BONUS SERIES: Levittown Episode 1 | Me... But Not Me

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1:15This series explores sexualized imagery involving minors and violence. Please take care when listening.

1:33Can we start from the beginning? How did this all start for you?

1:41So, I can go back into it. I remember somehow all these pictures from my Instagram, my VSCO, were all on this website. there was one picture of me in a bathing suit. Well, it was me in a bathing suit in one of my friend's backyards, and I didn't have a bathing suit on anymore.

2:15and it was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts.

2:29It was just boobs and body parts. Completely nude. That looked so much like my own body. There were so many different pictures from my social media on essentially a porn website.

2:53I was just trying to figure out exactly like, where is this coming from? Like, how are they finding my stuff? I didn't let people follow me that I didn't know. So it was always in the back of my head like, oh, it's someone that I know. But how do you find out who that someone is when you know so many people from school, soccer, all these things? Did you ever have any suspicions as to who it was back then? No. Not at all. It was always like, why is this happening? Who is this?

3:53Kayla was 20 years old and living at home with her parents in a town that was once the picture of the American dream, a Long Island suburb called Levittown. We're driving around Levittown. A lot of white picket fences, a lot of American flags. It has the feel of going back in time. This is Levittown, one of the most remarkable housing developments ever conceived. It's the kind of America that makes you think of the 1950s. Cookie cutter, single family houses. Like someone hit control C on the ideal suburban house. and then pasted it over and over, on street after street. The idea that came to a man named Bill Levitt was this.

4:45Why not apply to the building of houses the same principles that have brought other American industries to their unexcelled peaks of efficiency and service? Levittown was built for veterans returning from World War II as the picture of white suburbia, perfect houses, manicured lawns. Dotted here and there throughout the huge area, are shopping centres where every type of product or service is readily available. Shoe stores, Five and Dimes, department store.

5:17Today, we often talk about the future as digital. Algorithms and codes as the architecture of our lives. But back then, Levittown was the imagined future. It just feels like quite suburban and safe. You know, it feels like the kind of place that nothing really happens around here. And yet, underneath the facade of perfect order, it's here I found a story unfolding of a group of women faced with a new reality none of them wanted. A technological reality spinning out of control. It's like this is not the setting for a horror movie and that's exactly what played out. But this isn't your average horror story.

6:14The kind where a group of teens are hunted down until there's only one left standing. In this story, they flip the script, band together and fight back alongside some unexpected global allies. forcing law enforcement and tech companies to sit up and take notice.

6:47From iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope, this is Levertown. I'm Olivia Carville.

7:04Over the summer, our producer, Julia Nutter, and I made the drive out to Long Island to meet Kayla at her family home. I can hear music.

7:20Hey, Kayla. How are you? It's so nice to see you again. It's good to see you, too. How are you feeling? I'm good. Let me just do a quick levels check. Oh, do you want me to put the bird in another room? I didn't even hear the bird. Oh my god, the bird! Kayla's like a firecracker. She's small but loud with brightly coloured hair. Every time I've seen her, her hair is a different colour. She's covered in tattoos and piercings. What kind of bird is that? A parakeet. So he likes to talk to himself a lot.

7:55Do you feel comfortable showing us where you were when you discovered the website, when you were showing it. Yeah. It's a little messy. Kayla's 24 now. When we visited her, she was living in the same house she grew up in. See all your plans. And it is great. This is, as you can tell, I love my books. In high school, Kayla was an elite athlete and a girl who moved easily between friend groups. People make it seem like there's either the popular group or, you know, so-called nerds. I would like to say I was in the middle of it because I hung out with a lot of the sports people who were considered popular, but I had my friends who we would just sit around and play video games, hang out, do funny things, and make videos of us doing stupid little things.

8:53I say this to my friends, actually, all the time. I may not dress like it, but my inner person is kind of emo. I listen to a lot of dark music now. I have the tattoos all over, I have piercings all over. And I truly just like, it's not like I like the color black. I just like, I changed a lot. I have a really big book tattoo on my leg. I have a big wraparound plants because my whole leg is going to be things I love. and plants is another thing for me. This one is one of my favorites. It's Tell Me About Tomorrow. Tell Me About Tomorrow is one of my favorite songs because whenever I'm in a depressive state or just not doing good mentally, I play that song and it tells you to tell me about tomorrow.

9:46Tell me about the next day that's going to go on in your life. When I was going through this situation, I was not mentally doing good at all and it told me you will have tomorrow and you can have tomorrow

10:04It sounds like a lot of the tattoos are important to you because they represent you moving forward or healing or getting over the situation as you described it Do you feel comfortable getting into that now? Yes

10:23I remember being in my bed, just laying down. It was late at night. This was in March 2020, at the onset of the COVID pandemic. She'd recently graduated from high school and was stuck at home with her parents. I was in that corner. My bed was up against the wall. I was just laying in the bed. I'm pretty sure I was on my phone, just scrolling through Instagram or something or on Snapchat. She heard her dad walking up the stairs from the living room. I can always hear when someone comes up the stairs and he knocked. He always knocks on the door. So he knocked and just, like, walked right in. I thought automatically, like, I was in trouble or something.

11:09But then I could just, like, tell, like, he was just confused. and he was like a little hesitant to like come up to me. I could tell. And he was just like, what is this? What is this? What was he showing you? I think it was the website. It was the faked picture of her naked and next to it, a poll asking the site's users to rank what they wanted to do to her sexually. This next part is graphic and it might be difficult to hear. It was, um, I've always had trouble saying these parts. It was drink her piss, milk her, have her drink my piss, and there was something else and I can't entirely remember what the other one was.

12:10So they were ranking what they wanted to do to you sexually? Yes. Yeah. She kept scrolling and it got worse. You would see what they posted, like their nude pictures and them jerking off and coming on our pictures. Even like pictures of our pictures with their dicks there and the ejaculation there. And then there was some writings of raping her.

12:51My dad was very confused. He asked me what this was and how did it get up there. And I did not know because I've never seen it before, which I obviously told him.

13:10So that's how we found out about the website.

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16:37Deep in the work that moves the business. Let's create smarter business. IBM. Kayla says her dad is a big guy. Big personality. like her. Loud laugh. Back then, he was a police officer. A beat cop, really, for the Nassau County Police Department. He didn't want to talk to us for this podcast, but Kayla says he's really protective of his kids, which means he regularly Googles their names, searching the internet for anything related to them. For me specifically, I was playing soccer competitively, so So when I was, you know, going to college and playing soccer, then he just got nervous when they search things.

17:24He doesn't want them to see things are wrong or, you know, like exactly what we found. When he shows you the phone, what is the photograph on the phone that you're looking at? The specific photo that you first see? I'm almost positive. It was the one with the bikini taken off my body. And it was just me naked. Well, not me, but me with someone else's body parts on my body parts that looked exactly like my own.

18:01Was there ever a moment, even a split second moment that you thought it was you naked? Yes, I definitely like at first, like I was like, oh, my God, that's me. Like, how did they get that? But then I was like, no, that's in my friend's backyard. Like I was obviously wearing a bikini and I remember the bikini. It was a blue one and it was mesh a little bit. So that's why I would think it was so easy for them to completely alter the picture. But I just like instantly was like, whoa, how how did they get that picture of me? Like, I never took a picture like that. It was frightening how exact it looked.

18:49The website it was on was called comeonprintedpics.com, and it encouraged its members to do exactly what that title implies. To print out photos of girls and young women and masturbate to them. and then to post a photo of the user's erection or ejaculation on top of that image. This is a practice they called tributing. To have to see my dad find all that and, like, I don't know, like, just not understanding what's going on. I didn't even know anything was going on and then my dad just coming in and seeing all that. It's like nobody wants to see that, but to have your dad see that, that's not even uncomfortable.

19:41That's not even a word for it, but just unimaginable.

19:51I wish I could tell you that this website was tucked away in the dark web where users needed to download a special browser or slink through some other secret cyber door. But it wasn't. It was just out in the open. Kayla was out in the open too. Postings on the site included her real name, which is how her dad found it. Sometimes the images posted to the website were actual, unaltered photos. Revenge porn type stuff. But often, the original photos were taken from innocent social media posts, like Kayla's. And then the site's users turned those images into non-consensual pornography, often with underage subjects.

20:43This type of photo manipulation was new to Kayla, but it wasn't new to me. I've been starting to see more of it. Over the past few years, I've been reporting on big tech and social media platforms. What they're doing or not doing to prevent harm to kids. What guardrails they're putting up to stop exactly this kind of thing from happening. And images like these were starting to multiply with shocking speed, alongside the rise of artificial intelligence. I kept hearing more and more about the dark side of this new technology. About deepfakes. Altered videos online known as deepfakes. The rise of deepfakes.

21:28Computer generated videos known as deepfakes. Deep fake videos make people appear to say things they never did or never would. It's getting harder and harder to trust our eyes and ears. When I first heard about the Levittown case, I knew the reporting was going to take me to some uncomfortable but important places. From the rise of generative AI to the explosion of deep fakes to child sexual abuse material online. I also knew that it was going to be really hard to find the victims and dive into this website on my own. So I turned to my colleague for help, Margie Murphy. She's a technology reporter at Bloomberg.

22:11At the time, I remember I was reporting on this new generative AI tool that people were using to create child sexual abuse material. I typically write about people who hide on the fringes of the internet, like teenage hackers extorting global businesses, or cybercriminals using AI to scam people. Not that long ago, when I started on this beat, deepfakes weren't that easy to make, and kind of always had a tell. If you looked at them long enough, you would notice something was off. Yet they caught your attention. With AI, there's been so much innovation. But in the last few years, there have been rapid breakthroughs in machine learning.

22:50Amazon investing up to$4 billion in startup Anthropic. Microsoft reportedly investing$10 billion in open AI. And truly hundreds of millions of dollars has flowed into image generating software powered by AI. Microsoft, Amazon, you name it, they're all actively investing in young AI startups. That has made it a lot cheaper and easier to make convincing photos or videos of pretty much anything you can think of. Now, there are billions upon billions of deepfake images out there. And this probably won't surprise you, but the vast, vast majority, by one estimate more than 90 % of all deepfake imagery, is pornographic.

23:37Typically, people who have had their image turned into porn have not consented to having their faces, bodies or voices morphed in this way. A lot of people don't even know that these images of themselves exist. But as Olivia and I learned, Kayla's dad had found this website in a regular search of her name. And now he and Kayla knew it was there. Seeing what people had to say about my body as the pictures were like when I'm, what, 13, 14? I think I instantly cried. I was just like, I think I remember kind of like stating more to myself than anybody else. Like, why is this happening to me? Like, what is going on?