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