A woman has revealed she “really wanted to be dead” after finding fake porn videos of her having sex with various men online, only to discover they had been shared by her best friend.
The 20-year-old, from Cambridgeshire, who uses the pseudonym Jodie, spoke about her traumatic experience with BBC Sounds. File 4revealing how it started in 2019 with fake dating profiles and progressed to deepfake porn videos.
In 2021, Jodie, who was a teenager at the time, received a link to a pornographic website from an anonymous email account, which led to explicit images and a video of what appeared to be her.
Her face had been digitally added to another woman’s body, known as a “deepfake.”
Initially fired by the police, she became a detective herself and eventually discovered that the person responsible was one of her best friends, Cambridge University student Alexander Woolf, then 26, who was the 2012 winner of the Young Award. BBC Composer of the Year.
He discovered that the person next to him in the photo, which had been cropped, was his best friend Alex Woolf and that he was the only other person who had this photo.
Woolf achieved a double first in music from Cambridge University and won the BBC Young Composer of the Year award in 2012. She also appeared on Mastermind in 2021 (pictured in 2018).
A 20-year-old woman from Cambridgeshire, who uses the pseudonym Jodie, revealed on BBC Sounds File on the 4th that her best friend faked porn videos of her having sex with various men online.
He came to know many of his victims while he was a student at the university and, although he did not work as a teacher, he occasionally supervised some students in a faculty at the Faculty of Music.
Jodie’s ordeal began in 2019 when she discovered her name and photos were being used on dating apps without her consent.
She said: “When I first went to sixth form college, people started messaging me on Facebook Instagram and telling me People had been using my social media. Media photos on dating apps.
‘I thought it’s a risk people take when they use social media and sometimes they had my real name. Sometimes it was other people’s names but it always had my location and my real age.
‘The more it happened, the more I felt like this person really knew who I was. “I think it was probably the first time I felt a little worried about who was doing this.”
In May 2020, during the UK lockdown, a friend first alerted Jodie to several Twitter accounts posting photographs of her, with captions implying she was a sex worker.
The snaps, which were taken from her private social media account, were posted on Twitter under names such as ‘slut exposer’ and ‘pervert boss’.
A caption next to a picture of Jodie in a bikini, which her mother took while they were on holiday, read: ‘What would you like to do with little teenager Jodie?’
She said: ‘A lot of the captions compared the front of my body, the back of my body. I’m going through many of these accounts and also finding countless images of other people I know.’
File on 4 approached Woolf for a statement and said there is “no excuse for what I did nor can I adequately explain why I acted on these impulses so despicably at the time.”
Jodie began contacting the other women in the images to warn them and together they discovered even more Twitter accounts posting their images.
She said: “I thought that was the worst it could get, I didn’t know it was going to happen.” get a lot worse.’
A few months later, the situation seemed to take a turn for the worse after an anonymous email sender contacted Jodie to share a concerning post on Reddit.
The email said, “Sorry to remain anonymous, but I saw this guy was posting pictures of you on creepy subreddits.” “I know this must be really scary.”
One user had posted photos of Jodie and two of her friends, numbering them one, two and three and inviting others to play a game: “Which of these women would you have sex with, marry or kill?”
Six weeks later, the same email sender got in touch again, but this time about deepfakes he found online.
She recalled: “My whole body was hot and I just let out a scream because I knew this could really ruin my life and I was screaming and crying, violently scrolling through my phone and I realized what it was and it was just someone having sex with me. At that moment I really wanted to be dead.”
The images and a video. appeared to show Jodie having sex with several men in explicit positions.
However, when she saw one of the deepfake porn photos, she recognized the original image of herself standing in front of King’s College, Cambridge.
Jodie remembered it being taken, but didn’t post it on her social media account.
He discovered that the person next to him in the photo, which had been cropped, was his best friend Alex Woolf and that he was the only other person who had this photo.
She said: “I know instantly who it is, I knew it had been cut out and the person cut out was my best friend Alex.”
In 2021, Jodie, who was just a teenager at the time, received a link to a porn website from an anonymous email account. On the site he found explicit images and a video of what appeared to be her.
In August 2021, Woolf, 26, was found guilty of taking images of 15 women, including Jodie, from social media and uploading them to pornographic websites.
The composer was sentenced to 20 weeks in prison, suspended for two years, and ordered to pay each of his victims £100 in compensation.
‘I just felt like my whole world was falling apart before me, a huge sense of betrayal and humiliation. I just felt like my whole life was over because if he could do this to me, someone he loved, I believed he loved me back.
“I thought anyone could do this to me, I relived every conversation we had where he had comforted me, supported me, been kind to me, and I knew it was all a lie, and he knew the impact he was having on my life so deeply and yet so he did.’
In August 2021, Woolf, 26, was found guilty of taking images of 15 women, including Jodie, from social media and uploading them to pornographic websites.
He was given a 20-week prison sentence, suspended for two years and ordered to pay each of his victims £100 in compensation.
Woolf achieved a double first in music from Cambridge University and won the BBC Young Composer of the Year award in 2012. She also appeared on Mastermind in 2021.
File on 4 approached Woolf for a statement saying: “There is no excuse for what I did nor can I adequately explain why I acted on these impulses so despicably at the time.”
‘Please know that I write with a deep and abiding feeling of shame and remorse for my actions and their consequences, I am sincerely sorry.’