Laurie Segall
speaker
89 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Laurie Segall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
where the idea of sexually explicit deepfakes of saying, oh, I like that woman. I want her doing this with this person. I don't care what she says. I'm just gonna use AI to make my dreams come true. Like your wish is AI's command. That was what this site was. And it was called Mr. Deepfakes. And I remember,
also had like training manuals so it wasn't just about these public figures these women it was about training young men how to do this and take this into their schools or take you this into their workplace so you look on the message boards and it'd be like oh I want to do this to my sister-in-law I love tech I love artificial intelligence I think it's gonna do incredible things but this is ground zero for what happens when it is misused and it's used as a weapon against women and girls and I
eventually all of us, right? So I became very obsessed with Mr. Deepfakes and tracking him and took us all on an investigation that was very wild and never a dull moment. Spoiler alert, we found Mr. Deepfakes. Yay. Yes. It was probably a couple years ago and I'm like, we should just start talking about this on the internet and explaining why people need to care about this shady site.
So we said, okay, I believe this is one of the most dangerous men on the internet, the person behind this, and we need to know his name before it's too late because we're Why should this person who has harmed so many women be afforded anonymity? This site had been up and running for seven or eight years, and he was anonymous. So you had no idea who was doing this.
And I just thought, let's find him. Let's just try. On my team, we have some incredible investigative journalists that came with me from my 60 Minutes days. One of my colleagues, Nicole, she could be an FBI agent if she wanted. She's wonderful.
We started talking about it and we went out and I remember I started talking about it at like a mom's conference and all these moms got behind us with this idea that this might be about this shady deep fake porn site, but actually this is about the future of bullying. This is about what could happen in your schools with young men doing this to women thinking it's okay.
Like this is normalizing a new type of abuse. And so I think a lot of people really resonated with that message. And I remember I was getting my nails done And all of a sudden, I didn't even know I had another inbox on TikTok, but I was on TikTok looking at other inbox, which is like messages that sometimes they filter.
And this security company, security legal company called Sedenti reached out, and a guy named Jordy was like, we have a tip. We believe we have found him. And so I'm like, okay, this feels, I'm not sure if this is real, like a hundred percent, but I'm like, obviously we're vetting it.
And we ended up like going on this, we got like a dossier that had, I want to say 17, 18, 19 different data points. I brought in another security firm. Like we all basically tracked down like via social media, via the names we were given. And there were so many connections because anytime you do something on the internet, like you're just not hidden.
This is what I've learned through all my years in investigative reporting, like, Covering your traces is actually, like, very difficult, and you will make mistakes. And, like, you know, he made mistakes years ago. There was an 8chan post with him. A what? An 8chan. It's like 4chan, but, like, this message board where people put, like, crazy theories and memes and cultural things.
And it's, like, a place where a lot of, like, you know, internet lovers, for better and for worse, go and say some of the weirdest things. stuff and great stuff too, but it's a weird place. He had an 8chan post. We had him talking about a car, like a red Mitsubishi.
We were able to track and we ended up in front of his parents' home with the red Mitsubishi, like all sorts of crazy investigation went into it. And we tried to reach out to him many, many times. He wouldn't answer. He took down all his social media. We reached out to friends and family. And then finally we said, let's go, let's try to find him and talk to him in person.
I found out he worked as a pharmacist in a hospital, like helping people. I found out that he was the man that had really helped create this site that enabled so much, I would say, digital abuse against women. Had a wife. He had a new baby. Like, he was really living a double life. And we showed up outside the hospital.
We were able to call the floor he worked on, figure out exactly when his shift was starting. We were there the next day, and we confronted him. And so it's been a pretty wild journey just to say we shouldn't live in a world where this type of thing is enabled. And it's interesting because... When we confronted him, I knew we would have 30 seconds.
I knew that he wasn't gonna wanna speak to us and I knew he would know exactly who I am because I'd been reaching out to him for months before. And he saw me and he just started walking incredibly quickly towards the door. And I just remember asking for comment. Legally, I wanna ask for comment, right? We have all this evidence.
I asked him, I said, I wanna negotiate how someone who's a father and a son can create this type of thing that perpetuates this type of abuse. And as the doors were closing, I said, the harm is real. And did he say something? He wouldn't say a word. I've interviewed, like, some categorically sketchy folks in my career, but I was really shaken by how he looked at me.
And that was just part of our investigation. We did so many things to be able to really fan out. And we presented our findings to lawmakers around the world, started talking about why this mattered. And I think when this happened to Taylor Swift, I want to say, like, January or something of 2024, and... I hated this thought, but I thought, maybe now people will pay attention.
Like, it's happened to one of the most powerful women in the world, which is horrific, and it shouldn't take this type of abuse happening to Taylor Swift for people and lawmakers to pay attention. But it did help, I would say, people be like, oh, this is the language behind it. This is why it's bad. And I think we were able to speed up our investigation, and so it's been... Never a dull moment.
And then I got pregnant and had a child in the process. But did that change how you viewed this and bringing a child into this world? It's a really good question. I think when we were initially out, I was thinking about it because we just had Mother's Day and I was thinking about having a child. And I remember thinking like, If we are not careful, it's not just about the victims, right?
We are gonna train a whole new generation of abusers, of young men who grow up and think that I can nudify this girl from class in a couple clicks using artificial intelligence.
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