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
And I think that actually was very much as I was thinking about wanting to have a child, like, God, I remember not, this is like probably way too much information, but like when we were in the hotel room the day before tracking him, I was literally tracking ovulation. Like I was like, it was so top of my mind of thinking what happens for our children?
I just feel like we have to do better for them. And so it was wild. We went out there and a couple months later I found out I was pregnant and I, this felt so personal. To me, I just don't want my child to grow up in a world where people think they can control women and girls. It spreads out. And we had a team of women in the field, which is pretty incredible.
And the producer I was working with, who worked on Mostly Human, which was my show at CNN, she was six months pregnant in the field. And we had this moment She still wanted to come. I was like, are you sure you want to come? She's like a hundred percent. I'm like, okay. We're doing like car stakeouts. And she's literally six months pregnant at the time.
And I remember we had confronted him at the hospital and he left through another door. Like he was able to get out. He took some kind of car out because we were right near where he had parked. We didn't know his home address was. I remember it feeling like a little bit of a dead end. We came all the way out here. We wanted to get some answers.
We wanted to ask for some kind of comment and understanding of how you could have created this thing that became so big without any accountability. I'll never forget, we were in the car and Roxy, who the producer was working with, she was like, because we had just figured out he was a dad because we had gone to his parents' home and we saw a baby seat, like a car seat in the car.
And I was like, is Mr. Deepfakes a dad? And she was like, let's call a local toy store and see if he's registered. Like pregnant Roxy is saying this. And I'm like, oh, that's actually probably not a bad idea. And we ended up calling. Mr. Deepfakes was registered at, I guess, for his child.
And like we were able to somehow get his home address from that, which was just as it took, like, I think a lot of women just in like the only way, like I feel like a pregnant person would think we're trying to figure out a better future for our children. And the reason I focus so heavily on Mr. Deepfakes is because it's not just about Mr. Deepfakes.
It's about the future of consent and bullying and being able to like, create a better world for our children. And I think that was really personal to me because I was thinking about having a child during this investigation. Then I got pregnant and then I had a child. It's been a wild journey, but it makes it, I think, really meaningful that the site is now down.
As of the last couple of weeks, the site was down and I would say it took probably part of it, us showing up at his door, other people beginning to understand who he was. It took people creating friction, Google de-ranking the site. So it took all this friction, but it was such a win because I think so many people sometimes say, oh, it's a game of whack-a-mole.
It's what, you take one down, there's gonna be so many others. And I just don't buy it. Do you know how many women are gonna sleep better tonight because of this? And if it's like a game of whack-a-mole, we just whacked like a giant one. So that makes me sleep better. Yes, me too. Do you know if he had a boy or a girl? I don't know. It's messed up in both ways. I think he might have had a boy.
And I'm not positive when we did a little investigating, which is just crazy to me. And I might sound like a total crazy person. I always try to understand the why. I think it's too simple to be like, you're just this terrible person and you've done this thing. I think it's actually in trying to understand the why, maybe the more interesting reasons.
He reminded me a little bit of Ross Ulbrich from Silk Road, the guy who created one of the largest sites on the dark web where illegal things were bought and sold. Ross very much had this libertarian ethos of this is kind of the future of the internet and all these things. I can't speak for David. That's the name of one of the creators of Mr. Deepfakes, according to all of our evidence.
I can't speak for the why, but I do think that it started as more of a hobby and an interest. Deepfakes and also porn and all this stuff. And I don't know if there was just a lack of empathy, if maybe he didn't believe that the harm was real. I think that those walls closed in on him. I think the stakes got higher.
As the site got bigger and as people started talking about it more, and as more people started saying, this is really harmful, he never shut it down until a couple weeks ago when it was shut down. So I have no idea where he is now. Did he get fired? I don't know if they fired him. There was a report that he could potentially be overseas. I don't know. Does his wife know? I have no idea.
I had that question too. I mean, so I reached out to her after all of this happened and his name is out there and the site is down. She hasn't responded. I did at one point show up at his parents' home. It didn't feel like, I always think it's important for it not to feel like, oh, I got you. I'm gonna get the bad guy. It felt sad.
We grew up in a beautiful neighborhood where kids are playing on the street. I didn't get the sense his parents knew, but I don't know. You talked to them? Spoke to his father very briefly before he went inside. And I didn't want to... How do I say this? I didn't want to stay for too long. and be harassing at all.
There's always this fine line of... Between the reporters that are... I never wanted to be that. We've seen that, just without any empathy. And I'm not saying, like, I need to have empathy for this, but I think, like, empathy is the thing that we lack. So many... It's the whole reason I think we're seeing a problem in sexually explicit deepfakes. People don't realize that there's real harm here.
And so I... A person and a family. Yeah. I like to think that we showed up with a certain amount of empathy and being inquisitive without harassing his family. I think I walked away feeling really sad. How did it affect you? I think I get frustrated sometimes because it's like... I thought for so long, this is why it's so big, right? It starts here. Then it goes to schools.
Then it goes to democracy where we can make anyone say anything. And then it goes to conspiracy. So I always like to be like, how do I frame this to different people? And I think sometimes it can get frustrating to be able to be like, no, it's not about the shady site. It's actually about safety and consent. And it's about a tech threat that you don't realize
It's not what all the tech bros are talking about, which is AI becoming conscious and like Terminator. I'm like, no, no, no. This threat is already here and it's impacting your children. And I think sometimes that can be frustrating to me because I'm sometimes a couple of years ahead on this and I feel like I talk about it and people are like, huh?
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