Doe an email.

[Sam Cole]

Our reporting will identify you as the key person behind Mr. Deepfakes. We're requesting an on camera interview with you.

[Eric Seto]

It's straightforward. We know you're involved in Mr. Deepfakes. We want to talk to you.

[Sam Cole]

Can you acknowledge receipt of this email? No response.

[Eric Seto]

They sent it to four different email addresses, each attached to one of David Doe's domains and usernames.

[Ida Herskind]

They even put an email tracker so they could see that David Doe was opening the email several times, multiple times, without responding.

[Eric Seto]

He never replied to any of them, so they had to try something else.

[Sam Cole]

We wanted to deliver a letter to

[Eric Seto]

him in person, which means they needed to find him in real life, so.

[Sam Cole]

So we called his work. Please wait while I transfer your call. Hi, Marvin. Hi, David Doe, please. I think he's on lunch break.

[Ida Herskind]

Okay, can you call like maybe half an hour later?

[Sam Cole]

Half an hour? Yeah, we can call back. This is the big moment for us, right? Like, we now know he's working today, he's on lunch. So we decided we needed to go in the hospital to hand deliver this letter to him. We're going to get this letter to him this day.

[Eric Seto]

Okay? Most hospitals have two pharmacies, one for the public that anyone can access. And somewhere in the middle of the maze that is most big hospitals is another, the inpatient pharmacy. That's the one where David Doe worked. And to get to it, you need clearance, which Eric did not have.

[Sam Cole]

So we're like, okay, how are we going to do this? Downstairs yeah, nothing vacant. Okay, thanks. Here we are wandering the hospital, trying to figure out how do we find an inpatient and how do we get into a place that requires an access card.

[Eric Seto]

Essentially, Eric's a video reporter, but he's not going to film inside a hospital without permission. So he hits record on his voice memo app and drops his phone in his pocket.

[Taylor Klein]

Hi there.

[Sam Cole]

I was looking to speak to a pharmacist, an inpatient there. I was told to come down this way here. So we were walking around the hospital. We were asking people, I remember like, hey, do you know where inpatient pharmacy is? And then he finally pointed me down the hall here. We went down an elevator, around a corridor, down this long hall, and then I knocked on the door of this place. I'm not supposed to be at this point. And someone comes to the door. Hello, is David Doe here? Like, that's. And they're like, yep, one second. Okay, thank you. I'm standing in the doorway, and he comes around the corner. And I'm like, this is the David Doe from all the videos from the photos we've seen. This is David Doe for sure. And I remember thinking, okay, here we go. Hey there. Sorry, this is your name? My name is Eric Sido. I'm from the cbc. We've been trying to get on for the last few weeks about the story working on the strategic babes. And I said, oh, I'm a reporter at cbc. We've been emailing you, and you haven't responded. He's like, I don't know what you're talking about. Okay, I'm at work right now. Yeah, can we go outside and talk with him? And I was thinking in my head, I don't want to do this in his workplace. It's like, it's awkward. It's uncomfortable. So I'm like, can we go outside? Can you take five minutes to come outside and talk to me? Like, I can't remember. Okay, well, when he said, I, I have to go back to work. And I'm like, hold on. We've been trying to get a hold of you. I want to give you this letter. And he took it begrudgingly. I. I had to go. Well, there's a lot of people that want. I'm. I'm. You have my number. And so that was our first interaction with David Doe. It was crazy. Yeah, it was crazy. I was surprised at how kind of meek he was and truly not who you would expect to be the architect of the biggest deep fix fartzite in the world.

[Eric Seto]

Now they're expecting to wait to see if David Doe responds, to deny any involvement in the website to defend himself. Instead, something else entirely happens.

[Sam Cole]

Almost immediately after all of his social profiles went down, his family's social profiles went down.

[Ida Herskind]

Right.

[Sam Cole]

So now he's kind of like, gone off the map, really. Like digitally.

[Eric Seto]

The Canadians send an update to the Europeans, letter in hand, socials down. Eda Herskind remembers watching this unfold over email.

[Ida Herskind]

So they sort of knew that he got all the allegations. And after that, the next step was to confront him with a camera.

[Eric Seto]

So Eric does a stakeout.

[Sam Cole]

I don't know if you've done stakeouts or many, but I guess you see him in movies or TV shows, they were way more glamorous than they actually are because you're kind of just sitting in a car for hours on end.

[Eric Seto]

They have three cars surrounding Doe's house. A producer in the front, a producer at the end of the block, and Eric in the back alley. The plan wasn't to try to interview David Doe at his front door, but to follow him when he left and try to talk to him somewhere neutral, like a parking lot.

[Sam Cole]

So here we are, we're setting it up. It's like six in the morning. We're hanging out here, and five hours goes by. People are walking their dogs or walking past our car, seeing three random people in the car, and no sign of anything, no sign of movement coming from his house. And we're like, wondering, okay, we gotta call this. Like, there's. There's probably nothing happening. So we decided, let's call his work. And I remember we called the pharmacy and they said that he was not in today. Like, okay. And then we found out that he actually was gone. He actually gone on vacation. Sort of like, is it because of us? Is it because something he had planned? We didn't know. There's so many questions we had as a team, wondering what was going on.

[Eric Seto]

Eric sends a message to Ross, Zach and Ida. David Doe is gone.

[Ida Herskind]

All of us thought like, oh, shit, what can we do? Is this a part of a big exit strategy? Did he leave the country for good now? Will he come back?

[Eric Seto]

Ross Higgins and the team at Bellingcat decided to figure it out.

[Ida Herskind]

And suddenly bellingcat, they could see that he was active on his Airbnb profile.

[Ross Higgins]

And we found out based on Airbnb reviews that he'd gone to Portugal and

[Ida Herskind]

he was renting a beautiful house close to Lisbon. And we didn't know at that time if he were on vacation with his family or if he were for real, like leaving the country.

[Eric Seto]

And it's while they're watching this unfold that something even wilder happens. Zakaria Hamid we had a signal group

[Sam Cole]

where, you know, we're going back and forth about findings and publishing and just, you know, logistical stuff, right? And then one of the buildingcat researchers just wrote, I think the website has shut down. Lol.

[Eric Seto]

Lol.

[Sam Cole]

And then, you know, we all scrambled, we went like jumped on the website and we, everybody saw the same thing. Shut down notice, you know, on May

[Eric Seto]

4, 2025, just weeks after Eric confronted David Doe in person, MrDeepFakes.com went dark.

[Ida Herskind]

And everybody were like writing and calling each other like, have you seen it today? This morning, like the site is down. It has this shutdown notice and it

[Sam Cole]

basically said a critical service provider has terminated service permanently. Data loss has made it impossible to continue operation.

[Ross Higgins]

We will not be relaunching any website claiming this is fake. This domain will eventually expire and we are not responsible for future use. This message will be removed around one week.

[Eric Seto]

It was all very. This message will self destruct. Zach could hardly believe it.

[Ross Higgins]

Is this happening? You know, is this true? Isn't the website fucking down? Like, damn, we really did something for

[Sam Cole]

someone out there, you know, and that was really nice to feel.

[Ross Higgins]

I'm not gonna lie. That was a nice feeling to have.

[Sam Cole]

It actually blew me away. Of all the stories that I've done, of all the investigations I've done, I never experienced something where this had been a direct result impact like this.

[Ida Herskind]

Right away, it was just like this very, very nice feeling because I had been so frustrated doing this project that it had no consequences. So having this platform being shut down was the greatest feeling ever.

[Sam Cole]

We had an emergency meeting as a team and we were like, what are we going to do here? The website's down. We knew we needed to get ahead of those.

[Eric Seto]

With MrDeepFakes.com down and the headlines moving on. They know if they stop now, if they don't publish and name him now, David Doe could just slink away into obscurity. And the team was not prepared to let that happen.

[Ross Higgins]

Here on the job site with Dale, who's a framing contractor.

[Sam Cole]

Hey, good morning.

[Ross Higgins]

Dale traded up to Geico Commercial Auto Insurance for all his business vehicles. We're here where he needs us most.

[Sam Cole]

Yep, they sure are.

[Ross Higgins]

We make it easy for him to save on all his insurance needs, all in one place with coverage that fits his business and bottom line. Oh, I shouldn't have looked down.

[Sam Cole]

It's all Right.

[Ross Higgins]

We're so far up here.

[Sam Cole]

Look at me. Take a deep breath.

[Ross Higgins]

I'm good.

[Sam Cole]

So good. Get a commercial auto insurance quote [e-mail] and see how much you could save. It feels good. To Geico.

[Eric Seto]

All your favorite CBC podcasts are now available on YouTube. The best in award winning true crime investigations, hilarious comedies, vibrant pop culture conversations and even more audio series are all available on CBC Podcast YouTube channel. You'll also find exclusive video, first episodes, YouTube shorts and behind the scenes content

[Taylor Klein]

from our hosts and producers and that

[Eric Seto]

you can't find anywhere else. So if YouTube is your go to source for podcasts, just search CBC podcasts

[Taylor Klein]

and hit subscribe and you'll never miss the latest update.

[Sam Cole]

You know, one of the people I spoke to, she was a victim of this and was on Mr. Deepfakes said she felt like she was being raped. Seeing her likeness, right? So it's about getting answers for the people that have been victimized. Like it really is about seeing and getting some type of response and knowing that person knows that they're harming people.

[Eric Seto]

But at this point, they don't know if David Doe is even in the country or if he is still abroad, if he'll ever come back. Eric had been checking just to see

[Sam Cole]

if there are lights on in the house. No move in whatsoever. And I'm like, okay, he's not coming back in time before we publish.

[Eric Seto]

But that Sunday, Eric went back one more time.

[Sam Cole]

Probably not going to be there, but let's just, let's try it out, right? And as I was approaching his house, I saw lights. I basically screamed in my car. I said, holy shit, he's back. I was talking to myself, I'm on my own. I immediately took a photo of it and I sent it to, to the team and I said, he's back. We need to move on this like right away.

[Eric Seto]

The next morning, Eric and the CBC team are there.

[Sam Cole]

I think it was 6:00am, 5:30, we were out behind his house again. One car there, one car in the front just to keep have all the angles covered. And six o' clock rolls around, seven o' clock rolls around, eight o' clock rolls around, no movement, nothing. We're sitting there like, okay, we're running out of time, guys. Like, what are we doing here?

[Eric Seto]

Nine o' clock rolls around. People again are walking their dogs, driving their kids to school.

[Sam Cole]

We were about to give up hope.

[Eric Seto]

They're starting to pack it up, call it in, when Eric sees something.

[Sam Cole]

Out of the corner of my eye, I see in the passenger Mirror a Tesla start to approach. It drives past us. And I see the garage door open at its house. And I freaked out. I was like, that's him. I jumped out of the car. I dragged producer Katie, like, let's go. We gotta go. I ran straight to his garage while it was opening, as he was pulling up his Tesla. And I stood there, and I had to buy time because I knew that Katie hadn't got the cameras rolling yet, or she was still fixing them. She was running and fumbling, right? This is it. This is our chance. So I'm in front of the garage, and I remember he pulls down his window and he's like, excuse me. And I'm like, katie, are you rolling? She's like, yes.

[Ida Herskind]

Yeah.

[Sam Cole]

Ma'. Am, David, can I just talk to you right now? I'm a reporter, CBC News.

[Eric Seto]

David Doe says, I don't want to be recorded. Please.

[Sam Cole]

We've been trying to talk to you for weeks about Mr. Deepfakes and your role in it and why you do what you do. We just want to talk to you about why you do it. In my head, I'm trying to stay calm here because this is really our only shot. I know you have to go, but we want answers. We've been trying to talk to you for weeks.

[Ida Herskind]

David.

[Eric Seto]

Sorry, I can't talk to you right now. Please let me park my car.

[Sam Cole]

David, there's been thousands of people. Like, all these people we talk to, see, they're human, humiliated. They're victimized, David. You know that they're being hit. Victimized. They feel humiliated. They feel like they're being psychological, emotional damage. Like, why are you doing.

[Eric Seto]

David Doe gives up on parking the car. His garage door starts closing, and he starts slowly driving away.

[Sam Cole]

Why did. Why did you create this website? But, David, why did you create the website? Why are you doing what you do? You see, in movies and TV shows, you'd hear the car peeling out, but here, you heard Tesla going out with a soft hum. Backing out of the alley,

[Eric Seto]

Eric's producer, Katie, stops following the car but keeps filming. It's a wide shot. Rows of garage doors, down an alley. Eric is walking slowly after the Tesla as it reverses out, his arms out, palms up, beseeching David.

[Ida Herskind]

You have my number.

[Sam Cole]

You're not.

[Eric Seto]

Eric calls out, you have my number. You have my email. Why are you driving away? David Doe backs up and is gone.

[Sam Cole]

That was our last interaction with David Doe.

[Eric Seto]

Eric posts in the group signal chat. We got him. Do you want to see the video?

[Ross Higgins]

Of course. Yeah, we do you know, it just

[Sam Cole]

seems like when you found a new series on Netflix and you have to wait until next week for the next episode to drop, right? It was that same feeling. I just. I wanted to see that face, right? And then season finale, boom, you know, series finale even, you know, the whole show ended once we got that video, right? It was that feeling.

[Ross Higgins]

It was.

[Sam Cole]

It was. It was crazy.

[Ida Herskind]

I remember sitting at my desk in my office, opening the link, seeing the video, seeing Eric confronting David Doe in the Tesla, like, right in his face, asking, what do you have? What do you want to say to all these women? And I just remember his face, David Doe, like, he had this face, you know, closing his eyes, backing his car. He said something like, no, I don't want to be on a camera. And I just thought, you don't want to be on a camera. But all these women on your platform, they didn't want to be in a video.

[Ross Higgins]

All he wanted to say was, I don't want to be filmed. I don't want to be filmed. And I thought, isn't that beautifully ironic?

[Eric Seto]

On May 7, 2025, four newsrooms hit publish. The CBC headline was, this Canadian pharmacist is a key figure behind the world's most notorious deepfake porn site. And the news report went out.

[Sam Cole]

This is the first time someone involved in the website has been identified.

[Eric Seto]

The team watched as ripples from their reporting made their way around the world. And then they watched as those ripples turned into waves.

[Sam Cole]

What we learned soon after was that David Doe had been fired from his job, and then he was now under investigation by the College of Pharmacists in Ontario, which is the regulator there, which, as the end result, could mean losing his license.

[Eric Seto]

Then a Danish politician started calling for David Doe's extradition, wanting to see him criminally tried in Denmark. Soon after, another politician in the Netherlands did the same.

[Sam Cole]

Like, that's a serious. When people are calling for your extradition, that's a big deal.

[Eric Seto]

But extradition depends on something called double criminality. If a country wants someone extradited, whatever they've been accused of doing usually has to be a crime in both places. And in Canada, David Doe didn't meet the criteria.

[Sam Cole]

It's not illegal to create or share deep fake pornography in Canada.

[Eric Seto]

Yet that spring, the spring of 2025, as the team tracked down David Doe and reported this story, there was an election coming up. Liberal candidate and future prime minister Mark Carney made a commitment we will make

[Aaron Mackey]

producing and distributing non consensual sexual deep

[Sam Cole]

fakes a criminal offence.

[Eric Seto]

This winter, Canada's Department of Justice told us the same thing. An announcement is coming, a bill will be tabled. And then it happened.

[Taylor Klein]

It's such a massive bill. Just give me a sec.

[Eric Seto]

Susie Dunn was one of the first people who reached out to me after I published that initial story about deepfake porn way back in 2017. She's a law professor at Dalhousie University, where she studies tech facilitated violence and our digital rights to our identities, our voices, our images. Deepfake porn sits right between those worlds. So when Canada's bill was introduced, she was paying attention.

[Taylor Klein]

And if you look to paragraph 15, it says that 162.1, which is the intimate image, is for a term of not more than 10 years.

[Eric Seto]

C16 proposes changes to make it a crime in Canada, punishable by up to 10 years in prison to distribute or threaten to distribute intimate images. And it includes deep fakes in that

[Taylor Klein]

clause where it says it's a visual representation that is made by any electronic or mechanical means and that shows an identifiable person who is depicted as nude, as exposing their sexual organs, or as engaged in sexually explicit activity if the depiction is likely to be mistaken for a visual recording of that person.

[Eric Seto]

Okay, so what was your first reaction when you saw the changes?

[Taylor Klein]

So I'm still really chewing on that language like it was only released in the last few weeks. And the challenge is, is there's not a lot of laws to compare it to. We're going to see how the courts are going to interpret that language, and then the government might have to circle back and change the language. But I imagine one of the things that the government is really concerned about is making sure that the definition is narrow enough so that it doesn't over broadly impact people's freedom of expression.

[Eric Seto]

Susie has good reason to hope the Canadian government is concerned about this, because there is another law to compare it to, one critics say got this balance disturbingly wrong. Artificial intelligence and social media are the digital candy for the next generation. On a sunny May morning in 2025, just as the news was spreading that MrDeepFakes.com had shut down, Melania Trump stepped up to a microphone in front of the White House to make a rare speech in support of a new bill, the Take It Down Act. This legislation is a powerful step forward

[Ida Herskind]

in our efforts to ensure that every

[Eric Seto]

American, especially young people, can feel better protected from their image. By the time her husband Sharpie came out to sign the bill into law, the Take It down act was already being framed in the headlines as the solution to non consensual intimate images, ncii, and specifically deepfake porn.

[Sam Cole]

This legislation that will criminalize the publication of those images.

[Eric Seto]

It will also require social media and similar websites to have procedures in place to remove that content after a notification from the victim.

[Sam Cole]

It then gives these tech companies 48

[Eric Seto]

hours to take it down.

[Aaron Mackey]

I think that this was pitched as, let's criminalize the actual use of NCII and then let's give victims a really simple and effective way of removing these images.

[Eric Seto]

Aaron Mackey tracks Internet law for a living. He is the free Speech and Transparency Litigation director at the Electronic Frontier foundation, and he's one of those critics.

[Aaron Mackey]

The problem is the takedown provision doesn't actually map the same definitions of NCII that are found in the criminal provision.

[Eric Seto]

Okay. The Take It down act essentially has two parts. The first part made it illegal at the federal level to knowingly create or distribute non consensual intimate images, including deepfakes. And in this part of the law, the definition of what counts as a non consensual intimate image is written narrowly.

[Aaron Mackey]

The criminal provisions talk about how it has to be a depiction in which it's clear that it was distributed or published or created as an invasion of privacy or as a means of trying to harm someone.

[Eric Seto]

This is punishable by up to two years in prison. And Aaron says that that part of the law, which went into effect upon signing last May, is great.

[Aaron Mackey]

We've needed these federal laws, and particularly the criminal penalties for a long time.

[Eric Seto]

The issue, he says, is with the second part of the law, the takedown provision.

[Aaron Mackey]

The broader concern with this takedown provision of take it down is that it may not actually help vindicate victims of ncii, but could also be used as a censorship regime.

[Eric Seto]

The takedown provision defines what is takedownable simply as an intimate visual depiction. That phrasing, Aaron says, is so general, it could in practice be used for almost any depiction that someone doesn't like.

[Aaron Mackey]

And it's sort of rife for abuse.

[Sam Cole]

And I'm going to use that bill for myself, too, if you don't mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online. Nobody.

[Aaron Mackey]

The fact that the President saw this as a means to use this bill to remove speech that he said was like treating him worse online. Right. Just perfectly shows like this. This is a censorship regime. Its broad terms can be used to take down a whole bunch of speech that is an NCII.

[Eric Seto]

The takedown provision will only become enforceable on May 19th of 2026. One year after signing. So it hasn't yet been used in this way or at all. Only time will tell how it will play out. To be clear, Aaron is not saying there shouldn't be a way for targets of deepfake porn to get that content to taken down, just that the law needs to be written more carefully to discourage misuse. And in addition to the people targeted by deepfake porn, there's another group of victims, people that the Take It down act in the US and the proposed Protecting Victims act in Canada leave out entirely.

[Ida Herskind]

This is also a crime against the porn workers bodies because they haven't asked for their material being used in different ways with other people's faces. When all comes to an end, the biggest key word here is consent.

[Eric Seto]

Taylor Klein, the deep fake target we heard from in episode two, brought this up as well.

[Taylor Klein]

People's work got stolen, like that's their property, that's their work. So that's money that's being stolen from them and it's my consent that's being stolen from me. So there's, you know, there's no, everyone gets hurt in this process. There's no winners here.

[Eric Seto]

So even as these laws are being framed as a solution to deepfake porn, it leaves out the people whose bodies and performances are often the raw material for making it. In Canada, Bill C16 has not yet been ratified. It still has to go through Parliament. If Bill C16 does become law, it's unclear what will happen to David Doe. If anything, the website is down. Doe wasn't making this stuff while the law was in place. We reached out to him, putting the same questions and allegations to him as Eric, Ida, Zach and Ross, but no answer.

[Ida Herskind]

So what I would like to ask David Doe would really be like, have you ever thought about the consequences? Have you ever thought about the trauma it is for these women to see themselves and also the consequences for our democracy? I would love for him to tell and elaborate why they deserve it and how he think that it is to see oneself in a video like this.

[Eric Seto]

The last time David Doe, or at least someone claiming to be him, really spoke to the media were interviews where he was able to stay anonymous. In a BBC documentary they put some of those same questions to a person identifying themselves as the owner of Mr. Deepfakes with an actor speaking his words.

[David Doe]

A lot of people will say, how can you create deepfakes for women? How can you respect women if you work on this website? I guess like a lot of things in life, the answers aren't really simple, right? Part of me is in denial about the impact on women. I can see where women are coming from. I get that there's a cause. The psychological effects can of course affect celebrities as much as non celebrities. It can affect anybody. I haven't told my wife. I'm also afraid of how it might affect her. Knowing that I, I work on something like this, I need to look deep down and see what's acceptable. If laws come out and the laws are fair and right, we will follow the law.

[Eric Seto]

Now that the site is gone, what does that mean for the landscape of deepfakes? Where do you kind of see it landing in like the impact scale of how important this has been?

[Ross Higgins]

I don't think anything can eliminate this problem entirely. It's a Pandora's box. So my main objective of doing this is to say to people, okay, you don't have to put up with this. We've used methodology that people can replicate. So you better believe if another website comes along and gets as big as Mr. Deepfakes, we are going to investigate it and we're going to set ourselves the challenge of seeing who is behind this site.

[Eric Seto]

A few years ago, deepfake porn still had some barriers to entry. It took skill, time, forums, guides. There was a learning curve. Now if you want to make deepfake porn, you don't need to learn anything at all. The tools are migrating from niche corners of the Internet into mainstream AI systems. In early January 2026, regulators in the UK opened an investigation into X. You know, Twitter focused on reports that X's chatbot Grok was being used to generate sexually explicit synthetic images, including images of underage girls. X is not some niche website or forum. It's a household name platform owned by Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. With a tool for deepfake porn effectively built right in. Taylor Klein was deepfaked back in 2020 before most people had even heard of deepfakes. She sees the growing threat and she's not about to back down.

[Taylor Klein]

I think it's a little bit of a hydra perhaps in that like deepfakes and the tools to make deepfakes are becoming a lot more accessible than they were at the time that I was deepfaked. But I think that being able to show that we're not just gonna let this happen to people goes deeper than just getting Mr. Deepfakes taken down. I think it shows that we as like society don't think this is okay. And we're gonn.

[Eric Seto]

You've been listening to deepfake Porn Empire from CBC. The show was written and produced by our showrunner A.C. rowe. With me your host Sam Cole. The producers are Arman Agbali and Julian Uzieli, who is also our Sound designer. Roshni Nair is our coordinating producer. Our story Editor and Senior Producer is Veronica Simmons. Special thanks to Ida Herskind et Politikan, Zakaria Hamid and Daniel Grano at Czech Debt, Ross Higgins, Beau Donnelly and the team at Bellingcat, Eric Seto, Jordan Pearson, Andrew Kitchen, Katie Penn Pedersen, Christian Paul Zlang Litza Sortsies and everyone at the CBC Visual Investigations Unit and our in house counsel Katerina Germani. In this episode you heard archival tape from CBC and NBC, C span and the BBC. The executive producer of deepfake porn empire is Nick McKay Blokos. The executive producers of CBC Podcasts are Chris Oak and Cecil Fernandez. Tanya Springer is the Senior Manager, Arif Nurani is the director and Leslie Merklinger is the Executive Director of CBC Podcasts. Karen Burgess is the Managing Editor of CBC News Podcasts. I'm Sam Cole. You can listen to me every week on the 404 Media Podcast. You should also check out the last season of Understood I hosted by scrolling back in your feed to Season two, the pornhub Empire. I tell the history of the Montreal porn scene and what happened when we let Moral Panic. Write tech policy and make sure you subscribe because Understood will be back with a new season in the spring.

[Sam Cole]

For more cbc podcasts go to cbc ca podcasts.