Women reveal horror of finding deepfake porn images of themselves on sick site that encouraged men to rape and degrade underage girls as young as six

Daily Mail​

23-04-2025

Women have laid bare the horror of learning that the man pedaling fake AI-generated pornographic photos of them was a high-school friend.
Dozens of attendees and graduates of the local General Douglas MacArthur High School in Levittown, New York, had gone to the police to reveal that innocent pictures of them on social media were being digitally doctored alongside horrific messages encouraging users to 'rape' and in other ways degrade them.
They were all the more horrified to discover that the perpetrator was a fellow pupil who had grown up alongside the young women, and was at times, even a close friend.
More than 1,300 posts were shared across some 14 different usernames on a sick site that encouraged men to share pictures of themselves masturbating on printed-out images.
In 2023, Patrick Carey, 24, was sentenced to six months in jail, with 10 years probation after admitting to offenses including promotion of a sexual performance by a child, aggravated harassment as a hate crime, stalking and endangering the welfare of a child, the New York Post reported.
And some of the 14 women he was said to have shared content of have now spoken about the trauma of dealing with the harassment years on, on a new Bloomberg podcast titled Levittown, hosted by reporters Olivia Carville and Margi Murphy.
One of the victims, who was identified only as 'Kayla', 24, spoke about the disgust of finding out the photos of her were out there during the 2020 pandemic.
Her father, a policeman was doing a regular Google search of his children when he was shocked to see an apparentl nude photo of his daughter come up.
When he showed Kayla, she was baffled - as the image, in which she was originally dressed, had been manipulated.
A further search on the site saw more altered pictures, taken from her online profiles, with worrying messages alongside, expressing what depraved users wanted to do to her.
'It was "drink her piss", "milk her", "have her drink my piss",' she shared.
'We would see what they posted, like their nude pictures and them … j***ing off and c**ing on our pictures, even like pictures of our pictures with their d*** there and the ejaculation there. And then there was like some like, writings of like, "rape her".'
Soon enough, it became clear that the problem was more widespread, as Kayla was approached by a fellow student at the school known in the podcast as 'Cecilia'.
She too, among several girls that went to General Douglas MacArthur were featured on the site.
Much like had been the case for Kayla, images from their online profiles had been taken to make them seem sexually explicit - including pictures of the women when they were as young as six years old.
In summer 2021, another Levittown local - called 'Kat' in the podcast - recounted one awful experience led her to uncovering Patrick; whose father was a policeman.
She came across a deepfake of herself - originally a sweet snap where she was smiling - made to seem like 'her hands tied behind her back, covered in blood, with a plastic bag over her head'.
In a caption the post - which listed her real name - claimed that 'her body had been found near an abandoned construction site and 'that she'd been raped'.
'I'd had enough. It had to stop. I was like, OK, this is like more serious and I need to know who it is.
It appeared that at this stage rumors were circulating that Patrick was behind the fakes, but Kat - who had known him since she was five - was 'almost defending him in her head'.
'He was smart, so, like, he knew what he was talking about, you know? But anybody who said anything to him, it's just like, OK, I don't care. I'm smarter than anybody…
'That's when I went on the website. I had to look at things that I did not want to look at.
'I spent hours going through it. He would post pictures of himself - not his face, like, his body and his parts.'
In one image posted by the user, he looked to be in a child's bedroom - and Kat decided to inspect the background.
'So I saw stuffed animals and I was like, all right, let me see,' she continued, deciding to compare the furniture with that featured on his little sister's TikTok profile - and horrifically, it matched up.
Cecilia described Patrick as 'very talkative' and 'easy to talk to' when she was in high school.
'When I was a sophomore, I had a lot of classes with him. I had almost all of my day with him.
'And we were friends; we would talk. Until a month or two into the school year, he blocked me on every social media that we had together and stopped talking to me in class.
'And he reached out to me and said: I don't hate you, by the way. He said, I would sooner restrict you from all formats of contacting me. I'm extremely attracted to you, so before that becomes an inevitable problem or upset for me, I might as well stop myself from even trying. Does that explanation suffice for you?
'And I said, I guess it does. And that was that.'
She admitted her soul felt 'broken in half' because of the betrayal of trust from someone she considered a friend.
'You watched me kind of grow up, you know, you spent most of my teenage years with me,' she said.
'So you're telling me that all of that time that you spent with me, watching me kind of become the person that I am, was enjoyment to you because you were watching me turn into rape meat.'
Eventually, the evidence found its way to Nassau County Police Department.
Patrick, however, only got six months in jail - with 10 years probation.
In the end, it was not his campaign of terror that allowed the prosecution to build a case against him - but a real nude photo of one of the victims - 'a real picture that had been taken by an ex-boyfriend, who had then shared it among classmates, including Patrick'.
It was considered not only revenge porn - but because the victims was just 14 - child sexual abuse material.
He pleaded guilty in 2022.
Speaking to the podcast, Detective Timothy Ingram said that while the victims were incredible in making their case, when it came to charges it was more complicated.
'These girls, they did their own investigating and they did excellent work,' he expressed. 'They would make great detectives.
'A lot of my co-workers hadn't seen anything like this, where it was to this level of, you know, him posting everywhere for so long with so many victims.'
More than 40 women in Levittown were reportedly affected - but the site's reach was far broader.
The podcast also spoke to a victim of the same website in New Zealand - where, in a horrifyingly similar twist, the perpetrator was known to the woman.
'I was under the age of 18, so I could not have a Tinder. But some guys that I knew, who were maybe one or two years older than me, sent me screenshots of a Tinder account with all of my photos on it and were asking if it was me,' a woman known as 'Lucy' shared.
'When this person matched with a boy on Tinder, they would send them a Snapchat account - and through that Snapchat account would send like very explicit, nude and sexual content but without a face.'
These were not altered images of Lucy, but rather, were made to appear as if she was exchanging faceless nudes.
'In 2020, I got a very unexpected email from the New Zealand police asking to have a phone call with me,' she recalled.
'And I was so suspicious at this point of online harassment and the ability to fake anything online that my initial response was that this was my harasser pretending to be a police officer trying to get in touch with me.'
However she soon realized a 'wider case' was happening 'revolving around another woman who was being harassed in a similar way'.
'They had reverse engineered some evidence that led them to me.'
Investigators Will Wallace and Doug Nuku found some 12 other victims in the country.
While the perpetrator was skilled at hiding, he was eventually discovered as the suspect was followed around on various sites for months - including Facebook Marketplace, where he posted an electric guitar for sale, which was laid on out on a floral comforter.
The innocuous item matched with a photo he had shared on another pornographic site, and soon enough they tracked down the assailant - Finn Cottam.
'I remember the distinct sensation of time slowing down and then they just said a name. And I don't know what I expected, but they said a name that was very familiar to me. It was the name of a boy that I went to school with when I was 12,' Lucy said.
'I felt such a wave of relief that it was a person. Because I guess when someone lives in anonymity, you think they're a monster. And when you hear a name, they're suddenly just a person.'
In 2024, Cottam was sentenced to seven years in jail. As reported by the New Zealand Herald, when he was tracked down, Cottam was found with 'more than 8000 objectionable images and videos, including child exploitation material, on multiple devices he owned'.
He was imprisoned for what the court described as a 'sustained campaign of sexual terror'.