How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart
Account
Log in
Subscribe
Navigation
Home
About
RSS
Support/FAQ
Podcast
FOIA Forum Archive
Merch
Advertise
Thanks
Privacy
Follow us
Twitter<br>Bluesky<br>Mastodon<br>Instagram<br>TikTok<br>Facebook<br>RSS
Advertisement
•
Go ad free
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 for 404 Media
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>💡<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.
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.
This post is for paid members only
Become a paid member for unlimited ad-free access to articles, bonus podcast content, and more.
Subscribe
Sign up for free access to this post
Free members get access to posts like this one along with an email round-up of our week's stories.
Subscribe
Already have an account? Sign in
More like this
App Stores Push Users Toward Nudify Apps, New Research Shows
Findings from the Tech Transparency Project claim that Google and Apple’s app stores not only host harmful apps that can undress images of women, but encourage users to find them.
Samantha Cole
Apr 16, 2026
New Research Shows Deepfake Harassment Tools Spread on Social Media and Search Engines
An analysis of how tools to make non-consensual sexually explicit deepfakes spread online, from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, shows X and search engines surface these sites easily.
Samantha Cole
Oct 23, 2025
Almost Every State Has Its Own Deepfakes Law Now
Michigan just became the 48th state to enact a law addressing deepfakes, imposing jail time and penalties up to the felony level for people who make AI-generated nonconsensual abuse imagery of a real person.
Samantha Cole
Sep 2, 2025
This Archivist Has Saved 175,000 Articles from 30 Years of Writing about Magic: The Gathering
The Library of Leng contains old usenet posts and forgotten articles from Magic: the Gathering's long history.
Matthew Gault
May 21, 2026
The Oldest Evidence of Animal Sex Has Been Found, and It’s Mind-Boggling
Fossils unearthed in the Northwest Territories push the origins of animal sex back by 5-10 million years and reveal the earliest examples of locomotion in the fossil record.
Becky Ferreira
May 21, 2026
Township Leader Resigns in Tears Over OpenAI Data Center Death Threats
"I can’t take it anymore. The threats," the treasurer said. The planned data center is part of OpenAI and Oracle's Stargate initiative.
Matthew Gault
May 20, 2026
Advertisement
•
Go ad free
Advertisement
•
Go ad free
•
Hide