- Note to any parents out there: this is not how to show support to your kid.
It’s good for parents to support their children in their hobbies and goals – some might even call it a requirement. But as with so many other things, sometimes things just go that one step too far.
A Philadelphia woman has been charged with misdemeanor counts of cyber harassment of a child. She distributed doctored deepfake videos and photos of her daughter’s cheerleading rivals, reported the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Raffaela Spone, 50, was arrested on March 4 after sending videos supposedly depicting her victims in indecent situations. Her daughter, along with the harassed girls, are all members of a traveling cheerleading troupe called Victory Vipers, based in Doylestown.
Spone is charged with sending the pictures and videos anonymously to the targeted girls and several cheerleading couches. The messages showed the girls engaging in compromising behavior, including drinking, smoking, and partying naked.
In addition, Spone allegedly wrote text messages to her victims. The texts included such lovely sentiments as telling them to kill themselves.
Her apparent goal was to get the rival cheerleaders kicked off the team. Spone did this all without her daughter’s knowledge, court documents say.
We’re still going to guess that the poor girl might not be very popular after this.
Awful Messages
Spone’s claimed harassment spree began in July 2020. That’s when Madi Hime, 17, started receiving abusive messages from an anonymous number.
The texts told Hime that she had no friends, and that she should off herself. The texting went on for months, she told 6 ABC.
“I do get hate comments, nothing to this extreme, but I was really upset. I was like: ‘Who says this to someone? Who thinks it’s ok?’ It made me more mad than upset,” Hime said.
The texting soon spread to include her coaches at Victory Vipers. They, and the victim herself, received photos that allegedly showed the girl naked, drinking, and smoking vapes.
“I just knew it wasn’t real because I don’t [smoke],” said Hime.
According to Philadelphia Inquirer, the young lady’s parents contacted the police as the pictures could’ve gotten her removed from the cheerleading team. We’ll take the liberty of assuming that they might’ve been also concerned for their child’s safety.
The police launched an investigation. Once the news hit them, two other families contacted the cops, saying that their daughters had started getting similar texts.
The other girls had received pictures that supposedly portrayed them in bikinis. Accompanying texts said the photos were taken while the girls were “drinking at a beach.”
Follow the Data Trail
Further along their investigation, the police ran the pictures and videos through an analyzing software. The results showed that the pictures were so called “deepfakes.”
A deepfake is a picture or a video that has been processed with a specific program – usually AI-based – to alter it. The results can be disturbingly realistic.
The perpetrator had created the videos by mapping the girls’ social media photos. Their faces had then been plastered onto other people’s heads in the risqué videos.
The police tracked the source of the girls’ telephone numbers to a website that sells phone numbers to telemarketers. From there, they followed the data trail to an IP address, located at a house in Chalfont, PA.
It just so happens that Spone lives in that house. The cops searched her smartphone, and according to court documents, found evidence that linked her to the abusive messages.
Denying Guilt
For her part, Spone denies guilt. Her attorney Robert Birch told 6 ABC that he won’t make specific comments as the District Attorney is yet to present any evidence.
“[Spone] has absolutely denied what they’re charging her with and because of the fact that this has hit the press, she has received death threats,” Birch said.
“She has had to go to the police herself, they have a report. Her life has been turned upside down,” he added.
Buck County District Attorney Matt Weintraub stressed that Spone’s daughter did not know about her mother’s actions.
“The daughter is completely blameless in this,” said Weintraub.
‘Simply Not True’
The harassed girls and their parents have found the situation difficult, especially for the cheerleading team. George Ratel, father of one of the bullied girls, told the Philadelphia Inquirer he is “frustrated.”
Earlier on, Ratel’s daughter had been friends with Spone’s girl. He speculated that she might’ve felt spurned after Ratel and his wife told their daughter not to spend time with Spone’s daughter due to “concerns over the other girl’s behavior.”
“I don’t know what would push her to this point. As a dad I was pretty upset about it,” Ratel said.
“It’s an image put out there of my daughter that is simply not true,” he added.
If anything, this case goes to show that you can never take a picture on the internet at face value anymore. Most people used deepfakes for obviously fake memes and humorous videos, but there will also be some bad apple in the bunch.
Who knows, have you checked lately whether your face is out there?