How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart

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Deepfakes<br>How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart

Samantha Cole

May 21, 2026<br>at 10:41 AM

After five teen girls were targeted by AI-generated child sexual abuse material, Radnor Township High School in Pennsylvania has become a case study in how schools and police around the country grapple with how to response to deepfake crimes involving children.

Illustration by Mitchel Hunt

On a school night in early December, a freshman at Radnor High School in Pennsylvania wrote in Snapchat messages to his friends that his parents took his phone away.<br>“why,” one replied.<br>“the app,” he answered. “o shi. did you admit to what it was or just the money,” another asked. Just the money, the first boy replied.<br>“Bro u would literally be dead rn if ur parents found out what u were doing in ts”<br>He was sending these messages from a school-issued device, he said. “I dropped 250 on that hoe,” he replied. “Worth every penny.”<br>He spent that money on a subscription to an app from Apple’s App Store, called Movely, and allegedly used it to put five of his female classmates’ faces onto nude bodies and make sexual images of them. The boy who used the app and made the videos didn’t show up to school the next morning. But the girls did. And so did his friends.<br>“The boys are defending him, and they're now saying that they didn't see anything, but they did,” one of the girls texted her mom. “It's not okay.”<br>Radnor is ranked one of the top high schools in the state. It has a little more than 1,000 kids enrolled in the 2026 school year. The school district has had policies in place concerning bullying, harassment, and sexual violence for years, and Pennsylvania law criminalized malicious deepfakes in 2024. In 2025, a man was charged on over 30 felony counts of possession of child sexual abuse material after investigators found more than two dozen files of AI-generated content depicting minors on his phone.<br>Despite all this, Radnor’s administration failed students in the days and weeks after it learned about the abuse, according to parents who spoke to 404 Media, email exchanges between parents and mandated reporters in the aftermath, conflicting narratives between the administration and the police department, and spotlight on the school from governor Josh Shapiro.<br>“Candidly, I just want this to not happen again to anybody else,” Audrey Greenberg, a parent of one of the victims who has been speaking publicly to the press and at board meetings, told me.<br>The incident also started a new debate for the school: Whether what happens on kids’ phones while off campus and outside of school hours is within the purview of the school’s responsibility, especially under Title IX requirements.<br>“My daughter would not know this other boy if they were not in school together,” Greenberg said. “The entire school knows about it. She's been calling me for weeks on end to come home early. She can't concentrate, it's affecting her every day at school.”<br>In the days following the incident, the school offered to let the girls leave class early and eat lunch alone, isolating them further from their peers and studies. Meanwhile, parents and advocates have shown up to every school board meeting and organized events with state representatives and lawmakers to try to ensure this doesn’t happen again, to their girls or anyone else.

On the morning of December 4, five ninth grade girls, all 14 or 15 years old, showed up for class at Radnor High School. By 8 a.m.—the sun had been up for less than an hour—it felt like the entire school already heard what happened the night before. A fellow freshman boy allegedly created AI-generated sexually explicit videos of the girls using an app, and sent them to his friends. From there, the videos and gossip spread from teenager to teenager, school to school, until they made their way back to the girls whose faces were in the deepfakes.<br>💡<br>Do you have experience with deepfake harassment in schools? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404 Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co.

For weeks prior, parents of the girls say, the boys creating the images were showing them off at lunch tables at Radnor. When kids started sharing and talking about them on the night of December 3, someone reported the images to Pennsylvania’s Safe2Say hotline for cyberbullying, shooting plans or threats, and other violent activity.<br>The images originated from one boy, who used an app called Movely, the girls and their parents believe. The app is similar to dozens hosted in the Apple and Google app stores and advertised on Instagram and TikTok that promise to create AI images and videos of users as superheroes, animals,...