‘Haunting’ to see deepfake pornography of myself, says journalist Cathy Newman

By Hannah Roberts, PA Entertainment Reporter

Channel 4 News presenter Cathy Newman has said she found deepfake pornography of herself “haunting” and kept on “returning to the images”.

The 50-year-old journalist became her own “case study” in an investigation that found at least 250 British celebrities have been victims of the online phenomenon where victims’ faces and/or bodies are superimposed onto pornography using artificial intelligence (AI).

It comes as ministers are seeking to crack down on sexually explicit deepfake images, with the practice to become a criminal offence.

Newman discussed her experience on ITV’s Good Morning Britain (GMB) on Tuesday, alongside former Love Island contestant Cally Jane Beech, who said she had discovered an explicit, digitally altered image of herself on a website.

Predators who create sexually explicit deepfakes - could face up to 2 years in prison as the government cracks down on online abuse.

Former Love Islander Cally Jane Beech, who was a victim of deepfake images, has been campaigning to criminalise their creation. pic.twitter.com/kJedM3LFzR

— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) January 7, 2025

Beech said: “I was just contacted out of the blue and someone said ‘There’s an explicit image of you’, and I said ‘Well, that can’t be true’, because I knew I hadn’t taken anything like that.

“And they said ‘It’s on Google’, so I asked them to send me the link so I could have a look, opened it and, to my surprise, there was there an image of me.

“I knew it wasn’t real because I had the original photo and it was for an underwear campaign – but the underwear wasn’t there.”

The 33-year-old found where the site was being hosted and said it advertised that it could strip women’s clothes when users upload images.

“And that’s when I found out where the real issue was, took to my social media, spoke out on there about it,” she said.

“And then a lot of people came rushing forward and said ‘This is a major problem’, but it was never something I realised was an issue until that point, how big it was and how many people contacted me.”

Asked how it felt to discover the images, she said: “I think it was a bit of mixed emotions. At first I was just a bit in shock, I wasn’t quite sure what to feel.”

Beech said she realised it could happen to her daughter and was told that paedophiles have been “using this AI technology for their own access as well”.

She also said that when she called police there was “not a lot” they could do because they said the image was not a real picture of her.

Last year, Channel 4 aired an investigation after carrying out an analysis of the five most visited deepfake websites, finding around 250 of the almost 4,000 famous individuals listed were British, with all but two being women.

During the research, Newman watched a video where her face had been superimposed onto pornography after colleagues stumbled across a deepfake porn video of her.

She told GMB: “I decided to, in a way, be my own case study. I hadn’t seen the video before we started filming and I kind of thought ‘Well, you know, every day we cover gruesome stories, it will be water off a duck’s back.’

'The worst thing about it is not knowing who created this video and why.'

Channel 4 News presenter @cathynewman was looking into the abuse of women through AI images last year, when she discovered that she had fallen victim, with her face used to create deepfake pornography.… pic.twitter.com/RjBfJCBWvK

— Good Morning Britain (@GMB) January 7, 2025

“But I found myself keeping on returning to the images, it was haunting. And I think the worst thing about it, as you’ve reflected (to Beech), (is) not knowing who created this video, and why, and where they were, and who they were, and I still think about that.”

Channel 4 News said it contacted more than 40 celebrities for its investigation, all of whom were unwilling to comment publicly.

The broadcaster also said it found that more than 70 per cent of visitors arrived at deepfake websites using search engines like Google.

The UK government will target people who are both creating and sharing these types of images in a new deepfakes offence.

This builds on offences aimed at clamping down on the sharing of intimate images, including deepfakes, introduced in 2023.