March 26, 2025 • 31 mins
This is the first episode of a new podcast called Levittown. It’s a real-life horror story for the AI generation. In this six-part series from Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope and iHeartPodcasts, reporters Olivia Carville and Margi Murphy take listeners from the quiet suburbs of New York to as far as New Zealand and into the darkest corners of the internet. Where tech moves faster than the law, and it’s up to everyday people to hold back a rising tide of explicit deepfakes.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to tech stuff. I'ma's veloscan and this is the
story this week. Something quite prescient. Have you ever been
deep faked? Or maybe this is just a new fear
that photos of you end up online that are you
but not really you? What do you do? For an
increasing number of people, especially women, this is becoming a reality,
(00:24):
so much so that a recent bill in Congress called
the Take It Down Act has found some incredibly rare
bipartisan support. The bill is sponsored by Republican Senator Ted
Cruz and Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar, making it illegal to
post explicit deep fakes. Milania Trump has also been a
vocal supporter. But the thing is it isn't law yet,
(00:45):
and it might not be enough. A new podcast called
Levittown from Bloomberg News and our company Kaleidoscope, takes listeners
on a sort of cyber thriller for the AI age.
It's the story of a group of young women in
the suburbs of Long Island who find naked fakes of
themselves online, and, when told there's nothing they can do
(01:07):
about it, set out to catch the perpetrator. This ends
up connecting them to a web of online vigilantes and
cyber criminals taking advantage of a justice system not ready
for the reality of AI. This week on text Stuff,
we bring you the first episode in the series. If
you like what you hear, jump over to the Levittown
(01:27):
podcast feed and listen to the series in full.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
The series explores sexualized imagery involving miners and violence. Please
take here when listening. Can we start from the beginning?
(01:51):
How did this all start for you?
Speaker 3 (01:55):
So I can go back into it? Remember somehow all
these pictures from my Instagram by Visco were all on
this website. There was one picture of me in a
bathing suit, well it was me in a bathing suit
(02:19):
in one of my friend's backyards and I didn't have
a bathing suit on anymore. And it was just me naked,
well not me, but me with someone else's body parts
on my body parts. It was just boobs and body
(02:49):
parts completely nude that looked so much like my own body.
There were so many different pictures from my social media
on essentially a porn website. I was just trying to
(03:10):
figure out exactly, like where is this coming from? Like
how are they finding my stuff? I didn't let people
follow me that I didn't know, so it was always
in the back of my head like, oh, it's someone
that I know, But how do you find out who
that someone is when you know so many people from school, soccer,
(03:34):
all these things.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Did you even have any suspicions as to who it
was back then?
Speaker 4 (03:43):
No, not at all.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
It was always like, why is this happening?
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Who is this?
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Kayla was twenty years old and living at home with
her parents in a town that was once the picture
of the American dream, a long Island suburb called Leavettown.
We're driving around Leavittown. A lot of white picket fences,
a lot of American flags. It has the feel of
(04:32):
going back in time.
Speaker 5 (04:33):
This is Levittown, one of the most remarkable housing developments
ever conceived.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
It's the kind of America that makes you think of
the nineteen fifties cookie cutter single family houses. Like someone
hit control C on the ideal suburban house and then
pasted it over and over on street after street.
Speaker 5 (04:57):
The idea that came to a man named Bill Levitt
this why not apply to the building of houses the
same principles that have brought other American industries to there
On Accel Peaks of efficiency and service.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Levittown was built for veterans returning from World War II
as the picture of white suburbia. Perfect houses, manicured.
Speaker 5 (05:17):
Lawns started here and there Throughout the huge area are
shopping centers where every type of product or service is
readily available Hue Stars five and Dimes Department Store.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Today we often talk about the future as digital algorithms
and codes, as the architecture of our lives. But back then,
Levittown was the imagined future. It just feels like quite
suburban and safe, you know, it feels like the kind
(05:56):
of place that nothing really happens around here. And yet
underneath the facade of perfect order, it's here I found
a story unfolding of a group of women faced with
a new reality none of them wanted, a technological reality
spinning out of control. It's like, this is not the
(06:22):
setting for a horror movie, and that's exactly what played out.
But this isn't your average horror story, the kind where
a group of teens are hunted down until there's only
one left standing. In this story, they flip the script,
band together and fight back alongside some unexpected global allies,
(06:47):
forcing law enforcement and tech companies to sit up and
take notice from iHeart podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. This is Livettown.
(07:09):
I'm Olivia Carvill. Over the summer, our producer Julia Nutter,
and I made the drive out to Long Island to
meet Kayla at her family home.
Speaker 4 (07:31):
I can hear music.
Speaker 6 (07:37):
How are you nice?
Speaker 4 (07:38):
It's to see too. How are you feeling?
Speaker 7 (07:42):
Let me just do a quick levels check.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Oh do you want me to put the bird in
another room?
Speaker 7 (07:46):
I don't even hear the bird.
Speaker 6 (07:48):
The bird.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, Kayla is like a firecracker. She's small but loud,
with brightly colored hair. Every time I've seen her, her
hair is a different color. She's covered in tattoos and piercings.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
I was like, oh, yeah, what kind of bird is that?
A parakeet? So he likes to talk to himself a lot.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Do you feel comfortable showing us where you were when
you discovered the website? When you were showing it, yeah,
it's a little messy. Kayla's twenty four now. When we
visited her, she was living in the same house she
grew up in.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Well, I see all your plants and it's great, as
you could tell.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
I love my books in high school. Kayla was an
elite athlete and a girl who moved easily between friend groups.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
People make it seem like there's either a popular group
or you know, so called nerds.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
I would like to say I was.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
In the middle of it because I hung out with
a lot of the sports people who were considered popular.
But I had my friends who we would just sit
around and play video games, hang out, do funny things,
and make videos of us doing stupid little things. I
(09:09):
say this to my friends actually all the time. I
may not dress like it, but my inner person is
kind of emo. I listen to a lot of dark music.
Speaker 6 (09:18):
Now.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
I have the tattoos.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
All over, I have piercings all over, and I truly
just like It's not like I like the color black.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
I just like I changed a lot. I have a
really big book tattoo on my leg.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
I have a big wrap around plants because my whole
leg is going to be things I love, and plants
is another thing for me.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
This one, it's one of my favorites. It's tell Me
About Tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
Tell Me About Tomorrow is one of my favorite songs
because whenever I'm in a depressive state or just not
doing good, mentally, I play that song and it tells
you to tell me about tomorrow, tell me about the
next day that's going to go on in your life.
When I was going through this situation, I was not
mentally doing good at all, and it told me you
(10:14):
will have tomorrow, and you can't have tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
It sounds like a lot of the tattoos are important
to you because they represent you moving forward or healing
or getting over this situation as you described it. Do
you feel comfortable getting into that now.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
I remember being in my bed, just laying down. It
was lead at night.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
This was in March twenty twenty, at the onset of
the COVID pandemic. She'd recently graduated from high school and
was stuck at home with her parents.
Speaker 4 (10:54):
I was in that corner. My bad was up against
the wall. I was just laying in the bed.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
I'm pretty sure I was on my phone, just scrolling
through Instagram or something, or on Snapchat.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
She heard her dad walking up the stairs from the living.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Room, says, I can always hear when someone comes up
the stairs and he knocked.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
He always knocks on the door. So he knocked and
just like walked right in.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
I thought automatically like I was in trouble or something.
But then I could just like tell like he was
just confused, and he was like a little hesitant to
like come up to me. I could tell, and he
was just like, what is this?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
What is this? What was he showing you?
Speaker 4 (11:42):
I think it was the website.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
It was the faked picture of her naked, and next
to it a pole asking the site's users to rank
what they wanted to do to her sexually. This next
part is graphic, and it might be difficult to hear.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
It was. I always had trouble saying these parts.
Speaker 6 (12:12):
It was.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
Drink her piss, milk her, have her drink my piss,
and there was something else, and I can't entirely remember
what the other one was.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
So they were ranking what they wanted to do to
you sexually.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
Yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
She kept scrolling and it got worse.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
You would see what they posted, like their nude pictures
and jerking off and coming on our pictures, even like
pictures of our pictures with their dicks there and the
ejaculation there, and then there was like some like.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
Writings of like reaper.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
My dad was very confused. He asked me what this
was and how did it get up there? And I
did not know because I've never seen it before, which
I obviously told him.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
So that's how we found out about the website.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Kylas is Her dad is a big guy, big personality
like her loud laugh. Back then, he was a police officer,
a beat cop really, for the Nassau County Police Department.
He didn't want to talk to us for this podcast,
but he's really protective of his kids, which means he
(14:00):
regularly googles their names, searching the Internet for anything related
to them.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
For me, specifically, I was playing soccer and competitively, so
when I was, you know, going to college and playing soccer,
then he just got nervous when they search things. He
doesn't want dumb to see things are wrong or you know,
like exactly what we found.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
When he shows you the phone, what is the photograph
on the phone that you're looking at? The specific photo
that you first see.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
I'm almost passive.
Speaker 8 (14:37):
It was the one with the bikini taking off my
body and it was just me naked, well not me,
but me with someone else's body parts on my body
parts that looked exactly like my own.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Was there ever a moment even and a split seecond
moment that you thought it was you naked, Yes.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
I definitely like at first, like I was like, oh
my god, that's me, Like how did they get that?
But then I was like, no, that's in my friend's backyard.
Like I was obviously wearing a bikini, and I remember
the bikini. It was a blue one and it was
mesh a little bit. So that's why I would think
it was so easy for them to completely alter the picture.
(15:27):
But I just like instantly I was like, whoa, how
how did they get that picture of me? Like I
never took a picture like that. It was frightening how
exact it looked.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
The website it was on was called come on printed
pecks dot com, and it encouraged its members to do
exactly what that title implies, to print out photos of
girls and young women and estbate to them, and then
to post a photo of the user's erection or ejaculation
(16:07):
on top of that image. This is a practice they
called tributing.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
To have to see my dad find all that, and
like I don't know, like just not understanding what's going on.
I didn't even know anything was going on. And then
my dad just coming in and seeing all that, It's
like nobody wants to see that, but like to have
your dad see that, that's like not even uncomfortable, like
(16:37):
that's not even the word for it, but just like unimaginable.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
I wish I could tell you that this website was
tucked away in the dark web. We users needed to
download a special browser or slink through some other secret
cyber door. But it wasn't. It was just out in
the open. Kayla was out in the open too. Postings
(17:07):
on the site included her real name, which is how
her dad found it. Sometimes the images posted to the
website were actual unaltered photos, revenge porn type stuff, but
often the original photos were taken from innocent social media
posts like Kayla's, and then the site's users turned those
(17:29):
images into non consensual pornography, often with underage subjects. This
type of photo manipulation was new to Kayla, but it
wasn't new to me. I've been starting to see more
of it over the past few years. I've been reporting
on big tech and social media platforms what they're doing
(17:53):
or not doing to prevent harm to kids, what guardrails
they're putting up to stop exactly this kind of thing.
From happening, and images like these were starting to multiply
with shocking speed alongside the rise of artificial intelligence. I
kept hearing more and more about the dark side of
(18:15):
this new technology, about deep fakes, altered videos online known
as deep.
Speaker 6 (18:21):
Fakes, the rise of deep fakes.
Speaker 7 (18:23):
Computer generated videos known as deep fakes.
Speaker 9 (18:25):
Deep fake videos make people appear to say things they
never did or never would.
Speaker 10 (18:30):
It's getting harder and harder to trust our.
Speaker 6 (18:32):
Eyes and airs.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
When I first heard about the Leavettown case, I knew
the reporting was going to take me to some uncomfortable
but important places, from the rise of generative AI to
the explosion of deep fakes to child sexual abuse material online.
I also knew that it was going to be really
hard to find the victims and dive into this website
(18:57):
on my own, so I turned to my colleague for help,
Maggie Murphy. She's a technology reporter at Bloomberg.
Speaker 7 (19:06):
At the time, I remember I was reporting on this
new generative AI tool that people were using to create
child sexual abuse material. I typically write about people who
hide on the fringes of the Internet, like teenage hackers
extorting global businesses, or cyber criminals using AI to scam people.
Not that long ago when I started on this beat,
(19:28):
deep fakes weren't that easy to make and kind of
always had to tell. If you looked at them long
enough you would notice something was off, yet they caught
your attention.
Speaker 6 (19:38):
With AI, there has been so much innovation, but in the.
Speaker 7 (19:42):
Last few years there have been rapid breakthroughs and machine learning.
Speaker 10 (19:46):
Amazon investing up to four billion dollars in startup andthropic as.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
You reportedly investing ten billion dollars in open AI.
Speaker 7 (19:53):
That is and truly hundreds of millions of dollars has
flowed into image generating software powered by AI.
Speaker 6 (20:00):
Microsoft, Amazon, you name it. They are all actively investing
in young AI startups because you're trying.
Speaker 7 (20:08):
That has made it a lot cheaper and easier to
make convincing photos or videos of pretty much anything you
can think of. Now, there are billions upon billions of
deep fake images out there, and this probably won't surprise you,
but the vast, vast majority, by one estimate, more than
ninety percent of all deep fake imagery is pornographic. Typically,
(20:33):
people who have had their image turned into porn have
not consented to having their faces, bodies, or voices morphed
in this way. A lot of people don't even know
that these images of themselves exist. But as Olivia and
I learned, Kayla's dad had found this website in a
regular search of her name, and now he and Kayler
(20:54):
knew it was there.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Seeing what people had to say about my boy as
the pictures were like when I'm what thirteen fourteen, I
think I instantly cried. I was just like I think
I remember, kind of like stating more to myself than
anybody else, like why is this happening to me? Like
what is going on? Like is this even real life?
(21:20):
I felt betrayed by my body because it felt so real,
Like the pictures just seemed so real.
Speaker 7 (21:31):
The website, to us, is also encouraged each other to
comment on the images and even harass the person being pictured.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
It's unimaginable to think that people can even say how gross,
like to tell you to rape.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
Me or milk me.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
I remember a lot of mine was with my braces,
because I had braces until I was in eleventh grade,
and then I had some pimples, and I'd see people
saying that they loved my brastface and my pimples on
my face they like, I'm younger.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Did you actively search through the website for all photos
of you and look at other photos on there and
what the people were saying, or did you just could
you just not look at it at all?
Speaker 5 (22:24):
No.
Speaker 4 (22:24):
I constantly looked at it.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
I was searching to see if there were new pictures
that would be uploaded.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
After learning about the website, Kayla's biggest question was who
did this? Who went through the trouble of scraping her
pictures from social media, editing them to make her look naked,
and then posting them on the site asking others to
harass her. She wanted it to stop, so she took
(22:57):
a break from Visco, a photo sharing app.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Because I started to notice that was the main place
that they took my pictures from.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
I mean, for you, you can't unsee that that's your
body and that's someone putting it out there naked on
this website. How do you survive and how do you cope?
Speaker 3 (23:18):
I quite literally just put in the back of my
head and moved on and just did not think about it.
Try not to think about it. We're still on lockdown,
so I was stuck with my thoughts a lot. But
I was also stuck with my family. We all kind
of just put it in the back of our heads
(23:39):
and essentially basically pretended that it never happened.
Speaker 7 (23:46):
Kayla didn't tell anyone about it, not even her friends,
though her father reached out to his colleagues at the
Natau County Police Department. He wanted to know what could
they do to help Kayla.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
My dad did seek advice to his buddies at work.
He did ask if there was anything that they could do,
but his buddies really didn't know how to go about
it because it's so hard to trace, like those types
of websites when they're all anonymous and they're essentially a
porn website, so it's really hard to trace those back
(24:21):
to the original owner or anything like that.
Speaker 7 (24:24):
Bear in mind, this was happening in twenty twenty, when
the term deep fakes wasn't as widespread or recognized as
it is now, and there weren't any laws federal or
in New York State at this time to prevent faked
pornographic images of real people.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
I didn't really know what there was to do. After
my dad already tried to contact the police department and
his buddies and them just telling us that, like, there
really was not much that they can do going through
a complete and trying to go through all the steps
that took.
Speaker 4 (25:00):
I just don't think I was strong enough at that moment.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
And there's more time passed. Can you describe how your
feelings about that website and those photos changed.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
I think.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
After some time I stopped looking at the website put
in the back of my head, but it completely altered
the way that I thought about my body. And there's
some thing called body dysmorphia. Your brain alters the way
that you look at your body, and I completely went
through that.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
I used to feel so confident about it because I
was an athlete.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
I felt so in tune with my body, and then
I completely changed. I started having eating issues and wasn't able.
Speaker 4 (25:52):
To eat full meals.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
I would feel sick after eating. I couldn't even eat
three bites of food. I would eat two bites and
feel absolutely disgusted in what I'm eating and disgusted in
my body for wanting food. It completely changed just who
I was as a person. I completely got depressed and
just wasn't myself.
Speaker 7 (26:16):
And that's where the story could have ended. With Kayla's
faked pictures still online, and her and her dad not
able to do anything about it. Her small, safe, suburban
world turned upside down. But ten months later, Kayla's phone rang.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
I got a call when I was working at my
old job at a clothing store. It was around New
Year's Eve. I remember it was like seven forty and
I was behind the register. Was very quiet in the store,
so I was just on my phone. We weren't really
supposed to be on our phones, but I just remember
(26:53):
being on my phone and I see one of the classmates.
It was her dad's name popped up on my phone,
which was so weird to me because I was like,
I don't even have this number.
Speaker 4 (27:05):
Why are they calling me?
Speaker 3 (27:07):
And I just remember the last name, and I answered
and I was like hello, and she's like, Hi, this
is blank. She goes, I saw you on the website.
I just want to let you know I'm also on
this website. And I remember just like walking away from
the register and I was just like okay, like how
(27:30):
many other people are on there? Who do you think
it is? And that's when she said I figured out
who it was.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
I think.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
In an instant. Kayla's story got so much bigger. From there,
it would stretch beyond her bedroom, past the high school,
out of Leavettown, across the country, and around the world.
Speaker 7 (28:04):
What she didn't and couldn't know, but what Olivia and
I would learn through our investigation was that there was
a global web of cyber criminals taking advantage of a
plodding justice system being pursued by online vigilantes and hackers
willing to take risks the cops and prosecutors wouldn't. The
(28:26):
story took us from New York to small town New Zealand,
through the darkest corners of the Internet, back into bedrooms
of mid century homes lined up in neat little rows.
(29:08):
This season on Lovett Town.
Speaker 9 (29:10):
There are things you don't want to believe about your friends.
You kind of think that the people in your circle
are like you put them on a pedestal.
Speaker 10 (29:22):
This individual was just out to ruin their lives for
no reason. There was a very new type of crime
where there was a gray area to say, you.
Speaker 8 (29:33):
Have certain police officers there will wait for calls that
come in and they're now go and respond to those courts.
I'm the person that will go and hunt people.
Speaker 5 (29:43):
They call it an arms race between law enforcement and technology,
and it's just where we're losing.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
We are absolutely losing.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
This series is reported and hosted by Margie and me
Olivia Carvell. Produced by Kaleidoscote led by Julia Nutter, Edited
by Nita Tuluis Semnani, Producing by Dara luck Potts. Executive
produced by Kate Osborne. Original composition and mixing by Steve
bone Leavittown archival clips provided by screen Ocean Clips and Footage.
(30:23):
Our Bloomberg editors are Caitlyn Kenney and Jeff Grocock. Additional
reporting by Samantha Stewart. Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's executive producer
and head of Podcasting. Kristin Powers is our senior executive editor.
From iHeart, Our executive producers are Tyler Klang and Nicki Etoor.
Leavittown is a production of Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts.
(30:48):
If you liked this show, give us a follow and
tell your friends.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
That was the first episode of the six part series Levittown.
Go listen and subscribe to the series wherever you get
your podcasts, It's simply called Levittown. Thanks for listening. We'll
be back on Friday. And back in the studio with
my co host Cara with the week in Tech.
Welcome to tech stuff. I'ma's veloscan and this is the
story this week. Something quite prescient. Have you ever been
deep faked? Or maybe this is just a new fear
that photos of you end up online that are you
but not really you? What do you do? For an
increasing number of people, especially women, this is becoming a reality,
(00:24):
so much so that a recent bill in Congress called
the Take It Down Act has found some incredibly rare
bipartisan support. The bill is sponsored by Republican Senator Ted
Cruz and Democrat Senator Amy Klobuchar, making it illegal to
post explicit deep fakes. Milania Trump has also been a
vocal supporter. But the thing is it isn't law yet,
(00:45):
and it might not be enough. A new podcast called
Levittown from Bloomberg News and our company Kaleidoscope, takes listeners
on a sort of cyber thriller for the AI age.
It's the story of a group of young women in
the suburbs of Long Island who find naked fakes of
themselves online, and, when told there's nothing they can do
(01:07):
about it, set out to catch the perpetrator. This ends
up connecting them to a web of online vigilantes and
cyber criminals taking advantage of a justice system not ready
for the reality of AI. This week on text Stuff,
we bring you the first episode in the series. If
you like what you hear, jump over to the Levittown
(01:27):
podcast feed and listen to the series in full.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
The series explores sexualized imagery involving miners and violence. Please
take here when listening. Can we start from the beginning?
(01:51):
How did this all start for you?
Speaker 3 (01:55):
So I can go back into it? Remember somehow all
these pictures from my Instagram by Visco were all on
this website. There was one picture of me in a
bathing suit, well it was me in a bathing suit
(02:19):
in one of my friend's backyards and I didn't have
a bathing suit on anymore. And it was just me naked,
well not me, but me with someone else's body parts
on my body parts. It was just boobs and body
(02:49):
parts completely nude that looked so much like my own body.
There were so many different pictures from my social media
on essentially a porn website. I was just trying to
(03:10):
figure out exactly, like where is this coming from? Like
how are they finding my stuff? I didn't let people
follow me that I didn't know, so it was always
in the back of my head like, oh, it's someone
that I know, But how do you find out who
that someone is when you know so many people from school, soccer,
(03:34):
all these things.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Did you even have any suspicions as to who it
was back then?
Speaker 4 (03:43):
No, not at all.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
It was always like, why is this happening?
Speaker 4 (03:49):
Who is this?
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Kayla was twenty years old and living at home with
her parents in a town that was once the picture
of the American dream, a long Island suburb called Leavettown.
We're driving around Leavittown. A lot of white picket fences,
a lot of American flags. It has the feel of
(04:32):
going back in time.
Speaker 5 (04:33):
This is Levittown, one of the most remarkable housing developments
ever conceived.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
It's the kind of America that makes you think of
the nineteen fifties cookie cutter single family houses. Like someone
hit control C on the ideal suburban house and then
pasted it over and over on street after street.
Speaker 5 (04:57):
The idea that came to a man named Bill Levitt
this why not apply to the building of houses the
same principles that have brought other American industries to there
On Accel Peaks of efficiency and service.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
Levittown was built for veterans returning from World War II
as the picture of white suburbia. Perfect houses, manicured.
Speaker 5 (05:17):
Lawns started here and there Throughout the huge area are
shopping centers where every type of product or service is
readily available Hue Stars five and Dimes Department Store.
Speaker 2 (05:33):
Today we often talk about the future as digital algorithms
and codes, as the architecture of our lives. But back then,
Levittown was the imagined future. It just feels like quite
suburban and safe, you know, it feels like the kind
(05:56):
of place that nothing really happens around here. And yet
underneath the facade of perfect order, it's here I found
a story unfolding of a group of women faced with
a new reality none of them wanted, a technological reality
spinning out of control. It's like, this is not the
(06:22):
setting for a horror movie, and that's exactly what played out.
But this isn't your average horror story, the kind where
a group of teens are hunted down until there's only
one left standing. In this story, they flip the script,
band together and fight back alongside some unexpected global allies,
(06:47):
forcing law enforcement and tech companies to sit up and
take notice from iHeart podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. This is Livettown.
(07:09):
I'm Olivia Carvill. Over the summer, our producer Julia Nutter,
and I made the drive out to Long Island to
meet Kayla at her family home.
Speaker 4 (07:31):
I can hear music.
Speaker 6 (07:37):
How are you nice?
Speaker 4 (07:38):
It's to see too. How are you feeling?
Speaker 7 (07:42):
Let me just do a quick levels check.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Oh do you want me to put the bird in
another room?
Speaker 7 (07:46):
I don't even hear the bird.
Speaker 6 (07:48):
The bird.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Yeah, Kayla is like a firecracker. She's small but loud,
with brightly colored hair. Every time I've seen her, her
hair is a different color. She's covered in tattoos and piercings.
Speaker 4 (08:01):
I was like, oh, yeah, what kind of bird is that?
A parakeet? So he likes to talk to himself a lot.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
Do you feel comfortable showing us where you were when
you discovered the website? When you were showing it, yeah,
it's a little messy. Kayla's twenty four now. When we
visited her, she was living in the same house she
grew up in.
Speaker 3 (08:26):
Well, I see all your plants and it's great, as
you could tell.
Speaker 2 (08:30):
I love my books in high school. Kayla was an
elite athlete and a girl who moved easily between friend groups.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
People make it seem like there's either a popular group
or you know, so called nerds.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
I would like to say I was.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
In the middle of it because I hung out with
a lot of the sports people who were considered popular.
But I had my friends who we would just sit
around and play video games, hang out, do funny things,
and make videos of us doing stupid little things. I
(09:09):
say this to my friends actually all the time. I
may not dress like it, but my inner person is
kind of emo. I listen to a lot of dark music.
Speaker 6 (09:18):
Now.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
I have the tattoos.
Speaker 3 (09:20):
All over, I have piercings all over, and I truly
just like It's not like I like the color black.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
I just like I changed a lot. I have a
really big book tattoo on my leg.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
I have a big wrap around plants because my whole
leg is going to be things I love, and plants
is another thing for me.
Speaker 4 (09:44):
This one, it's one of my favorites. It's tell Me
About Tomorrow.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
Tell Me About Tomorrow is one of my favorite songs
because whenever I'm in a depressive state or just not
doing good, mentally, I play that song and it tells
you to tell me about tomorrow, tell me about the
next day that's going to go on in your life.
When I was going through this situation, I was not
mentally doing good at all, and it told me you
(10:14):
will have tomorrow, and you can't have tomorrow.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
It sounds like a lot of the tattoos are important
to you because they represent you moving forward or healing
or getting over this situation as you described it. Do
you feel comfortable getting into that now.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
I remember being in my bed, just laying down. It
was lead at night.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
This was in March twenty twenty, at the onset of
the COVID pandemic. She'd recently graduated from high school and
was stuck at home with her parents.
Speaker 4 (10:54):
I was in that corner. My bad was up against
the wall. I was just laying in the bed.
Speaker 3 (11:03):
I'm pretty sure I was on my phone, just scrolling
through Instagram or something, or on Snapchat.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
She heard her dad walking up the stairs from the living.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Room, says, I can always hear when someone comes up
the stairs and he knocked.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
He always knocks on the door. So he knocked and
just like walked right in.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
I thought automatically like I was in trouble or something.
But then I could just like tell like he was
just confused, and he was like a little hesitant to
like come up to me. I could tell, and he
was just like, what is this?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
What is this? What was he showing you?
Speaker 4 (11:42):
I think it was the website.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
It was the faked picture of her naked, and next
to it a pole asking the site's users to rank
what they wanted to do to her sexually. This next
part is graphic, and it might be difficult to hear.
Speaker 4 (12:03):
It was. I always had trouble saying these parts.
Speaker 6 (12:12):
It was.
Speaker 3 (12:14):
Drink her piss, milk her, have her drink my piss,
and there was something else, and I can't entirely remember
what the other one was.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
So they were ranking what they wanted to do to
you sexually.
Speaker 4 (12:30):
Yes, yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
She kept scrolling and it got worse.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
You would see what they posted, like their nude pictures
and jerking off and coming on our pictures, even like
pictures of our pictures with their dicks there and the
ejaculation there, and then there was like some like.
Speaker 4 (12:56):
Writings of like reaper.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
My dad was very confused. He asked me what this
was and how did it get up there? And I
did not know because I've never seen it before, which
I obviously told him.
Speaker 4 (13:25):
So that's how we found out about the website.
Speaker 2 (13:39):
Kylas is Her dad is a big guy, big personality
like her loud laugh. Back then, he was a police officer,
a beat cop really, for the Nassau County Police Department.
He didn't want to talk to us for this podcast,
but he's really protective of his kids, which means he
(14:00):
regularly googles their names, searching the Internet for anything related
to them.
Speaker 3 (14:05):
For me, specifically, I was playing soccer and competitively, so
when I was, you know, going to college and playing soccer,
then he just got nervous when they search things. He
doesn't want dumb to see things are wrong or you know,
like exactly what we found.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
When he shows you the phone, what is the photograph
on the phone that you're looking at? The specific photo
that you first see.
Speaker 4 (14:36):
I'm almost passive.
Speaker 8 (14:37):
It was the one with the bikini taking off my
body and it was just me naked, well not me,
but me with someone else's body parts on my body
parts that looked exactly like my own.
Speaker 2 (14:57):
Was there ever a moment even and a split seecond
moment that you thought it was you naked, Yes.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
I definitely like at first, like I was like, oh
my god, that's me, Like how did they get that?
But then I was like, no, that's in my friend's backyard.
Like I was obviously wearing a bikini, and I remember
the bikini. It was a blue one and it was
mesh a little bit. So that's why I would think
it was so easy for them to completely alter the picture.
(15:27):
But I just like instantly I was like, whoa, how
how did they get that picture of me? Like I
never took a picture like that. It was frightening how
exact it looked.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
The website it was on was called come on printed
pecks dot com, and it encouraged its members to do
exactly what that title implies, to print out photos of
girls and young women and estbate to them, and then
to post a photo of the user's erection or ejaculation
(16:07):
on top of that image. This is a practice they
called tributing.
Speaker 3 (16:14):
To have to see my dad find all that, and
like I don't know, like just not understanding what's going on.
I didn't even know anything was going on. And then
my dad just coming in and seeing all that, It's
like nobody wants to see that, but like to have
your dad see that, that's like not even uncomfortable, like
(16:37):
that's not even the word for it, but just like unimaginable.
Speaker 2 (16:46):
I wish I could tell you that this website was
tucked away in the dark web. We users needed to
download a special browser or slink through some other secret
cyber door. But it wasn't. It was just out in
the open. Kayla was out in the open too. Postings
(17:07):
on the site included her real name, which is how
her dad found it. Sometimes the images posted to the
website were actual unaltered photos, revenge porn type stuff, but
often the original photos were taken from innocent social media
posts like Kayla's, and then the site's users turned those
(17:29):
images into non consensual pornography, often with underage subjects. This
type of photo manipulation was new to Kayla, but it
wasn't new to me. I've been starting to see more
of it over the past few years. I've been reporting
on big tech and social media platforms what they're doing
(17:53):
or not doing to prevent harm to kids, what guardrails
they're putting up to stop exactly this kind of thing.
From happening, and images like these were starting to multiply
with shocking speed alongside the rise of artificial intelligence. I
kept hearing more and more about the dark side of
(18:15):
this new technology, about deep fakes, altered videos online known
as deep.
Speaker 6 (18:21):
Fakes, the rise of deep fakes.
Speaker 7 (18:23):
Computer generated videos known as deep fakes.
Speaker 9 (18:25):
Deep fake videos make people appear to say things they
never did or never would.
Speaker 10 (18:30):
It's getting harder and harder to trust our.
Speaker 6 (18:32):
Eyes and airs.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
When I first heard about the Leavettown case, I knew
the reporting was going to take me to some uncomfortable
but important places, from the rise of generative AI to
the explosion of deep fakes to child sexual abuse material online.
I also knew that it was going to be really
hard to find the victims and dive into this website
(18:57):
on my own, so I turned to my colleague for help,
Maggie Murphy. She's a technology reporter at Bloomberg.
Speaker 7 (19:06):
At the time, I remember I was reporting on this
new generative AI tool that people were using to create
child sexual abuse material. I typically write about people who
hide on the fringes of the Internet, like teenage hackers
extorting global businesses, or cyber criminals using AI to scam people.
Not that long ago when I started on this beat,
(19:28):
deep fakes weren't that easy to make and kind of
always had to tell. If you looked at them long
enough you would notice something was off, yet they caught
your attention.
Speaker 6 (19:38):
With AI, there has been so much innovation, but in the.
Speaker 7 (19:42):
Last few years there have been rapid breakthroughs and machine learning.
Speaker 10 (19:46):
Amazon investing up to four billion dollars in startup andthropic as.
Speaker 1 (19:49):
You reportedly investing ten billion dollars in open AI.
Speaker 7 (19:53):
That is and truly hundreds of millions of dollars has
flowed into image generating software powered by AI.
Speaker 6 (20:00):
Microsoft, Amazon, you name it. They are all actively investing
in young AI startups because you're trying.
Speaker 7 (20:08):
That has made it a lot cheaper and easier to
make convincing photos or videos of pretty much anything you
can think of. Now, there are billions upon billions of
deep fake images out there, and this probably won't surprise you,
but the vast, vast majority, by one estimate, more than
ninety percent of all deep fake imagery is pornographic. Typically,
(20:33):
people who have had their image turned into porn have
not consented to having their faces, bodies, or voices morphed
in this way. A lot of people don't even know
that these images of themselves exist. But as Olivia and
I learned, Kayla's dad had found this website in a
regular search of her name, and now he and Kayler
(20:54):
knew it was there.
Speaker 3 (20:57):
Seeing what people had to say about my boy as
the pictures were like when I'm what thirteen fourteen, I
think I instantly cried. I was just like I think
I remember, kind of like stating more to myself than
anybody else, like why is this happening to me? Like
what is going on? Like is this even real life?
(21:20):
I felt betrayed by my body because it felt so real,
Like the pictures just seemed so real.
Speaker 7 (21:31):
The website, to us, is also encouraged each other to
comment on the images and even harass the person being pictured.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
It's unimaginable to think that people can even say how gross,
like to tell you to rape.
Speaker 4 (21:46):
Me or milk me.
Speaker 3 (21:49):
I remember a lot of mine was with my braces,
because I had braces until I was in eleventh grade,
and then I had some pimples, and I'd see people
saying that they loved my brastface and my pimples on
my face they like, I'm younger.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
Did you actively search through the website for all photos
of you and look at other photos on there and
what the people were saying, or did you just could
you just not look at it at all?
Speaker 5 (22:24):
No.
Speaker 4 (22:24):
I constantly looked at it.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
I was searching to see if there were new pictures
that would be uploaded.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
After learning about the website, Kayla's biggest question was who
did this? Who went through the trouble of scraping her
pictures from social media, editing them to make her look naked,
and then posting them on the site asking others to
harass her. She wanted it to stop, so she took
(22:57):
a break from Visco, a photo sharing app.
Speaker 3 (23:00):
Because I started to notice that was the main place
that they took my pictures from.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
I mean, for you, you can't unsee that that's your
body and that's someone putting it out there naked on
this website. How do you survive and how do you cope?
Speaker 3 (23:18):
I quite literally just put in the back of my
head and moved on and just did not think about it.
Try not to think about it. We're still on lockdown,
so I was stuck with my thoughts a lot. But
I was also stuck with my family. We all kind
of just put it in the back of our heads
(23:39):
and essentially basically pretended that it never happened.
Speaker 7 (23:46):
Kayla didn't tell anyone about it, not even her friends,
though her father reached out to his colleagues at the
Natau County Police Department. He wanted to know what could
they do to help Kayla.
Speaker 3 (24:00):
My dad did seek advice to his buddies at work.
He did ask if there was anything that they could do,
but his buddies really didn't know how to go about
it because it's so hard to trace, like those types
of websites when they're all anonymous and they're essentially a
porn website, so it's really hard to trace those back
(24:21):
to the original owner or anything like that.
Speaker 7 (24:24):
Bear in mind, this was happening in twenty twenty, when
the term deep fakes wasn't as widespread or recognized as
it is now, and there weren't any laws federal or
in New York State at this time to prevent faked
pornographic images of real people.
Speaker 3 (24:40):
I didn't really know what there was to do. After
my dad already tried to contact the police department and
his buddies and them just telling us that, like, there
really was not much that they can do going through
a complete and trying to go through all the steps
that took.
Speaker 4 (25:00):
I just don't think I was strong enough at that moment.
Speaker 2 (25:07):
And there's more time passed. Can you describe how your
feelings about that website and those photos changed.
Speaker 4 (25:16):
I think.
Speaker 3 (25:19):
After some time I stopped looking at the website put
in the back of my head, but it completely altered
the way that I thought about my body. And there's
some thing called body dysmorphia. Your brain alters the way
that you look at your body, and I completely went
through that.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
I used to feel so confident about it because I
was an athlete.
Speaker 3 (25:41):
I felt so in tune with my body, and then
I completely changed. I started having eating issues and wasn't able.
Speaker 4 (25:52):
To eat full meals.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
I would feel sick after eating. I couldn't even eat
three bites of food. I would eat two bites and
feel absolutely disgusted in what I'm eating and disgusted in
my body for wanting food. It completely changed just who
I was as a person. I completely got depressed and
just wasn't myself.
Speaker 7 (26:16):
And that's where the story could have ended. With Kayla's
faked pictures still online, and her and her dad not
able to do anything about it. Her small, safe, suburban
world turned upside down. But ten months later, Kayla's phone rang.
Speaker 3 (26:33):
I got a call when I was working at my
old job at a clothing store. It was around New
Year's Eve. I remember it was like seven forty and
I was behind the register. Was very quiet in the store,
so I was just on my phone. We weren't really
supposed to be on our phones, but I just remember
(26:53):
being on my phone and I see one of the classmates.
It was her dad's name popped up on my phone,
which was so weird to me because I was like,
I don't even have this number.
Speaker 4 (27:05):
Why are they calling me?
Speaker 3 (27:07):
And I just remember the last name, and I answered
and I was like hello, and she's like, Hi, this
is blank. She goes, I saw you on the website.
I just want to let you know I'm also on
this website. And I remember just like walking away from
the register and I was just like okay, like how
(27:30):
many other people are on there? Who do you think
it is? And that's when she said I figured out
who it was.
Speaker 4 (27:40):
I think.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
In an instant. Kayla's story got so much bigger. From there,
it would stretch beyond her bedroom, past the high school,
out of Leavettown, across the country, and around the world.
Speaker 7 (28:04):
What she didn't and couldn't know, but what Olivia and
I would learn through our investigation was that there was
a global web of cyber criminals taking advantage of a
plodding justice system being pursued by online vigilantes and hackers
willing to take risks the cops and prosecutors wouldn't. The
(28:26):
story took us from New York to small town New Zealand,
through the darkest corners of the Internet, back into bedrooms
of mid century homes lined up in neat little rows.
(29:08):
This season on Lovett Town.
Speaker 9 (29:10):
There are things you don't want to believe about your friends.
You kind of think that the people in your circle
are like you put them on a pedestal.
Speaker 10 (29:22):
This individual was just out to ruin their lives for
no reason. There was a very new type of crime
where there was a gray area to say, you.
Speaker 8 (29:33):
Have certain police officers there will wait for calls that
come in and they're now go and respond to those courts.
I'm the person that will go and hunt people.
Speaker 5 (29:43):
They call it an arms race between law enforcement and technology,
and it's just where we're losing.
Speaker 4 (29:50):
We are absolutely losing.
Speaker 2 (29:56):
This series is reported and hosted by Margie and me
Olivia Carvell. Produced by Kaleidoscote led by Julia Nutter, Edited
by Nita Tuluis Semnani, Producing by Dara luck Potts. Executive
produced by Kate Osborne. Original composition and mixing by Steve
bone Leavittown archival clips provided by screen Ocean Clips and Footage.
(30:23):
Our Bloomberg editors are Caitlyn Kenney and Jeff Grocock. Additional
reporting by Samantha Stewart. Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's executive producer
and head of Podcasting. Kristin Powers is our senior executive editor.
From iHeart, Our executive producers are Tyler Klang and Nicki Etoor.
Leavittown is a production of Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts.
(30:48):
If you liked this show, give us a follow and
tell your friends.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
That was the first episode of the six part series Levittown.
Go listen and subscribe to the series wherever you get
your podcasts, It's simply called Levittown. Thanks for listening. We'll
be back on Friday. And back in the studio with
my co host Cara with the week in Tech.
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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