March 22, 2025 • 30 mins
Months after Kayla’s discovery, dozens of women in Levittown, a New York suburb on Long Island, learn they, too, are subjects of faked porn. Most are recent graduates of the local high school, and they zero in on a culprit. One of them sets out to prove it.
For official transcripts and additional information on this series, go to bloomberg.com/levittown
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
A quick note, this is episode two of a six
part series. If you haven't heard the prior episodes, we
recommend going back and starting there. It should also be
noted that this series explores sexualized imagery involving miners and violence.
Please take care when listening.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I got a call when I was working up my
old job at a clothing store, and I see one
of the classmates popped up on my phone. She goes,
I saw you on the website. I just want to
let you know I'm also on this website.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
It was New Year's Eve twenty twenty, nearly a year
after Kayla's father had knocked on her bedroom door to
show her the images he had found of her online.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
And I remember just like walking away from the register
and I was just like, okay, Like, how many other
people are on there?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Kayla wasn't the only one whose phone was lighting up.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I got a text. I was parked in the mall
parking lot outside of the entrance to the movie theater
with my boyfriend at the time, who was about to
start his evening night shift.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Cecilia was tucked in the driver's seat while rain pelted
the windshield. She'd planned to drop her boyfriend off at
his job at the mall near Leavitt Town, the New
York suburb where they lived. Before heading home, she.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Said, Hey, can I talk to you for a second
And I said, yeah, my boyfriend's going into work in
fifteen minutes. You could call me then, and she texted back,
he's going to want to hear this.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
The text was from a former last night, someone she
hadn't talked to in months. When the phone rang, Cecilia
put it on speaker.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
She said that her friend came across this website called
come on Printed Picks, in which someone was posting photos
of many of the girls that we had gone to
school with, and she said that there are pictures of
(02:32):
you on there, and I just wanted you to know,
And she also sent me the link to the website.
I opened the link immediately, with my boyfriend over my
shoulder looking at it with me. The first things I
(02:53):
saw when I opened that link, I remember, were photos
of girls that I graduated with. A lot of them
were just pictures from their instagrams. A lot of them
had lengthy captions saying their name and their age and
(03:13):
describing them in gross ways. I remember coming across mine.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
The photo was a selfie. Cecilia had taken it in
the changing room of a clothing store a few months earlier.
It was exactly the same photo she'd posted to social media,
except in this one she was completely naked.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
He described me as a ripe latina plaything.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
And there were others, including one of Cecilia when she
was a lot younger.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
I remember seeing a photo of myself as a child.
I was in elementary school. I had to be five
or sex.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
In the photo, she has chubby cheeks and ringlets that
she's since grown out of.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Next to that.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Innocent image was an erect penis just resting there like.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Like it wasn't and she's away from a digital image
of a child's face.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
She started crying, describing it as that kind of cry
where you sound like you're dying.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
It was such a terrible feeling, and I remember looking
over at my boyfriend at the time, and he looked
back at me, and we didn't share any words, but
his the look his eyes.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Several young women shared a similar experience.
Speaker 5 (05:07):
I felt gross. I felt like I needed to take
a shower. I felt like I wanted to cry. I
wanted to throw up, I wanted to scream.
Speaker 6 (05:15):
I didn't really want to look, but I had to look.
Speaker 7 (05:17):
It was the most horrifying thing.
Speaker 5 (05:19):
But you just can't look away, Like a car accident,
but I'm the car accident. I was just like paralyzed
on my couch for hours because it felt so surreal.
Speaker 6 (05:31):
And then that's when I went to my mom and
I was like, there's like a whole thing going on.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
The news came while they were working a shift at
their retail job or sitting at home watching New Year's
Eve celebrations. Others were away at college parties and ran
home in tears. In all, more than forty young women
found themselves living some version of the story. And they
(06:00):
weren't strangers. Most knew each other from MacArthur High School,
they were on the same cheerleading squad, or they lived
to feudors down from one another. So what are the
chances that they were all targets of someone? They didn't
know that this was all just a weird coincidence. Absolutely zero.
Speaker 4 (06:29):
I'm Olivia Carvill and I'm Margie Murphy from iHeart Podcasts,
Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. This is Levertown. That night, Cecilia drove
back to her boyfriend's house and called the cops. An
(06:50):
hour later, detectives from the Nassau County Police Department were
knocking at the door. She hadn't been the first to
call them interviewed her alone, a painful process that left
her wrung out.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
After the meaning that I had had that night with
the detectives, it became a little bit too much to
bear again. That was the first night of knowing, and
with that came a shark in betrayal and a lot
of heavy emotions.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
At least four of the young women and their parents
called the police that New Year's Eve. They were told
pretty much the same thing Kayla had heard all those
months before. The poster was anonymous, the photos were fake
according to the law at the time, there was no
real crime, but pretty soon messages were flying between the
(07:47):
young women.
Speaker 7 (07:48):
I reached out to a bunch of people and let
them know.
Speaker 4 (07:54):
Leah, who was a sophomore in college at the time,
remembers two things hit her as she scrolled through the
sod like one the shock of seeing her face tacked
onto a naked body that was not hers, and two,
the realization of just how widespread this was. She spent
hours scrolling as she saw one classmate after another defiled
(08:16):
in the same way.
Speaker 7 (08:17):
It was just a whole chain reaction of girls in
our community that were involved in this.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
Unfortunately, by New Year's Day, they weren't just offering each
other support, they were determined to figure out who was
behind this. As they texted back and forth, the women
throughout names of potential suspects. One thought it was a
guy from school who'd been stalking her for months, but
there was another name that kept coming up. It was
(08:48):
a guy most of them barely knew, but Cecilia did.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
I first met him when I was a freshman in
high school. I remember he was very talkative, you know,
easy to talk to.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
She described the group she used to hang out with.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
I hate to say it, but they were the Stoners.
That's who I was with. We would hang out, they
would have these great philosophical talks about whatever it was,
the state of the world, you know, and I felt
I felt so worthy, being deemed like valuable enough to
kind of hang out with them and spend time with
(09:28):
them while they were doing this. I'm just the girl
that they, you know, let hang around. Honestly, it was
probably just because I was pretty. They just let me
hang out because I was a pretty girl and they
could invite me over it. It was validating and reassuring
to have a kind of association that I was a
(09:48):
part of, like a little group that I was a
part of that was mine. You know. They were all really.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
Really nice, except for this one guy.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
He was really sarcastic and condescending, but it was part
of his charm. You know, he's just an asshole. We've
all met this guy usually in high school. He's small
and quick with a comeback. Nagging is basically how he
talks to girls. When I was a sophomore, I had
a lot of classes with him. I had almost all
(10:20):
of my day with him, and we were friends, so
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
(10:41):
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
(11:02):
I said, I guess it does. And that was that.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
The rest of high school was awkward between them. Some
weeks they were friends, he wanted to partner up in
class and asked her for a ride home from school.
Cecilia remembers looking up to him thinking he was really smart.
Then it was like a switch would flip and he
would start icing her out again. She hated it, but
(11:30):
no matter what, he'd always pop up in Cecilia's socials
to troll or debate her, like after she posted about
the importance of mental health in the LGBTQ community.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
I remember he said, I know you see a lot
of your ideals as common sense, but you need to
know you're basically a fascist, and I'm just trying to
advance you past the next five to ten years of
irrational thinking, Like he's doing me some grand favor by
coming into my social media and debating my ear off
(12:06):
about whether this sentence is grammatically correct or not. You know.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
So on New Year's Eve, when Cecilia was staring at
those doctored photos of herself and hearing from her former
classmates that they suspected this old friend of hers, it
was extra personal.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
It's hard to describe the kind of sinking feeling that
I felt in my stomach. There are things you don't
want to believe about your friends or people that you
know are close to you.
Speaker 4 (12:46):
Some of the young women remembered getting notifications that he
had taken screenshots of their pictures on Snapchat, like ones
of them in bikinis. Then they'd see the same pictures
on the website, now altered to make them appein it.
Some recognized his handwriting on images where words like haw
and slat were scrawled across their faces. For Cecilia, the
(13:10):
tell was the long, detailed fantasies posted on the tributing website.
She recognized the writing style.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
I know how he types, and reading his paragraph long
dedications to these girls that he finds disgusting, I read
them in his voice, so it was enough to make
me not a question that it was him.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
One after another, the young woman showed up to the
police station, and when asked who they thought was behind
the posts, many of them had the same answer. They
figured the police would take it from there, but the
police told them that these suspicion weren't enough. They would
need hard evidence, the kind that could help them prove
(14:06):
in court who had written the posts and as far
as the women and their families knew, that's where the
police were leaving it. They didn't hear much, if anything,
from the detectives after giving their statements. But as the
new year turned into spring and then summer, the anonymous
(14:27):
poster got bolder, uploading hundreds of new photos. These young
women watched in horror as a barrage of deep faked
nude images, pictures of them as young as thirteen flooded
the tributing website.
Speaker 5 (14:44):
Seeing these horrible things and people commenting on what we
look like and you know, putting our faces on screenshots
of foreign videos.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
New accounts with names like tween Hunter were posting and
reposting increasingly graphic fakes. Some of the threads reached thirty
thousand views. Full names, addresses, phone numbers, and actual social
media handles went up next to the images. The poster
(15:16):
was encouraging others to reach out to the women, to
send them voice notes threatening to rape them to death.
By the spring of twenty twenty one, some of the
Levittown women were getting direct messages to their Facebook, Instagram,
(15:37):
and Snapchat accounts their photos beside male genitalia or covered
in semen. Others got late night calls from foreign numbers.
When they picked up, they only heard heavy breathing and moaning.
Kayla told me that she didn't want to live in fear,
(15:58):
but she did. She lived in fear of going outside,
in fear of men, and fear of being herself. She
had nightmares of me and hunting her.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
But I could hear them like trying to find me,
and they would like say my name, and like they
would say the things from the website, like the milk
me and pea on her, like they were saying those
things while trying to find me.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
She also dreamed that the images on the website had
come true, that she had the words rape me tattooed
on her forehead, just as she'd seen on the website.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
I mean, I live every single day scared of man.
I mean not all men, but strangers, yes, all the time.
Because God forbid, it's someone that was on that website
that has just passed me on the street. You don't
know that, and that's scary.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
Suddenly I'm not post seeing my face on my Instagram
because I don't know who's gonna find it, you know?
And I directed so much guilt and uh so much
of his hate towards myself.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Most of the Levettown women turned their social media accounts
to private, but many deleted them all together. One dropped
out of college, another told me she lost twenty pounds
from the stress. Two confided that they had started carrying
knives everywhere they went. These are the stories we heard
(17:40):
from the women who agreed to talk to us. We
reached out to many others who either didn't respond or
didn't want to talk about it.
Speaker 5 (17:50):
I felt horrible for the main victims. I mean, we
are all victims, but there were some people who had
it much worse.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Leah not have been the main target. Others found dozens
and dozens of posts with their image and likeness, but
still whoever was doing this posted Li's full name and
phone number on the site. She worried what would happen
if someone, anyone really an employer, a romantic partner, ever
(18:21):
googled her.
Speaker 5 (18:22):
I was really worried about my future because I wanted to,
you know, like go to medical school, and I was
worried about the safety of all of my friends, and
what if these pictures, you know, get lead to like
their family members, and they can ruin relationships. Because some
of them were so realistic. This could ruin many people's lives.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
As the months went by, the women reported that the
harassment was escalating. Their parents were terrified, not only because
of what their children were going through, but because the
police didn't seem to be doing much. Cyber harassment cases
are notoriously hard to prove. Gathering digital evidence can be
time consuming and hard to capture, and most perpetrators cover
(19:07):
their tracks. Many of the parents created their own group
chats to brainstorm what to do. They were outraged that
their daughters were still being targeted, while the person they
believed was responsible for all this was right there among
them in Levettown. If law enforcement couldn't do anything about it,
(19:27):
they were going to have to do something themselves.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
That summer twenty twenty one, one of the Leavettown women
saw an image that almost broke her. We recorded an
interview with her, but she wasn't comfortable using her actual voice,
so the things she said in that interview will be
voiced here by someone else.
Speaker 6 (19:57):
I've learned not to trust anybody very private with things
now I don't really talk to anybody that I don't
trust and obvious naive because that was my problem. I'm
too nice.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
The photo that almost broke her was a photo of
herself smiling, wearing jeans and a white tank top. Beside
that appeared to be a deep fake of a woman
in the exact same outfit, her hands tied behind her back,
covered in blood, with a plastic bag over her head.
(20:35):
The caption said her body had been found near an
abandoned construction site, that she had been raped. We're calling
her Cat because she asked not to be identified by
her real name, but the post she found listed her
real name and claimed a snuff video of her murder
(20:58):
was circulating on the dark.
Speaker 6 (21:01):
I'd had enough.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
It had to stop.
Speaker 6 (21:03):
I was like, Okay, this is like more serious, and
I need to know. I just need to know who
it is.
Speaker 7 (21:10):
You know.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
She was aware that others thought they knew who was
behind all this, but the suspect was a guy she'd
known since she was five. They grew up three blocks
away from each other.
Speaker 6 (21:23):
In my head, I was almost defending him. I was like,
I don't think it's him, There's no way it's him.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
In high school that had a lot of classes together,
including a photoshop class, and while they didn't hang out,
they were still sort of friends, like they would snapchat
occasionally outside school.
Speaker 6 (21:45):
In high school, he got a little bit more like
I don't really give a shit vibe about anything. He
was smart, so like he knew what he was talking about,
you know, but anybody who said anything to him is
just like, Okay, I don't care. I'm smarter than anybody.
Speaker 4 (22:03):
Kat talks about him in the same way Cecilia does.
He would troll her at times, but was also smart
and could be fun. He knew how to push her buttons,
calling her naive. He'd tell her the world was full
of shitty people and sure, you want everything to be okay,
but it's not. She knew all this, but she didn't think,
(22:29):
or maybe didn't want to think it was him. She thought,
perhaps that she would be able to both clear his
name and figure out who was doing this once and
for all.
Speaker 6 (22:41):
Then that's when I went on the website. I sat
there for like, I had to look at things I
did not want to look at.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
From her bedroom at night, she carefully examined every post.
The suspected harassment made I spent.
Speaker 6 (22:56):
Like hours going through it, and then I went to
video of his own page where he would post himself.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
Cat found that the person posting deep fakes of her
and her classmates was also posting explicit pictures of himself
on the website.
Speaker 6 (23:11):
He would post things of himself, pictures of himself, not
his face, like his body and his parts.
Speaker 4 (23:20):
She found one picture where he appeared to be wearing
girls underwear while standing in a little girl's bedroom.
Speaker 6 (23:27):
Let me look in the background, Let me see if
I could see anything in the background. So I saw
stuffed animals and I was like, all right, let me see.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
She saw a white dresser with brown trim and a
stuffed toy sloth on the bed. Kat knew the guy
everyone suspected had younger twin sisters.
Speaker 6 (23:50):
So I went on his TikTok and I looked up
his sister and then I had the same exact stuffed
animals in the same background, and I was like, okay.
Speaker 4 (24:02):
His sister was posting dance videos to TikTok and they
were filmed in the same bedroom with a white dresser
and brown trim. Even that stuffed toy was in the
same spot on the bed.
Speaker 6 (24:15):
Oh my god, this is crazy. It really is him.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
His name was Patrick Carey. He definitely wasn't a stranger.
He was nineteen years old and he had also gone
to MacArthur High. His dad, like Kayla's, was a cop.
He lived three blocks away from cat just over the
back fence from their old elementary school in Levettown. She
(24:48):
went back to the police.
Speaker 8 (24:50):
They came to me with a photo of Patrick Carrey
in the bedroom.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
In August, Kat and her mum printed out the screenshots
the images on TikTok and on the website, and they
brought them to the lead detective on the case, Timothy Ingram.
Speaker 8 (25:07):
These girls they did their own investigating and they did
excellent work. They would make great detectives.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
But when I recently sat down with Detective Tim Ingram,
he told me that from the first day the woman
came in, the police were proactive.
Speaker 8 (25:22):
A lot of my coworkers hadn't really seen anything like this,
where it was to this level of you know, him
posting everywhere for so long, with so many.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Victims, He said. They immediately filed subpoenas for information connected
to users of the website, but getting an answer takes
time and Ingram said he didn't want to talk to
Patrick until he had enough evidence to arrest him. The
police did eventually find out that one of the users
(25:56):
on the website was posting from an ip address that
traced back to Patrick's family home, but even that wasn't
enough to arrest Patrick, and the police still had to
figure out what exactly to charge him with, because while
New York State had laws on the books for revenge
(26:20):
porn and child sexual abuse material, the images had to
be real, and in this case, they were fake.
Speaker 8 (26:29):
Being that it was a very new type of crime
where we it was a gray area per se, where
we weren't even sure if this met the criteria it's
filipenal law charge.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
We attempted to speak to Patrick Carrey for the story
and he declined. But while the police may have been
closer to making an arrest for the young woman of Leavittown,
the fear didn't just go away. Kat was glad that
she helped match Patrick Carrey with the postings, but she
(27:04):
was still terrified, and Cecilia was struggling to cope with
the fact that the person who had done this to
her was someone she had considered a friend.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
It kind of touches a part of your soul and
just breaks it in. Hah, because you watched me kind
of grow up. You know, you spent most of my
teenage years with me, So you're telling me that all
(27:39):
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 turning to rape me.
It kind of feels like he hallowed me out of
(28:00):
that made me who I am, And that is one
of the most horrifying things I think I've ever experienced.
They don't mind that he didn't respect me, you know,
or see me as a friend. I mind that he
didn't even see me as a person, you know, And that.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
Sense of horror it wasn't limited to Cecilia and Kayla
and the other women in Levittown, because powered by this
one website, that sort of harassment is hugely scalable. As
Detective Ingram started looking into the site, he saw that
the more than forty women in Levittown and their alleged tormentor,
(28:46):
which is a small part of a much bigger ecosystem
of men exploiting women in an interactive global arena.
Speaker 8 (28:55):
Somewhere in Scotland, somewhere in Russia. They were everywhere.
Speaker 4 (28:59):
Hundreds, maybe thousands of women and girls all around the
world were on the site. Olivia and I started to
get interested in what or who was behind this global
clearinghouse of non consensual pornographic images. Turns out we weren't
the only ones. Next time on Leavettown.
Speaker 9 (29:25):
You have certain police officers there that will wait for
calls to come in and then now go and respond
to those courts. I like to identify myself as a hunter.
I'm the person that will go and hunt people. If
you're given pray, you want to go and get it.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
This series is reported and hosted by Margie Murphy and
me Olivia Carvell. Produced by Kaleidoscope, Led by Julia Nutter,
Edited by Nidda tuluis Simnani, Producing by Dara luck Potts.
Executive produced by Kate Osborne. Original composition and mixing by
Steve bone Our. Bloomberg editors are Caitlin Kenney and Jeff Grocock.
(30:08):
Additional reporting by Samanthus Stewart. Sage Bauman 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. Levettown is a production of Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope
and iHeart Podcasts. If you liked this show, give us
(30:32):
a follow and tell your friends
A quick note, this is episode two of a six
part series. If you haven't heard the prior episodes, we
recommend going back and starting there. It should also be
noted that this series explores sexualized imagery involving miners and violence.
Please take care when listening.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
I got a call when I was working up my
old job at a clothing store, and I see one
of the classmates popped up on my phone. She goes,
I saw you on the website. I just want to
let you know I'm also on this website.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
It was New Year's Eve twenty twenty, nearly a year
after Kayla's father had knocked on her bedroom door to
show her the images he had found of her online.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
And I remember just like walking away from the register
and I was just like, okay, Like, how many other
people are on there?
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Kayla wasn't the only one whose phone was lighting up.
Speaker 3 (01:13):
I got a text. I was parked in the mall
parking lot outside of the entrance to the movie theater
with my boyfriend at the time, who was about to
start his evening night shift.
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Cecilia was tucked in the driver's seat while rain pelted
the windshield. She'd planned to drop her boyfriend off at
his job at the mall near Leavitt Town, the New
York suburb where they lived. Before heading home, she.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Said, Hey, can I talk to you for a second
And I said, yeah, my boyfriend's going into work in
fifteen minutes. You could call me then, and she texted back,
he's going to want to hear this.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
The text was from a former last night, someone she
hadn't talked to in months. When the phone rang, Cecilia
put it on speaker.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
She said that her friend came across this website called
come on Printed Picks, in which someone was posting photos
of many of the girls that we had gone to
school with, and she said that there are pictures of
(02:32):
you on there, and I just wanted you to know,
And she also sent me the link to the website.
I opened the link immediately, with my boyfriend over my
shoulder looking at it with me. The first things I
(02:53):
saw when I opened that link, I remember, were photos
of girls that I graduated with. A lot of them
were just pictures from their instagrams. A lot of them
had lengthy captions saying their name and their age and
(03:13):
describing them in gross ways. I remember coming across mine.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
The photo was a selfie. Cecilia had taken it in
the changing room of a clothing store a few months earlier.
It was exactly the same photo she'd posted to social media,
except in this one she was completely naked.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
He described me as a ripe latina plaything.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
And there were others, including one of Cecilia when she
was a lot younger.
Speaker 3 (03:56):
I remember seeing a photo of myself as a child.
I was in elementary school. I had to be five
or sex.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
In the photo, she has chubby cheeks and ringlets that
she's since grown out of.
Speaker 4 (04:13):
Next to that.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Innocent image was an erect penis just resting there like.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
Like it wasn't and she's away from a digital image
of a child's face.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
She started crying, describing it as that kind of cry
where you sound like you're dying.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
It was such a terrible feeling, and I remember looking
over at my boyfriend at the time, and he looked
back at me, and we didn't share any words, but
his the look his eyes.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
Several young women shared a similar experience.
Speaker 5 (05:07):
I felt gross. I felt like I needed to take
a shower. I felt like I wanted to cry. I
wanted to throw up, I wanted to scream.
Speaker 6 (05:15):
I didn't really want to look, but I had to look.
Speaker 7 (05:17):
It was the most horrifying thing.
Speaker 5 (05:19):
But you just can't look away, Like a car accident,
but I'm the car accident. I was just like paralyzed
on my couch for hours because it felt so surreal.
Speaker 6 (05:31):
And then that's when I went to my mom and
I was like, there's like a whole thing going on.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
The news came while they were working a shift at
their retail job or sitting at home watching New Year's
Eve celebrations. Others were away at college parties and ran
home in tears. In all, more than forty young women
found themselves living some version of the story. And they
(06:00):
weren't strangers. Most knew each other from MacArthur High School,
they were on the same cheerleading squad, or they lived
to feudors down from one another. So what are the
chances that they were all targets of someone? They didn't
know that this was all just a weird coincidence. Absolutely zero.
Speaker 4 (06:29):
I'm Olivia Carvill and I'm Margie Murphy from iHeart Podcasts,
Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. This is Levertown. That night, Cecilia drove
back to her boyfriend's house and called the cops. An
(06:50):
hour later, detectives from the Nassau County Police Department were
knocking at the door. She hadn't been the first to
call them interviewed her alone, a painful process that left
her wrung out.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
After the meaning that I had had that night with
the detectives, it became a little bit too much to
bear again. That was the first night of knowing, and
with that came a shark in betrayal and a lot
of heavy emotions.
Speaker 4 (07:25):
At least four of the young women and their parents
called the police that New Year's Eve. They were told
pretty much the same thing Kayla had heard all those
months before. The poster was anonymous, the photos were fake
according to the law at the time, there was no
real crime, but pretty soon messages were flying between the
(07:47):
young women.
Speaker 7 (07:48):
I reached out to a bunch of people and let
them know.
Speaker 4 (07:54):
Leah, who was a sophomore in college at the time,
remembers two things hit her as she scrolled through the
sod like one the shock of seeing her face tacked
onto a naked body that was not hers, and two,
the realization of just how widespread this was. She spent
hours scrolling as she saw one classmate after another defiled
(08:16):
in the same way.
Speaker 7 (08:17):
It was just a whole chain reaction of girls in
our community that were involved in this.
Speaker 4 (08:25):
Unfortunately, by New Year's Day, they weren't just offering each
other support, they were determined to figure out who was
behind this. As they texted back and forth, the women
throughout names of potential suspects. One thought it was a
guy from school who'd been stalking her for months, but
there was another name that kept coming up. It was
(08:48):
a guy most of them barely knew, but Cecilia did.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
I first met him when I was a freshman in
high school. I remember he was very talkative, you know,
easy to talk to.
Speaker 4 (09:03):
She described the group she used to hang out with.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
I hate to say it, but they were the Stoners.
That's who I was with. We would hang out, they
would have these great philosophical talks about whatever it was,
the state of the world, you know, and I felt
I felt so worthy, being deemed like valuable enough to
kind of hang out with them and spend time with
(09:28):
them while they were doing this. I'm just the girl
that they, you know, let hang around. Honestly, it was
probably just because I was pretty. They just let me
hang out because I was a pretty girl and they
could invite me over it. It was validating and reassuring
to have a kind of association that I was a
(09:48):
part of, like a little group that I was a
part of that was mine. You know. They were all really.
Speaker 4 (09:54):
Really nice, except for this one guy.
Speaker 3 (09:58):
He was really sarcastic and condescending, but it was part
of his charm. You know, he's just an asshole. We've
all met this guy usually in high school. He's small
and quick with a comeback. Nagging is basically how he
talks to girls. When I was a sophomore, I had
a lot of classes with him. I had almost all
(10:20):
of my day with him, and we were friends, so
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
(10:41):
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
(11:02):
I said, I guess it does. And that was that.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
The rest of high school was awkward between them. Some
weeks they were friends, he wanted to partner up in
class and asked her for a ride home from school.
Cecilia remembers looking up to him thinking he was really smart.
Then it was like a switch would flip and he
would start icing her out again. She hated it, but
(11:30):
no matter what, he'd always pop up in Cecilia's socials
to troll or debate her, like after she posted about
the importance of mental health in the LGBTQ community.
Speaker 3 (11:42):
I remember he said, I know you see a lot
of your ideals as common sense, but you need to
know you're basically a fascist, and I'm just trying to
advance you past the next five to ten years of
irrational thinking, Like he's doing me some grand favor by
coming into my social media and debating my ear off
(12:06):
about whether this sentence is grammatically correct or not. You know.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
So on New Year's Eve, when Cecilia was staring at
those doctored photos of herself and hearing from her former
classmates that they suspected this old friend of hers, it
was extra personal.
Speaker 3 (12:29):
It's hard to describe the kind of sinking feeling that
I felt in my stomach. There are things you don't
want to believe about your friends or people that you
know are close to you.
Speaker 4 (12:46):
Some of the young women remembered getting notifications that he
had taken screenshots of their pictures on Snapchat, like ones
of them in bikinis. Then they'd see the same pictures
on the website, now altered to make them appein it.
Some recognized his handwriting on images where words like haw
and slat were scrawled across their faces. For Cecilia, the
(13:10):
tell was the long, detailed fantasies posted on the tributing website.
She recognized the writing style.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
I know how he types, and reading his paragraph long
dedications to these girls that he finds disgusting, I read
them in his voice, so it was enough to make
me not a question that it was him.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
One after another, the young woman showed up to the
police station, and when asked who they thought was behind
the posts, many of them had the same answer. They
figured the police would take it from there, but the
police told them that these suspicion weren't enough. They would
need hard evidence, the kind that could help them prove
(14:06):
in court who had written the posts and as far
as the women and their families knew, that's where the
police were leaving it. They didn't hear much, if anything,
from the detectives after giving their statements. But as the
new year turned into spring and then summer, the anonymous
(14:27):
poster got bolder, uploading hundreds of new photos. These young
women watched in horror as a barrage of deep faked
nude images, pictures of them as young as thirteen flooded
the tributing website.
Speaker 5 (14:44):
Seeing these horrible things and people commenting on what we
look like and you know, putting our faces on screenshots
of foreign videos.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
New accounts with names like tween Hunter were posting and
reposting increasingly graphic fakes. Some of the threads reached thirty
thousand views. Full names, addresses, phone numbers, and actual social
media handles went up next to the images. The poster
(15:16):
was encouraging others to reach out to the women, to
send them voice notes threatening to rape them to death.
By the spring of twenty twenty one, some of the
Levittown women were getting direct messages to their Facebook, Instagram,
(15:37):
and Snapchat accounts their photos beside male genitalia or covered
in semen. Others got late night calls from foreign numbers.
When they picked up, they only heard heavy breathing and moaning.
Kayla told me that she didn't want to live in fear,
(15:58):
but she did. She lived in fear of going outside,
in fear of men, and fear of being herself. She
had nightmares of me and hunting her.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
But I could hear them like trying to find me,
and they would like say my name, and like they
would say the things from the website, like the milk
me and pea on her, like they were saying those
things while trying to find me.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
She also dreamed that the images on the website had
come true, that she had the words rape me tattooed
on her forehead, just as she'd seen on the website.
Speaker 2 (16:36):
I mean, I live every single day scared of man.
I mean not all men, but strangers, yes, all the time.
Because God forbid, it's someone that was on that website
that has just passed me on the street. You don't
know that, and that's scary.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
Suddenly I'm not post seeing my face on my Instagram
because I don't know who's gonna find it, you know?
And I directed so much guilt and uh so much
of his hate towards myself.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Most of the Levettown women turned their social media accounts
to private, but many deleted them all together. One dropped
out of college, another told me she lost twenty pounds
from the stress. Two confided that they had started carrying
knives everywhere they went. These are the stories we heard
(17:40):
from the women who agreed to talk to us. We
reached out to many others who either didn't respond or
didn't want to talk about it.
Speaker 5 (17:50):
I felt horrible for the main victims. I mean, we
are all victims, but there were some people who had
it much worse.
Speaker 1 (17:59):
Leah not have been the main target. Others found dozens
and dozens of posts with their image and likeness, but
still whoever was doing this posted Li's full name and
phone number on the site. She worried what would happen
if someone, anyone really an employer, a romantic partner, ever
(18:21):
googled her.
Speaker 5 (18:22):
I was really worried about my future because I wanted to,
you know, like go to medical school, and I was
worried about the safety of all of my friends, and
what if these pictures, you know, get lead to like
their family members, and they can ruin relationships. Because some
of them were so realistic. This could ruin many people's lives.
Speaker 4 (18:42):
As the months went by, the women reported that the
harassment was escalating. Their parents were terrified, not only because
of what their children were going through, but because the
police didn't seem to be doing much. Cyber harassment cases
are notoriously hard to prove. Gathering digital evidence can be
time consuming and hard to capture, and most perpetrators cover
(19:07):
their tracks. Many of the parents created their own group
chats to brainstorm what to do. They were outraged that
their daughters were still being targeted, while the person they
believed was responsible for all this was right there among
them in Levettown. If law enforcement couldn't do anything about it,
(19:27):
they were going to have to do something themselves.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
That summer twenty twenty one, one of the Leavettown women
saw an image that almost broke her. We recorded an
interview with her, but she wasn't comfortable using her actual voice,
so the things she said in that interview will be
voiced here by someone else.
Speaker 6 (19:57):
I've learned not to trust anybody very private with things
now I don't really talk to anybody that I don't
trust and obvious naive because that was my problem. I'm
too nice.
Speaker 1 (20:11):
The photo that almost broke her was a photo of
herself smiling, wearing jeans and a white tank top. Beside
that appeared to be a deep fake of a woman
in the exact same outfit, her hands tied behind her back,
covered in blood, with a plastic bag over her head.
(20:35):
The caption said her body had been found near an
abandoned construction site, that she had been raped. We're calling
her Cat because she asked not to be identified by
her real name, but the post she found listed her
real name and claimed a snuff video of her murder
(20:58):
was circulating on the dark.
Speaker 6 (21:01):
I'd had enough.
Speaker 4 (21:02):
It had to stop.
Speaker 6 (21:03):
I was like, Okay, this is like more serious, and
I need to know. I just need to know who
it is.
Speaker 7 (21:10):
You know.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
She was aware that others thought they knew who was
behind all this, but the suspect was a guy she'd
known since she was five. They grew up three blocks
away from each other.
Speaker 6 (21:23):
In my head, I was almost defending him. I was like,
I don't think it's him, There's no way it's him.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
In high school that had a lot of classes together,
including a photoshop class, and while they didn't hang out,
they were still sort of friends, like they would snapchat
occasionally outside school.
Speaker 6 (21:45):
In high school, he got a little bit more like
I don't really give a shit vibe about anything. He
was smart, so like he knew what he was talking about,
you know, but anybody who said anything to him is
just like, Okay, I don't care. I'm smarter than anybody.
Speaker 4 (22:03):
Kat talks about him in the same way Cecilia does.
He would troll her at times, but was also smart
and could be fun. He knew how to push her buttons,
calling her naive. He'd tell her the world was full
of shitty people and sure, you want everything to be okay,
but it's not. She knew all this, but she didn't think,
(22:29):
or maybe didn't want to think it was him. She thought,
perhaps that she would be able to both clear his
name and figure out who was doing this once and
for all.
Speaker 6 (22:41):
Then that's when I went on the website. I sat
there for like, I had to look at things I
did not want to look at.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
From her bedroom at night, she carefully examined every post.
The suspected harassment made I spent.
Speaker 6 (22:56):
Like hours going through it, and then I went to
video of his own page where he would post himself.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
Cat found that the person posting deep fakes of her
and her classmates was also posting explicit pictures of himself
on the website.
Speaker 6 (23:11):
He would post things of himself, pictures of himself, not
his face, like his body and his parts.
Speaker 4 (23:20):
She found one picture where he appeared to be wearing
girls underwear while standing in a little girl's bedroom.
Speaker 6 (23:27):
Let me look in the background, Let me see if
I could see anything in the background. So I saw
stuffed animals and I was like, all right, let me see.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
She saw a white dresser with brown trim and a
stuffed toy sloth on the bed. Kat knew the guy
everyone suspected had younger twin sisters.
Speaker 6 (23:50):
So I went on his TikTok and I looked up
his sister and then I had the same exact stuffed
animals in the same background, and I was like, okay.
Speaker 4 (24:02):
His sister was posting dance videos to TikTok and they
were filmed in the same bedroom with a white dresser
and brown trim. Even that stuffed toy was in the
same spot on the bed.
Speaker 6 (24:15):
Oh my god, this is crazy. It really is him.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
His name was Patrick Carey. He definitely wasn't a stranger.
He was nineteen years old and he had also gone
to MacArthur High. His dad, like Kayla's, was a cop.
He lived three blocks away from cat just over the
back fence from their old elementary school in Levettown. She
(24:48):
went back to the police.
Speaker 8 (24:50):
They came to me with a photo of Patrick Carrey
in the bedroom.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
In August, Kat and her mum printed out the screenshots
the images on TikTok and on the website, and they
brought them to the lead detective on the case, Timothy Ingram.
Speaker 8 (25:07):
These girls they did their own investigating and they did
excellent work. They would make great detectives.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
But when I recently sat down with Detective Tim Ingram,
he told me that from the first day the woman
came in, the police were proactive.
Speaker 8 (25:22):
A lot of my coworkers hadn't really seen anything like this,
where it was to this level of you know, him
posting everywhere for so long, with so many.
Speaker 1 (25:34):
Victims, He said. They immediately filed subpoenas for information connected
to users of the website, but getting an answer takes
time and Ingram said he didn't want to talk to
Patrick until he had enough evidence to arrest him. The
police did eventually find out that one of the users
(25:56):
on the website was posting from an ip address that
traced back to Patrick's family home, but even that wasn't
enough to arrest Patrick, and the police still had to
figure out what exactly to charge him with, because while
New York State had laws on the books for revenge
(26:20):
porn and child sexual abuse material, the images had to
be real, and in this case, they were fake.
Speaker 8 (26:29):
Being that it was a very new type of crime
where we it was a gray area per se, where
we weren't even sure if this met the criteria it's
filipenal law charge.
Speaker 1 (26:42):
We attempted to speak to Patrick Carrey for the story
and he declined. But while the police may have been
closer to making an arrest for the young woman of Leavittown,
the fear didn't just go away. Kat was glad that
she helped match Patrick Carrey with the postings, but she
(27:04):
was still terrified, and Cecilia was struggling to cope with
the fact that the person who had done this to
her was someone she had considered a friend.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
It kind of touches a part of your soul and
just breaks it in. Hah, because you watched me kind
of grow up. You know, you spent most of my
teenage years with me, So you're telling me that all
(27:39):
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 turning to rape me.
It kind of feels like he hallowed me out of
(28:00):
that made me who I am, And that is one
of the most horrifying things I think I've ever experienced.
They don't mind that he didn't respect me, you know,
or see me as a friend. I mind that he
didn't even see me as a person, you know, And that.
Speaker 4 (28:23):
Sense of horror it wasn't limited to Cecilia and Kayla
and the other women in Levittown, because powered by this
one website, that sort of harassment is hugely scalable. As
Detective Ingram started looking into the site, he saw that
the more than forty women in Levittown and their alleged tormentor,
(28:46):
which is a small part of a much bigger ecosystem
of men exploiting women in an interactive global arena.
Speaker 8 (28:55):
Somewhere in Scotland, somewhere in Russia. They were everywhere.
Speaker 4 (28:59):
Hundreds, maybe thousands of women and girls all around the
world were on the site. Olivia and I started to
get interested in what or who was behind this global
clearinghouse of non consensual pornographic images. Turns out we weren't
the only ones. Next time on Leavettown.
Speaker 9 (29:25):
You have certain police officers there that will wait for
calls to come in and then now go and respond
to those courts. I like to identify myself as a hunter.
I'm the person that will go and hunt people. If
you're given pray, you want to go and get it.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
This series is reported and hosted by Margie Murphy and
me Olivia Carvell. Produced by Kaleidoscope, Led by Julia Nutter,
Edited by Nidda tuluis Simnani, Producing by Dara luck Potts.
Executive produced by Kate Osborne. Original composition and mixing by
Steve bone Our. Bloomberg editors are Caitlin Kenney and Jeff Grocock.
(30:08):
Additional reporting by Samanthus Stewart. Sage Bauman 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. Levettown is a production of Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope
and iHeart Podcasts. If you liked this show, give us
(30:32):
a follow and tell your friends
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