Content warning: This article contains mentions of self-harm and suicide.
Joanne Chew found deepfakes of herself online the same way many women have found themselves face-swapped into porn: She was searching her own name after a big accomplishment.
“Sometimes I just Google my name to see what comes up,” Chew told me in a phone call in August 2024. “I want to see, like, is it my artwork, or my acting, or my main website that comes up first? And then I saw this, and I thought, ‘Okay, this is weird.’” Someone was posting deepfakes of her with her full name in the video titles, alongside racist slurs, to popular tube sites.
Chew acted in the May 2024 film Dead Wrong and suspects her harasser started ramping up his targeting her in AI face-swapped porn shortly before the time it came out.
“At the time, I thought, ‘It's gonna blow over.’ Because this is bound to happen the more you move forward in your career as any sort of public person,” she said. “But then I noticed he was putting up more and more... And then I started wondering, is it somebody that I know?” Although the names changed over the year, all of the deepfake content at that point was coming from the same username, “Ron.” 404 Media isn’t publishing his screen names to avoid amplifying his accounts.
Many targets of deepfake harassment attempt to tackle the barrage of harassment themselves by finding and reporting content to sites that are difficult to reach and often rarely respond. This is a time-consuming, traumatizing process. Chew did this for a while. “Initially I thought it was just going to be a few videos, and I had other girlfriends who modeled and acted, with much bigger followings than me, who said unfortunately these things happen as our careers progress,” she said.
She pushed what she saw out of her mind for a few months until she checked again around August. She was horrified, she said, to see how much more had been uploaded in just a few months. “At the height, he had an album of over 2,000 pieces of content, [was posting] on multiple sites, multiple YouTube channels, and then he started making multiple accounts on Facebook and Instagram to direct message me.”
At that point, she enlisted the help of Charles DeBarber, an online investigator who previously helped Girls Do Porn victims reclaim their images online.
“We're seeing a rapid upswing of AI generated art used in harassment. The ease [with which] even a lay person can use an open source tool to create deep fakes is going to only make them increase,” DeBarber told me. “The technology is inevitable, but the way it is used requires careful regulation and consequences for its abuse. We're still struggling to catch up to technology.”
Chew’s harasser only ramped up his efforts as time went on. Ron contacted Chew directly to insult her, obsess over her, or beg for her forgiveness, all while posting more degrading content all over the internet. Nearly a year later, Chew is still dealing with the fallout of becoming a victim of non-consensual, algorithmically-generated intimate imagery.
“After discovering this content, I’m not going to lie… there are times it made me not want to be around any more either,” she said. “I literally felt buried.”
When a big-name celebrity like Scarlett Johansson or Taylor Swift is targeted with deepfake harassment, it’s often from a legion of “fans,” people who join group efforts in Telegram channels or make Civitai models of a specific person. It’s been this way from the beginning of deepfakes, with people trading tips and tricks for the best prompts, platforms, and generative AI tools to create whatever explicit material they’re trying to achieve featuring a specific person. But when it’s someone who doesn’t have the same professional or financial power as these mega-celebrities, the harassment can take on a different form: one guy, in Chew’s case, producing what feels like an endless stream of images and videos of his obsession in videos stolen from pornographers and warped into something that threatens to take over a person’s life.
“Follower of the goddess J.,” Ron’s Instagram account bio said. The account was dedicated to posting photos of Chew, with an AI-generated image of her in a kimono as the profile picture. He was also, it seemed, the one spreading this content all over every popular deepfake repository and tube site.
In August, Chew posted a video explaining the situation to her followers on Instagram. By then, Ron had made hundreds of pieces of deepfaked content of her, and a YouTube channel dedicated to posting it. She filed a complaint to YouTube, and the platform responded, telling her this account was not in violation of its privacy guidelines, which clearly forbids “AI-generated or other synthetic content that looks or sounds like you.”
“How is this not a violation? Someone has taken my name, my face, my professional information, against my consent, and is creating horrible, disgusting, degrading content [and] posting it all over the internet. Make this make sense,” she said in the video.
“I felt like he was watching my social media, so I was kind of just calling him out on stuff to see if he would drop more hints or say more things,” Chew told me.
Later that month, Ron removed all of the content from the YouTube channel.
But in September, Ron started commenting on Chew’s Instagram posts. And for the first time, she engaged with her harasser directly, replying to his comments.
Then, he sent her a barrage of messages on Instagram, pleas for attention and forgiveness mixed in with threats. “Please give my life some meaning,” he wrote. “I dont want to just be the deepfake porn monster I started as. What did you say I was? A deranged monster. People can change. Right? Let me change and be a good person. To me you have the most beautiful face of any asian girl I have ever seen. Please let me be your devoted worshipper. Ok I will put up nice pics of you on my instagram. Until you say otherwise. You mocked my art before. But these will be real art. Inspired by you, Jo.”
He continued sending her long, emotionally-charged messages, about how he feels worthless and is a monster, how he hated himself and wanted to die. “I just want to say that Im with you on A.I. We got to stop it,” he said. “It hurts women. But it also addicting and does terrible things to the men who use it. Sure it feels good and its exciting. But after the poison is released, there is guilt and shame. I hated myself after every release. Its terrible to be the monster you hate.”
He begged her to see him as her biggest fan, and to consider letting him start an OnlyFans on her behalf. He said he made money off of making deepfakes of her. “Men love you. Use them for yourself,” he wrote. “I will stop if you ask me to. If you want me to never look at any of your social media, all you have to do is ask. I am a man of my word. If you ask me to, I will never look you up ever again. I will stop being a fan.”
“He made a point of calling me Jo because I said only people who grew up with me are allowed to call me that and for a while he was purposely referring to me as ‘Jo’ in some of the titles of his content and while messaging me,” she said.
Chew didn’t engage with any of these direct messages. But on the same day he was sending her these screeds, he uploaded a new video to a tube site: “Hate-Fucking Joanne Chew Some Chinese Whore.”
On Facebook, he sent her more incredibly lengthy messages about his obsession with her.
“I don't want you dead. I am making you immortal,” one message said. He continued:
“You hate me now, but maybe someday you will see things my way. I am not the monster you think I am. I'm just honest with my nature. I'm also sorry about your dad. I lost mine when I was a kid. Yes, it's true. I do love your image. And rest in mind, I'm not anyone from your life. [...] So life isn't that nice, so I've made up your personality and surrounded it with AI flesh. I have a mask of you that I make my tiny Asian girlfriend wear. Lastly, yes, I do have eight inches. It's not the biggest, but it is fine for little Asian girls. I'm good with my life and my love of the girl I have created in my mind with your face and my girlfriend's body. No one loves you as much as I do. You should be flattered that anyone loves you. And yes, my art is of the highest integrity, because it is actually truly honest. It isn't hiding or lying like all the beta males in your life. I am a real man that desires your body and isn't afraid to say so, not your real one, though, that one is bold and faded, but your AI body is forever young, Jo.”
She replied to some of his Facebook messages, trying to goad him into giving more information she could potentially bring to the police. But he never took the bait, instead continuing to send long rants about his sex life, her appearance, and his racist fetishes. (Chew still hasn’t gone directly to the police; she told me she’s had negative experiences going to her local police for assault, something many women report as a systemic issue across police forces.)
By late September, things became quiet. He’d deleted or deactivated his Instagram and Facebook accounts. But another account, under a new username, popped up in October and restarted the harassment, posting more to sites where people seek out deepfake porn. In some videos and images, the bodies he swapped her face onto seemed very young, and were posted alongside videos of children.
In November, Chew found someone posting the same images and videos to another site with her Chinese name. “It’s very sensitive for me as I’ve grown sick and tired of the fetishization of Asian women (that I’ve been exposed to my entire life) and I’ve only been open with my Chinese name in the last decade or so.” she told me in an email. “It looks like it’s all preexisting content. Drives me nuts someone or multiple people are out there freely distributing said content facing no repercussions (and even profiting from it).”
Around the same time, the videos returned to YouTube, posted by two new accounts, where the uploader titled videos with Chew’s full name.
By December, other users were reposting the same content on porn tube sites—again with her full name in the titles. Around that time, a new username popped up in her Instagram comments, claiming that Ron died by suicide and that she was to blame.
“Initially wasn’t planning on replying, but wanted to see if he would drop any more information (whether or not it’s true is debatable),” Chew told me at the time. “Then he started making excuses for Ron (whether he is him or one of his followers remains to be seen) saying he was mentally challenged and then tried to blame me for his suicide, which also may or may not have happened.”
Over the course of 10 months, Chew kept finding more accounts posting her image, her full name, and graphic videos and photos alongside degrading titles and descriptions.
As of writing, the harassment has slowed down. In the last year, Chew has sent me dozens of emails with links to hundreds and thousands of pieces of content and screenshots showing more deepfakes, comments, and videos on multiple platforms, many more than can be shown in one article. Much of it is gone after DeBarber’s reporting and takedown notices and searching for her name on Google no longer returns results from porn sites, but some of it is still online.
But she’s still terrified of the long-term effects this harassment could continue to have. Although she’s a working actor, she still relies on working in the corporate world to make ends meet between the more sporadic gigs in the arts, and those jobs often require background checks. And as an actor, it’s made networking and social events harder, as trusting people outside of her closest confidants has become difficult. “It's made me incredibly wary of men, which I know isn't fair, but Ron could literally be anyone,” she said. “And there are a lot of men out there who don't see the issue, they wonder why we aren't flattered for the attention.”
Deepfakes started as a novel AI-powered explicit imagery abuse technique seven years ago. The technology went from crude frankenporn among the programming-savvy and morally flippant to producing fakes so realistic it was considered a national security threat within months of its inception. But its most popular use has always been as a mass-harassment tool. The platforms where people spread deepfakes have only expanded in that time, while the methods for making deepfakes have gotten simpler; so simple that schoolchildren do it. The adults in the room, as well as policymakers, continue to fail victims of deepfake harassment. Conversations about deepfakes still leave sex workers, who are doubly exploited in this content, behind. AI continues to explode exponentially, while women targeted by this kind of harassment say again and again and again that they believe sexualized online harassment is part of the deal of being a successful woman on the internet: untenable and yet part of some unwritten contract.
“The Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act of 2022 created a federal civil cause of action for victims of non-consensual content,” DeBarber said. “This law allows victims to file a lawsuit against the person who disclosed their intimate images without consent. However, this law doesn't cover ‘deepfakes’ including those created via AI. The focus tends to be on celebrities, influencers, and political figures. This itself is changing rapidly. We feel lawmakers and voters aren't seeing the larger picture — this is an everyone issue.”
Even when proposed legislation takes a new stab at criminalizing deepfakes, like the TAKE IT DOWN Act is currently attempting, it risks being used as a weapon by those who would love to further curb free speech online, rather than being nuanced, effective, and inclusive — or learning from legislative mistakes of the past.
While legislators and platforms continue to fumble around for solutions and police push victims to the side, everyone suffers. There is still no technological solution to deepfakes, and a perfect legal one seems far away, too. But Chew’s experience confronting her harasser gives us a new look into the mind of the people who dole out the abuse and hide behind anonymity, and the exhausting process of reclaiming one's own name.
