Women subjected to severe online harassment have revealed the shock of discovering that the individual behind the fake AI-generated pornographic images of them was once a high school friend.

Over 1,300 posts, spread across roughly 14 different usernames on a malicious site that urged men to share images of themselves engaging in lewd acts on printed photos, were tormenting underage girls in Levittown, New York.

Numerous current and former students of General Douglas MacArthur High School reported to the police that images of them taken innocently from social media were being digitally manipulated alongside appalling messages urging users to commit acts of ‘rape’ and humiliate them in various ways.

They were all the more horrified to discover that the perpetrator was a fellow pupil who had grown up alongside the young women, and was at times, even a close friend.

In 2023, Patrick Carey, 24, was sentenced to six months in jail, with 10 years probation after admitting to offences including promotion of a sexual performance by a child, aggravated harassment as a hate crime, stalking and endangering the welfare of a child, the New York Post reported.

And some of the 14 women he was said to have shared content of have now spoken about the trauma of dealing with the harassment years on, on a new Bloomberg podcast titled Levittown, hosted by reporters Olivia Carville and Margi Murphy.

One of the victims, who was identified only as ‘Kayla’, 24, spoke about the disgust of finding out the photos of her were out there during the 2020 pandemic.

Her father, a protective policeman was doing a regular Google search of his children when he was shocked to see an apparently-nude photo of his daughter come up.

When he showed Kayla, she was baffled – as the image, in which she was originally dressed, had been manipulated to make it seem like she had been naked.

A further search on the site saw more altered pictures, taken from her online profiles, with worrying messages alongside, expressing what depraved users wanted to do to her.

‘It was “drink her piss”, “milk her”, “have her drink my piss”,’ she shared. ‘We would see what they posted, like their nude pictures and them … j***ing off and c**ing on our pictures, even like pictures of our pictures with their d**k there and the ejaculation there. And then there was like some like, writings of like, “rape her”.’

Kayla revealed how the discovery ‘completely altered the way that she thought about her body’.

‘I used to feel so confident about it. I felt so in tune with my body and then I completely changed. I started having eating issues,’ she recounted. ‘I would eat two bites and feel absolutely disgusted in what I’m eating and disgusted in my body for wanting food.’

Soon enough, it became clear however that the problem was more widespread, as Kayla was approached by a school alum known in the podcast as ‘Cecilia’.

She too, among several girls that went to General Douglas MacArthur were featured on the site. 

Much like had been the case for Kayla, images from their online profiles had been taken to make them seem sexually explicit – including pictures of the women when they were as young as six years old.

In summer 2021, another Levittown local – called ‘Kat’ (not her real name) in the podcast – recounted one awful experience led her to uncovering Patrick; whose father was a policeman.

She came across a deepfake of herself – originally a sweet snap where she was smiling – made to seem like ‘her hands tied behind her back, covered in blood, with a plastic bag over her head’.

In a caption the post – which listed her real name – claimed that ‘her body had been found near an abandoned construction site and ‘that she’d been raped’.

‘I’d had enough. It had to stop. I was like, okay, this is like more serious and I need to know – I just need to know who it is, you know,’ she expressed. 

It appeared that at this stage rumours were circulating that Patrick was behind the fakes, but Kat – who had known him since she was five – was ‘almost defending him in her head’. 

‘In high school, he got a little bit more like, uh, a ‘I don’t really give a s**t’ vibe about anything,’ she explained. 

‘He was smart, so, like, he knew what he was talking about, you know? But anybody who said anything to him, it’s just like, okay, I don’t care. I’m smarter than anybody…

‘Then that’s when I went on the website. I sat there for, like — I had to look at things that I did not want to look at.

‘I spent like hours going through it, and then I went to videos of his own page where he would post himself.

‘He would post things of himself, pictures of himself – not his face, like, his body and his parts.’

In one image posted by the user, he looked to be in a child’s bedroom – and Kat decided to inspect the background. 

‘So I saw stuffed animals and I was like, all right, let me see,’ she continued, deciding to compare the furniture with that featured on his little sister’s TikTok profile – and horrifically, it matched up.

Cecilia described Patrick as ‘very talkative’ and ‘easy to talk to’ when she was in high school.

‘He was really sarcastic and condescending. But it was part of his charm. You know, he’s just an a****le,’ she described.

‘When I was a sophomore, I had a lot of classes with him. I had almost all of my day with him.

‘And we were friends; we would talk. Until a month or two into the school year, he blocked me on every social media that we had together and stopped talking to me in class.

‘And he reached out to me and said: I don’t hate you, by the way. He said, I would sooner restrict you from all formats of contacting me. I’m extremely attracted to you, so before that becomes an inevitable problem or upset for me, I might as well stop myself from even trying. Does that explanation suffice for you?

‘And I said, I guess it does. And that was that.’

Cecilia admitted her soul felt ‘broken in half’ because of the betrayal of trust from someone she considered a friend. 

‘You watched me kind of grow up, you know, you spent most of my teenage years with me,’ she said.

‘So you’re telling me that all of that time that you spent with me, watching me kind of become the person that I am, was enjoyment to you because you were watching me turn into rape meat.’

Eventually, the evidence found its way to Nassau County Police Department. 

Speaking to the podcast, Detective Timothy Ingram said that while the victims were incredible in making their case, when it came to charges things became more complicated.

‘These girls, they did their own investigating and they did excellent work,’ he expressed. ‘They would make great detectives.

‘A lot of my coworkers hadn’t really seen anything like this, where it was to this level of, you know, him posting everywhere for so long with so many victims.’

More than 40 women in Levittown were reportedly affected – but the site’s reach was far broader.

The podcast also spoke to a victim of the same website in New Zealand – where, in a horrifyingly similar twist, the perpetrator was known to the woman. 

‘I was under the age of 18, so I could not have a Tinder. But some guys that I knew, who were maybe one or two years older than me, sent me screenshots of a Tinder account with all of my photos on it and were asking if it was me,’ a woman known as ‘Lucy’ shared.

‘When this person matched with a boy on Tinder, they would send them a Snapchat account – and through that Snapchat account would send like very explicit, nude and sexual content but without a face.’

These were not altered images of Lucy, but rather, were made to appear as if she was exchanging faceless nudes. 

Initial reports to her hometown in Nelson, New Zealand, didn’t yield results back around 2015.

‘I went after school one day in my school uniform to the police station. And I knocked on the little window-thingy and, um, a middle-aged man came out and I said I, I maybe needed some help. But as soon as he stepped up to the window, I remember getting really nervous and suddenly feeling so silly because it’s actually rather public when you go to the police,’ Lucy revealed. 

‘You have to kind of plead your case in the waiting room, which is quite echoey and loud. So, this random middle-aged man – police officer – comes up to the window and asked me what was wrong and I kind of feebly told him that I think someone had stolen my pictures and was faking my identity on Tinder. And he just stared at me blankly. 

‘He just had no idea what I was talking about. I remember him just saying: “Oh, Snapchat? What’s that?” He just, he had really no idea what I was talking about.’

By 2016, he escalated to messaging.

‘I am not quite sure how it began, but it began at some point that year that I started receiving quite a number of message requests from anonymous profiles, either on Facebook Messenger or via Instagram, of some disturbing content,’ Lucy said.

‘And other times there was photos. Somebody, holding their penis over printed-out photos of me, many a different photo strewn across the carpet, or on a bed.

‘It sounds crazy, but I have received so, so many photos of penises over pictures of me, over five years. I cannot remember how it feels to be shocked by it. I have received more than I care to remember. I have become so accustomed to that image, I cannot even remember being shocked by it. And I’m sorry – I’m sorry to say that. It just seems like same s**t, different day now.’

From 2018 Lucy had moved away and things ‘slowed down’ – but when she came back to New Zealand following her dad getting sick, the harassment returned, and this time it was ‘more pointed’. 

‘In 2020, I got a very unexpected email from the New Zealand police asking to have a phone call with me,’ she recalled. 

‘And I was so suspicious at this point of online harassment and the ability to fake anything online that my initial response was that this was my harasser pretending to be a police officer trying to get in touch with me.’

However she soon realised a ‘wider case’ was happening ‘revolving around another woman who was being harassed in a similar way’.

‘They had reverse engineered some evidence that led them to me.’

Investigators Will Wallace and  Doug Nuku found some 12 other victims in the country.

While the perpetrator was skilled at hiding, he was eventually discovered as the suspect was followed around on various sites for months – including Facebook Marketplace, where he posted an electric guitar for sale, which was laid on out on a floral comforter.

The innocuous item matched with a photo he had shared on another pornographic site, and soon enough they tracked down the assailant – Finn Cottam.

‘I remember the distinct sensation of time slowing down and then they just said a name. And I don’t know what I expected, but they said a name that was very familiar to me. It was the name of a boy that I went to school with when I was 12,’ Lucy said.

‘I felt such a wave of relief that it was a person. Because I guess when someone lives in anonymity, you think they’re a monster. And when you hear a name, they’re suddenly just a person.’

In 2024, Cottam was sentenced to seven years in jail. As reported by the New Zealand Herald, when he was tracked down, Cottam was found with ‘more than 8000 objectionable images and videos, including child exploitation material, on multiple devices he owned’.

He was imprisoned for what the court described as a ‘sustained campaign of sexual terror’. 

Carey, however, only got six months in jail – with 10 years probation. 

In his confession, he said he ‘started using these accounts because he became bored and could not find any interest in his life’.

‘I became addicted to internet pornography and began to find websites.’

Eventually, he found his way to the site where he would post photos of the women he went to school with, alongside their information, to ‘shame these females into a depression and cause them to be too scared to use any form of social media’.

‘I found a thrill in posting these things to that website because I knew that what I was doing was wrong and that I was causing fear and embarrassment to these girls,’ he continued.

‘This gave me a sense of life knowing that in the back of my head, this was wrong and that I would one day be caught.

‘From time to time throughout the course of me posting on this website, I did begin to feel remorse for the fear and embarrassment I was causing these girls.

‘Once this sense of remorse wore off, I would become complacent and bored and seek the thrill of posting something again, knowing it was wrong. I am sorry for the fear, suffering and embarrassment I have caused to all of the victims.’

In the end, it was not Carey’s campaign of terror that allowed the prosecution to build a case against him – but  a real nude photo of one of the victim – ‘a real picture that had been taken by an ex-boyfriend, who had then shared it among classmates, including Patrick’.

It was considered not only revenge porn – but because the victims was just 14 – child sexual abuse material. 

He pleaded guilty in 2022. In her victim statement, one of the women harassed, Kayla, read: ‘I can safely say you are the weakest person in the room, not any of the victims. You had to sit behind an electronic device to say how you felt.

‘I am the strongest person in the room because I am looking you directly in the face to tell you that you disgust me, you hurt me, but you have also changed me. You completely changed the way that I viewed myself and my body, and for that I’ll never forgive you. Your name will forever give me nightmares and haunt me.’

Carey, meanwhile, concluded: ‘To my many victims and their families, if you want to hear anything from me at all, I would want my last words to be that I do not expect forgiveness; I am just sorry.’

As well as Carey and Cottam’s cases, the podcast delved into the worrying trend of online sites such as the ones employed by them.