Speaker 1: A quick note. This is episode four of a six
Speaker 1: part series. If you haven't heard the prior episodes, we
Speaker 1: recommend going back and starting there. It should also be
Speaker 1: noted that this series explores sexualized imagery involving miners and violence.
Speaker 1: Please take care when listening. Detective Timothy Ingram in New
Speaker 1: York was en route to make an arrest. He had
Speaker 1: been working the Levittown Deep Fate case for eight months,
Speaker 1: ever since a number of young women first called the
Speaker 1: police that New Year's Eve. He had had enough. It
Speaker 1: was five o'clock in the evening when Tim and his
Speaker 1: partner drove through a quiet Livettown neighborhood and stopped in
Speaker 1: front of a small, light blue Cape cod style.
Speaker 2: It looked like a regular house. The grass was caught,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 1: The house had a backyard that she had a fence
Speaker 1: with an elementary school.
Speaker 2: It was just just an everyday house where you wouldn't
Speaker 2: expect this to be going on.
Speaker 1: That morning, yet another young woman had walked into a
Speaker 1: local precinct to tell the police a now familiar story,
Speaker 1: one that matched the stories of so many others. This time, though,
Speaker 1: the detectives had already received some key evidence evidence that
Speaker 1: showed the person behind the posts was a guy many
Speaker 1: of the women knew someone they went to high school with,
Speaker 1: Patrick Carry, And at that.
Speaker 2: Point my partner and I at the time kind of
Speaker 2: looked at each other and you know, this has to end. Now,
Speaker 2: whether we go to his house and he clams up
Speaker 2: and doesn't say anything, or whether he admits to it,
Speaker 2: he was coming with us either way. So when we
Speaker 2: got there, we knocked on the door and Patrick Carry
Speaker 2: answered the door, and from what I recall, I think
Speaker 2: he was shirtless when he answered the door. We asked
Speaker 2: him to come outside after we identified herself as detectives.
Speaker 2: So he turned around and he told his mom that
Speaker 2: we were there, and his mother came outside also, and
Speaker 2: he sat down on the front steps of the house,
Speaker 2: in front of the front door, and his mom stood
Speaker 2: next to him, and we asked him if he knew
Speaker 2: why we were there, and he said no, and we said, okay,
Speaker 2: you know, we just want to we want to talk
Speaker 2: to you about some things that are going on the internet.
Speaker 2: And I said, I'm going to read this to you now.
Speaker 2: I wanted him to hear out loud the things he
Speaker 2: was writing, and I wanted to see his reaction to
Speaker 2: other people knowing about what he was doing, and that's
Speaker 2: when we started to read this murder rape fantasy, and
Speaker 2: maybe halfway through it, his mother asked us to stop.
Speaker 2: Looked at him. She had some choice words for him,
Speaker 2: and he looked at us, dead in the eyes, and
Speaker 2: he said, yeah, it was me. I did it.
Speaker 1: What are the choice words his mum said to him.
Speaker 2: I believe she said, you're a fucking asshole.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yes, And at that point we didn't need anything else,
Speaker 2: you know, he admitted to everything without us asking a
Speaker 2: single question.
Speaker 1: We attempted to speak with Patrick and his family for
Speaker 1: the story and they declined. Do you remember your reaction
Speaker 1: to his arrest?
Speaker 4: Yeah? I was shocked that they had built the case
Speaker 4: enough to be able to arrest him.
Speaker 1: It had been months since Patrick's off and on high
Speaker 1: school friend Cecilia had given her statement to detectives. She
Speaker 1: knew there was an ongoing investigation, but figured nothing would
Speaker 1: come of.
Speaker 4: It because when it happened, I didn't think that it
Speaker 4: was enough. It was a threat and predatory and dangerous,
Speaker 4: but I didn't think that the law would see it
Speaker 4: that way. I didn't think that they would validate I
Speaker 4: didn't think that they would view it as something that
Speaker 4: needed to be punished and put away. For I had
Speaker 4: lost hope that this was going to turn into anything.
Speaker 4: So when I found out that he was arrested, I
Speaker 4: was so so surprised.
Speaker 1: These concerns that Cecilia had about whether what Patrick Carey
Speaker 1: had done to her would be seen as a crime,
Speaker 1: those were the very same concerns nagging the prosecutors in charge.
Speaker 4: Of this case.
Speaker 1: Patrick Carey's behavior was awful, but was it criminal?
Speaker 5: iHeart podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. This is Lavet Town. I'm
Speaker 5: Margie Marthy.
Speaker 1: And I'm Olivia Carvell. That night, Patrick was pulled off
Speaker 1: his front porch, handcuffed, put into the back of a
Speaker 1: police car, and escorted into a small eight y eight
Speaker 1: interview room at the Nassau County Police Department. There, he
Speaker 1: handed over his devices and signed a confession. One of
Speaker 1: the questions the detectives had for Patrick was why why
Speaker 1: did he do this? Which was the same question Margie
Speaker 1: and I had for Patrick. Patrick and his former attorney
Speaker 1: declined to be interviewed for this podcast, but what we
Speaker 1: do have is the statement he gave the evening of
Speaker 1: his arrest. Patrick started by admitting that he was the
Speaker 1: sole person behind several usernames on the website, and that
Speaker 1: he had been active there since twenty nineteen, his senior
Speaker 1: year of high school.
Speaker 6: I started using these accounts because I became bored and
Speaker 6: could not find any interest in my life.
Speaker 1: This is a voice actor reading verbatim from Patrick's confession.
Speaker 6: I became addicted to internet pornography and began to find
Speaker 6: websites such as comeonprintedpecks dot com.
Speaker 1: Patrick says he used the website for more than two years,
Speaker 1: posting pictures of the girls he went to high school with,
Speaker 1: with their social media handles and other contact information. He
Speaker 1: said that he encouraged other users too. As he puts,
Speaker 1: it shame.
Speaker 6: These females into a depression and caused them to be
Speaker 6: too scared to use any form of social media. I
Speaker 6: found a thrill in posting these things so that website
Speaker 6: because I knew that what I was doing was wrong
Speaker 6: and that I was causing fear and embarrassment to these girls.
Speaker 6: This gave me a sense of life, knowing that in
Speaker 6: the back of my head this was wrong and that
Speaker 6: I would one day be caught.
Speaker 1: He described it as almost an obsession, a cycle of
Speaker 1: thrill seeking, then guilt, then thrill seeking again.
Speaker 6: From time to time throughout the course of me posting
Speaker 6: on this website, I did begin to feel remorse for
Speaker 6: the fear and embarrassment I was causing these girls. Once
Speaker 6: the sense of remorse wore off, I would become complacent
Speaker 6: and bored and seek the thrill of posting something again,
Speaker 6: knowing it was wrong. I am sorry for the fear,
Speaker 6: suffering and embarrassment I have caused to all of the victims.
Speaker 7: I'm going through it and I'm reading his statement and
Speaker 7: I'm like, hey, wow, it was awful, Like it was
Speaker 7: an awful thing to read.
Speaker 1: Assistant District Attorney Melissa Scannell was at her desk the
Speaker 1: Monday morning after Patrick's arrest. Melissa has experienced prosecuting sex crimes.
Speaker 1: She's also the head of the officer's cyber crimes unit.
Speaker 1: The details of this particular report jumped.
Speaker 7: Out a lot of what I do. I see really
Speaker 7: horrible things, and I have, you know, my prior cases,
Speaker 7: and my case is now. I've seen and dealt with
Speaker 7: pretty terrible things. So sometimes my barometer is off and
Speaker 7: I find it very helpful to go to somebody else
Speaker 7: and be like.
Speaker 3: Is this that bad? Is this worse?
Speaker 7: You know, like, am I reacting normally here?
Speaker 1: After she read Patrick's statement, she ran down the hall
Speaker 1: to find her colleague Kelsey.
Speaker 5: Laura, it was shocking.
Speaker 3: It was the things he was saying, what he was
Speaker 3: doing was it was. It was shocking, and it kind
Speaker 3: of it stays with you. To me, it seemed like
Speaker 3: the purpose of the website wasn't even sexual anymore. It
Speaker 3: was more, you know, let's let's take women down a peg,
Speaker 3: let's you know, degrade them. Basically, that was the purpose
Speaker 3: of the website was degradation.
Speaker 1: Kelsey's another assistant DA. She usually works on racketeering cases,
Speaker 1: things like organized crime, drug trafficking, extortion, but this case
Speaker 1: was different. It was more personal. Kelsey had graduated from
Speaker 1: MacArthur High School. She had walked the same halls as
Speaker 1: these young women. Kelsey and Melissa looked at the charges
Speaker 1: and realized it was a series of misdemeanor harassment and
Speaker 1: obscenity violations, meaning Patrick would only face up to a
Speaker 1: year in jail at most. They believed his actions were
Speaker 1: much more serious.
Speaker 7: There were absolutely some posts where he was soliciting death
Speaker 7: or repe threats about these young women attached to all
Speaker 7: of their personal information, and people were responding and writing
Speaker 7: death or repe fantasies. When does that become somebody who says, Okay,
Speaker 7: I'm gonna I'm going to act this out.
Speaker 1: They believed he should be charged with at least one felony,
Speaker 1: but to do that they had to file new charges.
Speaker 1: Patrick had since been released from police custody and was
Speaker 1: back at his family's home awaiting next steps. New York
Speaker 1: law gave the prosecutors only ninety days to figure out
Speaker 1: what those new charges should be. Kelsey and I were
Speaker 1: on a clerk and how to make them stick.
Speaker 7: Because if the charges get dismissed, them were out of luck.
Speaker 7: We can't charge him with anything else.
Speaker 1: The prosecutors weren't sure if what Patrick had done creating
Speaker 1: and posting these manipulated images was a crime, let alone
Speaker 1: a felony.
Speaker 7: This is awful, This should be illegal.
Speaker 1: But what is this?
Speaker 7: What is this crime?
Speaker 1: He was posting morphed naked photos of teenage girls.
Speaker 6: How is that not illegal?
Speaker 7: Because they weren't real.
Speaker 1: Patrick could argue that these posts were artistic expression, which
Speaker 1: is protected under the First Amendment. This is something that
Speaker 1: still hasn't been settled in US courts, so the prosecutors
Speaker 1: needed to keep looking. They needed to find something that
Speaker 1: didn't count as free speech. They got warrants for all
Speaker 1: of Patrick's social media accounts, everything from Instagram to the
Speaker 1: messaging app Kick, and began going through his phone and
Speaker 1: his tablet. Police found them in the top drawer of
Speaker 1: a TV stand in the basement.
Speaker 7: Off to the races.
Speaker 8: The first thing we did was start going through the
Speaker 8: website and trying to first of all, preserve it. We
Speaker 8: didn't know now that he had been arrested, is he
Speaker 8: going to go back, is he going to try to
Speaker 8: take things down?
Speaker 7: At this point, we didn't know what we were where
Speaker 7: we were going.
Speaker 1: They had to start by identifying everyone who Patrick had targeted,
Speaker 1: because it turned out he had gone after many more
Speaker 1: women than the ones who had gone to the police.
Speaker 7: At some point in the beginning, we just had nicknames
Speaker 7: for them all because depending on how we were going
Speaker 7: through it, they wouldn't necessarily have a name attached until later.
Speaker 7: You know, he did attach their names, but we might
Speaker 7: be looking not chronologically because we're going by username or things.
Speaker 7: So we had a lot of nicknames for these young women, like, oh, no,
Speaker 7: we've seen her before. That's you know. We had one
Speaker 7: we called Eyeliner because she always had her eyeliner was
Speaker 7: just one point in every picture. So we're like, oh,
Speaker 7: there's eyeliner again, okay. And then eventually we figured out
Speaker 7: what Eyeliner's name was, and we're like, oh, okay. When
Speaker 7: we were going through the website by itself, we were
Speaker 7: doing that together partially to buttress each other's weaknesses and strengths, right,
Speaker 7: you know, I'm like a little bit faceblind, so she
Speaker 7: was much better, like, no, we've definitely seen her before,
Speaker 7: things like that, and then partly not to sound ridiculous
Speaker 7: about it, but like for moral support, Like it was
Speaker 7: a very difficult sight to go through, and you needed
Speaker 7: to go through it with somebody else.
Speaker 1: The two women split up the work. Kelsey took the lead,
Speaker 1: figuring out if they could charge them with a felony offense.
Speaker 1: She grabbed the thick volume of the State's Penal Code
Speaker 1: and started going through it page by page.
Speaker 8: I literally just took the book down from the shelf
Speaker 8: and started from the getting and went through. Even if
Speaker 8: it kind of seemed like it wouldn't fit, like, obviously,
Speaker 8: this isn't going to be a robbery. But I looked
Speaker 8: at every single statute and I made a document to say, like,
Speaker 8: is there anything that could arguably fit that we could
Speaker 8: fit this into.
Speaker 1: Melissa created a detailed archive, a catalogue of horrors.
Speaker 7: Multiple spreadsheets tracking every post, who appeared on what post,
Speaker 7: what was said? Did we think he had said anything
Speaker 7: that qualified as a hate crime? Was it racist? You know,
Speaker 7: we've described it a lot as trying to put a
Speaker 7: square peg in a round hole. You know, we're like,
Speaker 7: we know that this is bad, but there's no law
Speaker 7: yet to cover this. But where are we going to
Speaker 7: make this work? You know, how are we going to
Speaker 7: make this work?
Speaker 1: Over the the next few weeks, Kelsey and Melissa became
Speaker 1: experts on Patrick Carey's m O. They learned how he
Speaker 1: honed in on a victim and scraped their images from
Speaker 1: social media accounts. When some of the women learned what
Speaker 1: was happening and made their accounts private, he would continually
Speaker 1: check to see if they'd switch back to public again.
Speaker 7: He was obsessively checking to see if okay, well it
Speaker 7: got quiet long enough that now she made it on
Speaker 7: private and now I can get back on there.
Speaker 1: If a victim changed her username, he would learn the
Speaker 1: new one and post it to the website. Then he'd
Speaker 1: alert the other users and encourage them to find and
Speaker 1: harass her again. This is a voice actor reading from
Speaker 1: one of Patrick's posts.
Speaker 6: Calling all sickos to seriously ruin her life.
Speaker 1: The prosecutors found that Patrick would respond to his own
Speaker 1: posts with different usernames, so to.
Speaker 7: Either, you know, to boost the engagement and to make
Speaker 7: other people think, oh, this is a really popular person.
Speaker 7: Look at all these people commenting I want to go.
Speaker 5: Look.
Speaker 1: It didn't seem to be a financial motive to boost engagement,
Speaker 1: at least not one that the prosecutors found, but Patrick
Speaker 1: was getting something out of it. He even created accounts
Speaker 1: where he pretended to be one of the victims and
Speaker 1: begged the users to leave them alone. Melissa says he
Speaker 1: was on the website almost constantly.
Speaker 7: It was all day, all night, six am, two am,
Speaker 7: two pm.
Speaker 1: All of the time, he checked his work, googling his victims'
Speaker 1: names to see if his posts were getting engagement.
Speaker 7: To see if it was getting traction anywhere, and he
Speaker 7: was able to find then several of these young women
Speaker 7: then get posted to other pornography sites, and so he
Speaker 7: was sort of obsessively following himself and following his.
Speaker 1: Workfect Melissa and Kelsey found that even after his arrest,
Speaker 1: Patrick went back on the website many, many times.
Speaker 7: I think our final stats were about thirteen hundred posts,
Speaker 7: and that was across fourteen different user names.
Speaker 5: The prosecutors also learned more about how Patrick was editing
Speaker 5: the pictures. It was an early glimpse and a technology
Speaker 5: that was poised to make a giant leap thanks to
Speaker 5: artificial intelligence. The website where Patrick Carey posted was created
Speaker 5: around twenty ten, and for most of that time, the
Speaker 5: site's he uses posted real photos of women and girls. Eventually,
Speaker 5: photo editing apps became more widely available, the website became
Speaker 5: flooded with requests for other users to quote unquote fake
Speaker 5: their victims. Patrick was using apps like body Editor, which
Speaker 5: likely would have taken him hours to make images that
Speaker 5: looked real, but as soon as he uploaded the pictures
Speaker 5: the tech was out of date. Like others on the site,
Speaker 5: he'd send out requests for better fakes. On October eleventh,
Speaker 5: twenty twenty, he asked on a thread about one of
Speaker 5: his Victims, which was viewed by more than four thousand
Speaker 5: people at the time.
Speaker 6: Anyone know how to do Bruce slash beat up fakes
Speaker 6: would love to see with a black eye or two,
Speaker 6: or a fantasy involving much harsher treatment would be just
Speaker 6: as appreciated.
Speaker 5: Other people were developing way better tools. The deep fake
Speaker 5: revolution had begun around twenty seventeen. Deep fakes began popping
Speaker 5: up on Reddit. Users were photoshopping celebrity faces on pawn performers' bodies.
Speaker 5: Then someone posted a video of the actress gal Gado
Speaker 5: having sex with her stepbrother. It was totally fake, but
Speaker 5: it really caught people's attention because it looked so real.
Speaker 5: One of them was a video of one scantily clad
Speaker 5: lying on a bed weaving a sex way around.
Speaker 6: She had Galgadot's face.
Speaker 5: A Vice News reporter named Samantha Cole trapped down person
Speaker 5: who had made it. He told her he was just
Speaker 5: a programmer interested in machine learning, and that to make
Speaker 5: the Galgado video, he had used a deep learning algorithm
Speaker 5: to swap the actress's face onto the porn performer's body. Basically,
Speaker 5: he taught the algorithm to convincingly edit video by having
Speaker 5: a study, lots of porn and lots of images of
Speaker 5: Galgado's face. This programmer's name deep fakes, a portmanteau for
Speaker 5: deep learning, and of course fake. Developers have been working
Speaker 5: on different software to create realistic looking fake images for years.
Speaker 5: The work he and other early adopters were doing would
Speaker 5: have taken hours and a lot of computing power, but
Speaker 5: the source code they needed was already available online. The
Speaker 5: Galgado video inspired an army of AI programmers to make
Speaker 5: more pornography, mostly of other celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and
Speaker 5: Taylor Swift.
Speaker 8: Johansson telling the Post, this can happen to anybody. It
Speaker 8: just depends on whether or not someone has the desire
Speaker 8: to target you.
Speaker 5: Deep fakes were also getting attention for their potential political impact.
Speaker 5: A video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi edited to make
Speaker 5: it sound like she was slurring her words, went viral
Speaker 5: on Facebook.
Speaker 4: We wanted to give this president the opportunity to do
Speaker 4: something historic for our country.
Speaker 5: As more deep fakes were shared online, more and more
Speaker 5: people took to the deep fakes reddit and other forums
Speaker 5: to swap tips on how to create realistic pictures and videos.
Speaker 5: One the technology could repeatedly assess an adjust an image
Speaker 5: until it got a convincing perfect match.
Speaker 2: You guys, cool if I play some sports.
Speaker 5: That's when another celebrity video starring a faked Tom Cruise
Speaker 5: went everywhere.
Speaker 6: If you like what you're seeing, sweet till what's coming next.
Speaker 5: The AI model that was used to create the uncanny
Speaker 5: Tom Cruise was also used to feel the largest non
Speaker 5: consensual pornography website at the time, a website called Mister
Speaker 5: Deep Fakes. For many people, celebrities and politicians, being victims
Speaker 5: of deep fakes feels like a them problem, a price
Speaker 5: of fame. What wasn't making headlines was that everyday women
Speaker 5: were already dealing with this.
Speaker 1: With changes this fast, no wonder the prosecutors on Long
Speaker 1: Island hit a hard time finding a law on the books.
Speaker 1: Melissa and Kelsey had just three months to charge Patrick
Speaker 1: before risking double jeopardy, but they got what they needed
Speaker 1: in one.
Speaker 7: I remember her coming down and like beaming, like we
Speaker 7: got it, we got it. And at first they're like,
Speaker 7: we got what, what did you get? What did we find?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 7: And then she said I found her picture.
Speaker 1: After all this time talking about faked images. The prosecutors
Speaker 1: had finally found something that would allow them to charge
Speaker 1: Patrick with a felony, a real image. It was a
Speaker 1: nude photo of one of the victims, a real picture
Speaker 1: that had been taken by an ex boyfriend, who had
Speaker 1: then shared it among classmates, including Patrick. Patrick had then
Speaker 1: sent this picture to someone else Overkick, a messaging app
Speaker 1: which prioritizes user privacy. Not only is this image considered
Speaker 1: to be revenge porn, but because the girl in the
Speaker 1: picture was just fourteen when it was taken, it also
Speaker 1: qualified as child sexual abuse material. In November twenty twenty one,
Speaker 1: Patrick was indicted by a grand jury. Now we faced
Speaker 1: multiple felony charges, including promoting a sexual performance by a child,
Speaker 1: aggravated harassment, and second degree stalking. Not one of those
Speaker 1: charges was related to the eleven hundred non consensual pornographic
Speaker 1: deep fake images he had created. Patrick pleaded guilty in
Speaker 1: December twenty twenty two, but that didn't solve everything for
Speaker 1: the young woman in Leavittown. The website was still up,
Speaker 1: along with their photos and their contact info. They were
Speaker 1: still exposed to the hundreds of online predators that Patrick
Speaker 1: Kerry had called to arms. Did you ever consider going
Speaker 1: after the website itself.
Speaker 7: I don't think we have criminal grounds to do that.
Speaker 7: It's not hosted in the United States and certainly not
Speaker 7: hosted Nasau County, so we don't have authorization to do that.
Speaker 5: Nassau County prosecutors didn't have the power to take it down,
Speaker 5: but someone else might.
Speaker 1: Do.
Speaker 5: You work in cybersecurity for security reasons? I cannot answer
Speaker 5: that question. Why do you have to keep yourself anonymous?
Speaker 5: I have many enemies, some show themselves and others who
Speaker 5: like to be invisible and attacked without warning. In cases
Speaker 5: of cybercrime, law enforcement is hamstrung by resources, by borders
Speaker 5: and by jurisdiction. Hackers, on the other hand, feel hemmed
Speaker 5: in by nothing. Accept their own skill. That's next time
Speaker 5: on Leavitt Town.
Speaker 1: This series is reported and hosted by Margie Murphy and
Speaker 1: me Olivia Carvell. Produced by Kaleidoscope, Led by Julia Nutter,
Speaker 1: edited by Nita Tuluis Semnani, Producing by Dara lup Potts,
Speaker 1: Executive produced by Kate Osborne. Original composition and mixing by
Speaker 1: Steve Bone. Patrick Carey's words were read by Jackson ark Our.
Speaker 1: Bloomberg editors are Caitlin Kenney and Jeff Grocot. Additional reporting
Speaker 1: by Samantha Stewart. Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's executive producer and
Speaker 1: head of Podcasting. Kristin Powers is our senior executive editor.
Speaker 1: From iHeart Our executive producers are Tyler Klang and nicki Etour.
Speaker 1: Leavettown is a production of Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcast.
Speaker 1: If you liked this show, give us a follow and
Speaker 1: tell your friends.