March 28, 2025 • 26 mins
An arrest in Levittown kicks off the next phase of an investigation. The central question for the prosecutors is: Is any of this a crime? And they’re on the clock.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
A quick note. This is episode four of a six
part series. If you haven't heard the prior episodes, we
recommend going back and starting there. It should also be
noted that this series explores sexualized imagery involving miners and violence.
Please take care when listening. Detective Timothy Ingram in New
(00:32):
York was en route to make an arrest. He had
been working the Levittown Deep Fate case for eight months,
ever since a number of young women first called the
police that New Year's Eve. He had had enough. It
was five o'clock in the evening when Tim and his
partner drove through a quiet Livettown neighborhood and stopped in
(00:56):
front of a small, light blue Cape cod style.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
It looked like a regular house. The grass was caught,
you know.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
The house had a backyard that she had a fence
with an elementary school.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
It was just just an everyday house where you wouldn't
expect this to be going on.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
That morning, yet another young woman had walked into a
local precinct to tell the police a now familiar story,
one that matched the stories of so many others. This time, though,
the detectives had already received some key evidence evidence that
(01:35):
showed the person behind the posts was a guy many
of the women knew someone they went to high school with,
Patrick Carry, And at that.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Point my partner and I at the time kind of
looked at each other and you know, this has to end. Now,
whether we go to his house and he clams up
and doesn't say anything, or whether he admits to it,
he was coming with us either way. So when we
got there, we knocked on the door and Patrick Carry
answered the door, and from what I recall, I think
(02:11):
he was shirtless when he answered the door. We asked
him to come outside after we identified herself as detectives.
So he turned around and he told his mom that
we were there, and his mother came outside also, and
he sat down on the front steps of the house,
in front of the front door, and his mom stood
next to him, and we asked him if he knew
(02:32):
why we were there, and he said no, and we said, okay,
you know, we just want to we want to talk
to you about some things that are going on the internet.
And I said, I'm going to read this to you now.
I wanted him to hear out loud the things he
was writing, and I wanted to see his reaction to
other people knowing about what he was doing, and that's
when we started to read this murder rape fantasy, and
(02:57):
maybe halfway through it, his mother asked us to stop.
Looked at him. She had some choice words for him,
and he looked at us, dead in the eyes, and
he said, yeah, it was me. I did it.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
What are the choice words his mum said to him.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
I believe she said, you're a fucking asshole.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yes, And at that point we didn't need anything else,
you know, he admitted to everything without us asking a
single question.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
We attempted to speak with Patrick and his family for
the story and they declined. Do you remember your reaction
to his arrest?
Speaker 4 (03:34):
Yeah? I was shocked that they had built the case
enough to be able to arrest him.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
It had been months since Patrick's off and on high
school friend Cecilia had given her statement to detectives. She
knew there was an ongoing investigation, but figured nothing would
come of.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
It because when it happened, I didn't think that it
was enough. It was a threat and predatory and dangerous,
but I didn't think that the law would see it
that way. I didn't think that they would validate I
didn't think that they would view it as something that
(04:17):
needed to be punished and put away. For I had
lost hope that this was going to turn into anything.
So when I found out that he was arrested, I
was so so surprised.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
These concerns that Cecilia had about whether what Patrick Carey
had done to her would be seen as a crime,
those were the very same concerns nagging the prosecutors in charge.
Speaker 4 (04:48):
Of this case.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Patrick Carey's behavior was awful, but was it criminal?
Speaker 5 (05:00):
iHeart podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. This is Lavet Town. I'm
Margie Marthy.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
And I'm Olivia Carvell. That night, Patrick was pulled off
his front porch, handcuffed, put into the back of a
police car, and escorted into a small eight y eight
(05:27):
interview room at the Nassau County Police Department. There, he
handed over his devices and signed a confession. One of
the questions the detectives had for Patrick was why why
did he do this? Which was the same question Margie
and I had for Patrick. Patrick and his former attorney
(05:50):
declined to be interviewed for this podcast, but what we
do have is the statement he gave the evening of
his arrest. Patrick started by admitting that he was the
sole person behind several usernames on the website, and that
he had been active there since twenty nineteen, his senior
(06:11):
year of high school.
Speaker 6 (06:13):
I started using these accounts because I became bored and
could not find any interest in my life.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
This is a voice actor reading verbatim from Patrick's confession.
Speaker 6 (06:23):
I became addicted to internet pornography and began to find
websites such as comeonprintedpecks dot com.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Patrick says he used the website for more than two years,
posting pictures of the girls he went to high school with,
with their social media handles and other contact information. He
said that he encouraged other users too. As he puts,
it shame.
Speaker 6 (06:49):
These females into a depression and caused them to be
too scared to use any form of social media. I
found a thrill in posting these things so that website
because I knew that what I was doing was wrong
and that I was causing fear and embarrassment to these girls.
This gave me a sense of life, knowing that in
the back of my head this was wrong and that
(07:11):
I would one day be caught.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
He described it as almost an obsession, a cycle of
thrill seeking, then guilt, then thrill seeking again.
Speaker 6 (07:26):
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
the 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,
(07:48):
suffering and embarrassment I have caused to all of the victims.
Speaker 7 (07:56):
I'm going through it and I'm reading his statement and
I'm like, hey, wow, it was awful, Like it was
an awful thing to read.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Assistant District Attorney Melissa Scannell was at her desk the
Monday morning after Patrick's arrest. Melissa has experienced prosecuting sex crimes.
She's also the head of the officer's cyber crimes unit.
The details of this particular report jumped.
Speaker 7 (08:25):
Out a lot of what I do. I see really
horrible things, and I have, you know, my prior cases,
and my case is now. I've seen and dealt with
pretty terrible things. So sometimes my barometer is off and
I find it very helpful to go to somebody else
and be like.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Is this that bad? Is this worse?
Speaker 7 (08:48):
You know, like, am I reacting normally here?
Speaker 1 (08:52):
After she read Patrick's statement, she ran down the hall
to find her colleague Kelsey.
Speaker 5 (08:57):
Laura, it was shocking.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
It was the things he was saying, what he was
doing was it was. It was shocking, and it kind
of it stays with you. To me, it seemed like
the purpose of the website wasn't even sexual anymore. It
was more, you know, let's let's take women down a peg,
let's you know, degrade them. Basically, that was the purpose
(09:23):
of the website was degradation.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Kelsey's another assistant DA. She usually works on racketeering cases,
things like organized crime, drug trafficking, extortion, but this case
was different. It was more personal. Kelsey had graduated from
MacArthur High School. She had walked the same halls as
these young women. Kelsey and Melissa looked at the charges
(09:52):
and realized it was a series of misdemeanor harassment and
obscenity violations, meaning Patrick would only face up to a
year in jail at most. They believed his actions were
much more serious.
Speaker 7 (10:07):
There were absolutely some posts where he was soliciting death
or repe threats about these young women attached to all
of their personal information, and people were responding and writing
death or repe fantasies. When does that become somebody who says, Okay,
I'm gonna I'm going to act this out.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
They believed he should be charged with at least one felony,
but to do that they had to file new charges.
Patrick had since been released from police custody and was
back at his family's home awaiting next steps. New York
law gave the prosecutors only ninety days to figure out
(10:51):
what those new charges should be. Kelsey and I were
on a clerk and how to make them stick.
Speaker 7 (10:57):
Because if the charges get dismissed, them were out of luck.
We can't charge him with anything else.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
The prosecutors weren't sure if what Patrick had done creating
and posting these manipulated images was a crime, let alone
a felony.
Speaker 7 (11:15):
This is awful, This should be illegal.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
But what is this?
Speaker 7 (11:19):
What is this crime?
Speaker 1 (11:21):
He was posting morphed naked photos of teenage girls.
Speaker 6 (11:26):
How is that not illegal?
Speaker 7 (11:29):
Because they weren't real.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Patrick could argue that these posts were artistic expression, which
is protected under the First Amendment. This is something that
still hasn't been settled in US courts, so the prosecutors
needed to keep looking. They needed to find something that
didn't count as free speech. They got warrants for all
(11:58):
of Patrick's social media accounts, everything from Instagram to the
messaging app Kick, and began going through his phone and
his tablet. Police found them in the top drawer of
a TV stand in the basement.
Speaker 7 (12:14):
Off to the races.
Speaker 8 (12:15):
The first thing we did was start going through the
website and trying to first of all, preserve it. We
didn't know now that he had been arrested, is he
going to go back, is he going to try to
take things down?
Speaker 7 (12:26):
At this point, we didn't know what we were where
we were going.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
They had to start by identifying everyone who Patrick had targeted,
because it turned out he had gone after many more
women than the ones who had gone to the police.
Speaker 7 (12:42):
At some point in the beginning, we just had nicknames
for them all because depending on how we were going
through it, they wouldn't necessarily have a name attached until later.
You know, he did attach their names, but we might
be looking not chronologically because we're going by username or things.
So we had a lot of nicknames for these young women, like, oh, no,
we've seen her before. That's you know. We had one
(13:03):
we called Eyeliner because she always had her eyeliner was
just one point in every picture. So we're like, oh,
there's eyeliner again, okay. And then eventually we figured out
what Eyeliner's name was, and we're like, oh, okay. When
we were going through the website by itself, we were
doing that together partially to buttress each other's weaknesses and strengths, right,
you know, I'm like a little bit faceblind, so she
(13:25):
was much better, like, no, we've definitely seen her before,
things like that, and then partly not to sound ridiculous
about it, but like for moral support, Like it was
a very difficult sight to go through, and you needed
to go through it with somebody else.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
The two women split up the work. Kelsey took the lead,
figuring out if they could charge them with a felony offense.
She grabbed the thick volume of the State's Penal Code
and started going through it page by page.
Speaker 8 (13:57):
I literally just took the book down from the shelf
and started from the getting and went through. Even if
it kind of seemed like it wouldn't fit, like, obviously,
this isn't going to be a robbery. But I looked
at every single statute and I made a document to say, like,
is there anything that could arguably fit that we could
fit this into.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Melissa created a detailed archive, a catalogue of horrors.
Speaker 7 (14:21):
Multiple spreadsheets tracking every post, who appeared on what post,
what was said? Did we think he had said anything
that qualified as a hate crime? Was it racist? You know,
we've described it a lot as trying to put a
square peg in a round hole. You know, we're like,
we know that this is bad, but there's no law
(14:44):
yet to cover this. But where are we going to
make this work? You know, how are we going to
make this work?
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Over the the next few weeks, Kelsey and Melissa became
experts on Patrick Carey's m O. They learned how he
honed in on a victim and scraped their images from
social media accounts. When some of the women learned what
was happening and made their accounts private, he would continually
check to see if they'd switch back to public again.
Speaker 7 (15:22):
He was obsessively checking to see if okay, well it
got quiet long enough that now she made it on
private and now I can get back on there.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
If a victim changed her username, he would learn the
new one and post it to the website. Then he'd
alert the other users and encourage them to find and
harass her again. This is a voice actor reading from
one of Patrick's posts.
Speaker 6 (15:49):
Calling all sickos to seriously ruin her life.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
The prosecutors found that Patrick would respond to his own
posts with different usernames, so to.
Speaker 7 (16:00):
Either, you know, to boost the engagement and to make
other people think, oh, this is a really popular person.
Look at all these people commenting I want to go.
Speaker 5 (16:07):
Look.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
It didn't seem to be a financial motive to boost engagement,
at least not one that the prosecutors found, but Patrick
was getting something out of it. He even created accounts
where he pretended to be one of the victims and
begged the users to leave them alone. Melissa says he
was on the website almost constantly.
Speaker 7 (16:31):
It was all day, all night, six am, two am,
two pm.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
All of the time, he checked his work, googling his victims'
names to see if his posts were getting engagement.
Speaker 7 (16:43):
To see if it was getting traction anywhere, and he
was able to find then several of these young women
then get posted to other pornography sites, and so he
was sort of obsessively following himself and following his.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Workfect Melissa and Kelsey found that even after his arrest,
Patrick went back on the website many, many times.
Speaker 7 (17:09):
I think our final stats were about thirteen hundred posts,
and that was across fourteen different user names.
Speaker 5 (17:16):
The prosecutors also learned more about how Patrick was editing
the pictures. It was an early glimpse and a technology
that was poised to make a giant leap thanks to
artificial intelligence. The website where Patrick Carey posted was created
around twenty ten, and for most of that time, the
site's he uses posted real photos of women and girls. Eventually,
(17:39):
photo editing apps became more widely available, the website became
flooded with requests for other users to quote unquote fake
their victims. Patrick was using apps like body Editor, which
likely would have taken him hours to make images that
looked real, but as soon as he uploaded the pictures
the tech was out of date. Like others on the site,
(18:02):
he'd send out requests for better fakes. On October eleventh,
twenty twenty, he asked on a thread about one of
his Victims, which was viewed by more than four thousand
people at the time.
Speaker 6 (18:13):
Anyone know how to do Bruce slash beat up fakes
would love to see with a black eye or two,
or a fantasy involving much harsher treatment would be just
as appreciated.
Speaker 5 (18:23):
Other people were developing way better tools. The deep fake
revolution had begun around twenty seventeen. Deep fakes began popping
up on Reddit. Users were photoshopping celebrity faces on pawn performers' bodies.
(18:44):
Then someone posted a video of the actress gal Gado
having sex with her stepbrother. It was totally fake, but
it really caught people's attention because it looked so real.
One of them was a video of one scantily clad
lying on a bed weaving a sex way around.
Speaker 6 (19:04):
She had Galgadot's face.
Speaker 5 (19:06):
A Vice News reporter named Samantha Cole trapped down person
who had made it. He told her he was just
a programmer interested in machine learning, and that to make
the Galgado video, he had used a deep learning algorithm
to swap the actress's face onto the porn performer's body. Basically,
(19:28):
he taught the algorithm to convincingly edit video by having
a study, lots of porn and lots of images of
Galgado's face. This programmer's name deep fakes, a portmanteau for
deep learning, and of course fake. Developers have been working
on different software to create realistic looking fake images for years.
(19:53):
The work he and other early adopters were doing would
have taken hours and a lot of computing power, but
the source code they needed was already available online. The
Galgado video inspired an army of AI programmers to make
more pornography, mostly of other celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and
(20:17):
Taylor Swift.
Speaker 8 (20:18):
Johansson telling the Post, this can happen to anybody. It
just depends on whether or not someone has the desire
to target you.
Speaker 5 (20:26):
Deep fakes were also getting attention for their potential political impact.
A video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi edited to make
it sound like she was slurring her words, went viral
on Facebook.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
We wanted to give this president the opportunity to do
something historic for our country.
Speaker 5 (20:49):
As more deep fakes were shared online, more and more
people took to the deep fakes reddit and other forums
to swap tips on how to create realistic pictures and videos.
One the technology could repeatedly assess an adjust an image
until it got a convincing perfect match.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
You guys, cool if I play some sports.
Speaker 5 (21:10):
That's when another celebrity video starring a faked Tom Cruise
went everywhere.
Speaker 6 (21:16):
If you like what you're seeing, sweet till what's coming next.
Speaker 5 (21:21):
The AI model that was used to create the uncanny
Tom Cruise was also used to feel the largest non
consensual pornography website at the time, a website called Mister
Deep Fakes. For many people, celebrities and politicians, being victims
of deep fakes feels like a them problem, a price
(21:44):
of fame. What wasn't making headlines was that everyday women
were already dealing with this.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
With changes this fast, no wonder the prosecutors on Long
Island hit a hard time finding a law on the books.
Melissa and Kelsey had just three months to charge Patrick
before risking double jeopardy, but they got what they needed
in one.
Speaker 7 (22:10):
I remember her coming down and like beaming, like we
got it, we got it. And at first they're like,
we got what, what did you get? What did we find?
Speaker 5 (22:20):
You know?
Speaker 7 (22:22):
And then she said I found her picture.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
After all this time talking about faked images. The prosecutors
had finally found something that would allow them to charge
Patrick with a felony, a real image. It was a
nude photo of one of the victims, a real picture
that had been taken by an ex boyfriend, who had
(22:46):
then shared it among classmates, including Patrick. Patrick had then
sent this picture to someone else Overkick, a messaging app
which prioritizes user privacy. Not only is this image considered
to be revenge porn, but because the girl in the
picture was just fourteen when it was taken, it also
(23:08):
qualified as child sexual abuse material. In November twenty twenty one,
Patrick was indicted by a grand jury. Now we faced
multiple felony charges, including promoting a sexual performance by a child,
(23:30):
aggravated harassment, and second degree stalking. Not one of those
charges was related to the eleven hundred non consensual pornographic
deep fake images he had created. Patrick pleaded guilty in
December twenty twenty two, but that didn't solve everything for
(23:51):
the young woman in Leavittown. The website was still up,
along with their photos and their contact info. They were
still exposed to the hundreds of online predators that Patrick
Kerry had called to arms. Did you ever consider going
after the website itself.
Speaker 7 (24:11):
I don't think we have criminal grounds to do that.
It's not hosted in the United States and certainly not
hosted Nasau County, so we don't have authorization to do that.
Speaker 5 (24:22):
Nassau County prosecutors didn't have the power to take it down,
but someone else might.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Do.
Speaker 5 (24:31):
You work in cybersecurity for security reasons? I cannot answer
that question. Why do you have to keep yourself anonymous?
I have many enemies, some show themselves and others who
like to be invisible and attacked without warning. In cases
of cybercrime, law enforcement is hamstrung by resources, by borders
(24:53):
and by jurisdiction. Hackers, on the other hand, feel hemmed
in by nothing. Accept their own skill. That's next time
on Leavitt Town.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
This series is reported and hosted by Margie Murphy and
me Olivia Carvell. Produced by Kaleidoscope, Led by Julia Nutter,
edited by Nita Tuluis Semnani, Producing by Dara lup Potts,
Executive produced by Kate Osborne. Original composition and mixing by
Steve Bone. Patrick Carey's words were read by Jackson ark Our.
(25:34):
Bloomberg editors are Caitlin Kenney and Jeff Grocot. Additional reporting
by Samantha Stewart. Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's executive producer and
head of Podcasting. Kristin Powers is our senior executive editor.
From iHeart Our executive producers are Tyler Klang and nicki Etour.
(25:55):
Leavettown is a production of Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcast.
If you liked this show, give us a follow and
tell your friends.
A quick note. This is episode four of a six
part series. If you haven't heard the prior episodes, we
recommend going back and starting there. It should also be
noted that this series explores sexualized imagery involving miners and violence.
Please take care when listening. Detective Timothy Ingram in New
(00:32):
York was en route to make an arrest. He had
been working the Levittown Deep Fate case for eight months,
ever since a number of young women first called the
police that New Year's Eve. He had had enough. It
was five o'clock in the evening when Tim and his
partner drove through a quiet Livettown neighborhood and stopped in
(00:56):
front of a small, light blue Cape cod style.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
It looked like a regular house. The grass was caught,
you know.
Speaker 1 (01:04):
The house had a backyard that she had a fence
with an elementary school.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
It was just just an everyday house where you wouldn't
expect this to be going on.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
That morning, yet another young woman had walked into a
local precinct to tell the police a now familiar story,
one that matched the stories of so many others. This time, though,
the detectives had already received some key evidence evidence that
(01:35):
showed the person behind the posts was a guy many
of the women knew someone they went to high school with,
Patrick Carry, And at that.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Point my partner and I at the time kind of
looked at each other and you know, this has to end. Now,
whether we go to his house and he clams up
and doesn't say anything, or whether he admits to it,
he was coming with us either way. So when we
got there, we knocked on the door and Patrick Carry
answered the door, and from what I recall, I think
(02:11):
he was shirtless when he answered the door. We asked
him to come outside after we identified herself as detectives.
So he turned around and he told his mom that
we were there, and his mother came outside also, and
he sat down on the front steps of the house,
in front of the front door, and his mom stood
next to him, and we asked him if he knew
(02:32):
why we were there, and he said no, and we said, okay,
you know, we just want to we want to talk
to you about some things that are going on the internet.
And I said, I'm going to read this to you now.
I wanted him to hear out loud the things he
was writing, and I wanted to see his reaction to
other people knowing about what he was doing, and that's
when we started to read this murder rape fantasy, and
(02:57):
maybe halfway through it, his mother asked us to stop.
Looked at him. She had some choice words for him,
and he looked at us, dead in the eyes, and
he said, yeah, it was me. I did it.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
What are the choice words his mum said to him.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
I believe she said, you're a fucking asshole.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yes, And at that point we didn't need anything else,
you know, he admitted to everything without us asking a
single question.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
We attempted to speak with Patrick and his family for
the story and they declined. Do you remember your reaction
to his arrest?
Speaker 4 (03:34):
Yeah? I was shocked that they had built the case
enough to be able to arrest him.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
It had been months since Patrick's off and on high
school friend Cecilia had given her statement to detectives. She
knew there was an ongoing investigation, but figured nothing would
come of.
Speaker 4 (03:55):
It because when it happened, I didn't think that it
was enough. It was a threat and predatory and dangerous,
but I didn't think that the law would see it
that way. I didn't think that they would validate I
didn't think that they would view it as something that
(04:17):
needed to be punished and put away. For I had
lost hope that this was going to turn into anything.
So when I found out that he was arrested, I
was so so surprised.
Speaker 1 (04:35):
These concerns that Cecilia had about whether what Patrick Carey
had done to her would be seen as a crime,
those were the very same concerns nagging the prosecutors in charge.
Speaker 4 (04:48):
Of this case.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Patrick Carey's behavior was awful, but was it criminal?
Speaker 5 (05:00):
iHeart podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. This is Lavet Town. I'm
Margie Marthy.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
And I'm Olivia Carvell. That night, Patrick was pulled off
his front porch, handcuffed, put into the back of a
police car, and escorted into a small eight y eight
(05:27):
interview room at the Nassau County Police Department. There, he
handed over his devices and signed a confession. One of
the questions the detectives had for Patrick was why why
did he do this? Which was the same question Margie
and I had for Patrick. Patrick and his former attorney
(05:50):
declined to be interviewed for this podcast, but what we
do have is the statement he gave the evening of
his arrest. Patrick started by admitting that he was the
sole person behind several usernames on the website, and that
he had been active there since twenty nineteen, his senior
(06:11):
year of high school.
Speaker 6 (06:13):
I started using these accounts because I became bored and
could not find any interest in my life.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
This is a voice actor reading verbatim from Patrick's confession.
Speaker 6 (06:23):
I became addicted to internet pornography and began to find
websites such as comeonprintedpecks dot com.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
Patrick says he used the website for more than two years,
posting pictures of the girls he went to high school with,
with their social media handles and other contact information. He
said that he encouraged other users too. As he puts,
it shame.
Speaker 6 (06:49):
These females into a depression and caused them to be
too scared to use any form of social media. I
found a thrill in posting these things so that website
because I knew that what I was doing was wrong
and that I was causing fear and embarrassment to these girls.
This gave me a sense of life, knowing that in
the back of my head this was wrong and that
(07:11):
I would one day be caught.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
He described it as almost an obsession, a cycle of
thrill seeking, then guilt, then thrill seeking again.
Speaker 6 (07:26):
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
the 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,
(07:48):
suffering and embarrassment I have caused to all of the victims.
Speaker 7 (07:56):
I'm going through it and I'm reading his statement and
I'm like, hey, wow, it was awful, Like it was
an awful thing to read.
Speaker 1 (08:06):
Assistant District Attorney Melissa Scannell was at her desk the
Monday morning after Patrick's arrest. Melissa has experienced prosecuting sex crimes.
She's also the head of the officer's cyber crimes unit.
The details of this particular report jumped.
Speaker 7 (08:25):
Out a lot of what I do. I see really
horrible things, and I have, you know, my prior cases,
and my case is now. I've seen and dealt with
pretty terrible things. So sometimes my barometer is off and
I find it very helpful to go to somebody else
and be like.
Speaker 3 (08:45):
Is this that bad? Is this worse?
Speaker 7 (08:48):
You know, like, am I reacting normally here?
Speaker 1 (08:52):
After she read Patrick's statement, she ran down the hall
to find her colleague Kelsey.
Speaker 5 (08:57):
Laura, it was shocking.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
It was the things he was saying, what he was
doing was it was. It was shocking, and it kind
of it stays with you. To me, it seemed like
the purpose of the website wasn't even sexual anymore. It
was more, you know, let's let's take women down a peg,
let's you know, degrade them. Basically, that was the purpose
(09:23):
of the website was degradation.
Speaker 1 (09:26):
Kelsey's another assistant DA. She usually works on racketeering cases,
things like organized crime, drug trafficking, extortion, but this case
was different. It was more personal. Kelsey had graduated from
MacArthur High School. She had walked the same halls as
these young women. Kelsey and Melissa looked at the charges
(09:52):
and realized it was a series of misdemeanor harassment and
obscenity violations, meaning Patrick would only face up to a
year in jail at most. They believed his actions were
much more serious.
Speaker 7 (10:07):
There were absolutely some posts where he was soliciting death
or repe threats about these young women attached to all
of their personal information, and people were responding and writing
death or repe fantasies. When does that become somebody who says, Okay,
I'm gonna I'm going to act this out.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
They believed he should be charged with at least one felony,
but to do that they had to file new charges.
Patrick had since been released from police custody and was
back at his family's home awaiting next steps. New York
law gave the prosecutors only ninety days to figure out
(10:51):
what those new charges should be. Kelsey and I were
on a clerk and how to make them stick.
Speaker 7 (10:57):
Because if the charges get dismissed, them were out of luck.
We can't charge him with anything else.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
The prosecutors weren't sure if what Patrick had done creating
and posting these manipulated images was a crime, let alone
a felony.
Speaker 7 (11:15):
This is awful, This should be illegal.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
But what is this?
Speaker 7 (11:19):
What is this crime?
Speaker 1 (11:21):
He was posting morphed naked photos of teenage girls.
Speaker 6 (11:26):
How is that not illegal?
Speaker 7 (11:29):
Because they weren't real.
Speaker 1 (11:33):
Patrick could argue that these posts were artistic expression, which
is protected under the First Amendment. This is something that
still hasn't been settled in US courts, so the prosecutors
needed to keep looking. They needed to find something that
didn't count as free speech. They got warrants for all
(11:58):
of Patrick's social media accounts, everything from Instagram to the
messaging app Kick, and began going through his phone and
his tablet. Police found them in the top drawer of
a TV stand in the basement.
Speaker 7 (12:14):
Off to the races.
Speaker 8 (12:15):
The first thing we did was start going through the
website and trying to first of all, preserve it. We
didn't know now that he had been arrested, is he
going to go back, is he going to try to
take things down?
Speaker 7 (12:26):
At this point, we didn't know what we were where
we were going.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
They had to start by identifying everyone who Patrick had targeted,
because it turned out he had gone after many more
women than the ones who had gone to the police.
Speaker 7 (12:42):
At some point in the beginning, we just had nicknames
for them all because depending on how we were going
through it, they wouldn't necessarily have a name attached until later.
You know, he did attach their names, but we might
be looking not chronologically because we're going by username or things.
So we had a lot of nicknames for these young women, like, oh, no,
we've seen her before. That's you know. We had one
(13:03):
we called Eyeliner because she always had her eyeliner was
just one point in every picture. So we're like, oh,
there's eyeliner again, okay. And then eventually we figured out
what Eyeliner's name was, and we're like, oh, okay. When
we were going through the website by itself, we were
doing that together partially to buttress each other's weaknesses and strengths, right,
you know, I'm like a little bit faceblind, so she
(13:25):
was much better, like, no, we've definitely seen her before,
things like that, and then partly not to sound ridiculous
about it, but like for moral support, Like it was
a very difficult sight to go through, and you needed
to go through it with somebody else.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
The two women split up the work. Kelsey took the lead,
figuring out if they could charge them with a felony offense.
She grabbed the thick volume of the State's Penal Code
and started going through it page by page.
Speaker 8 (13:57):
I literally just took the book down from the shelf
and started from the getting and went through. Even if
it kind of seemed like it wouldn't fit, like, obviously,
this isn't going to be a robbery. But I looked
at every single statute and I made a document to say, like,
is there anything that could arguably fit that we could
fit this into.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Melissa created a detailed archive, a catalogue of horrors.
Speaker 7 (14:21):
Multiple spreadsheets tracking every post, who appeared on what post,
what was said? Did we think he had said anything
that qualified as a hate crime? Was it racist? You know,
we've described it a lot as trying to put a
square peg in a round hole. You know, we're like,
we know that this is bad, but there's no law
(14:44):
yet to cover this. But where are we going to
make this work? You know, how are we going to
make this work?
Speaker 1 (14:59):
Over the the next few weeks, Kelsey and Melissa became
experts on Patrick Carey's m O. They learned how he
honed in on a victim and scraped their images from
social media accounts. When some of the women learned what
was happening and made their accounts private, he would continually
check to see if they'd switch back to public again.
Speaker 7 (15:22):
He was obsessively checking to see if okay, well it
got quiet long enough that now she made it on
private and now I can get back on there.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
If a victim changed her username, he would learn the
new one and post it to the website. Then he'd
alert the other users and encourage them to find and
harass her again. This is a voice actor reading from
one of Patrick's posts.
Speaker 6 (15:49):
Calling all sickos to seriously ruin her life.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
The prosecutors found that Patrick would respond to his own
posts with different usernames, so to.
Speaker 7 (16:00):
Either, you know, to boost the engagement and to make
other people think, oh, this is a really popular person.
Look at all these people commenting I want to go.
Speaker 5 (16:07):
Look.
Speaker 1 (16:08):
It didn't seem to be a financial motive to boost engagement,
at least not one that the prosecutors found, but Patrick
was getting something out of it. He even created accounts
where he pretended to be one of the victims and
begged the users to leave them alone. Melissa says he
was on the website almost constantly.
Speaker 7 (16:31):
It was all day, all night, six am, two am,
two pm.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
All of the time, he checked his work, googling his victims'
names to see if his posts were getting engagement.
Speaker 7 (16:43):
To see if it was getting traction anywhere, and he
was able to find then several of these young women
then get posted to other pornography sites, and so he
was sort of obsessively following himself and following his.
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Workfect Melissa and Kelsey found that even after his arrest,
Patrick went back on the website many, many times.
Speaker 7 (17:09):
I think our final stats were about thirteen hundred posts,
and that was across fourteen different user names.
Speaker 5 (17:16):
The prosecutors also learned more about how Patrick was editing
the pictures. It was an early glimpse and a technology
that was poised to make a giant leap thanks to
artificial intelligence. The website where Patrick Carey posted was created
around twenty ten, and for most of that time, the
site's he uses posted real photos of women and girls. Eventually,
(17:39):
photo editing apps became more widely available, the website became
flooded with requests for other users to quote unquote fake
their victims. Patrick was using apps like body Editor, which
likely would have taken him hours to make images that
looked real, but as soon as he uploaded the pictures
the tech was out of date. Like others on the site,
(18:02):
he'd send out requests for better fakes. On October eleventh,
twenty twenty, he asked on a thread about one of
his Victims, which was viewed by more than four thousand
people at the time.
Speaker 6 (18:13):
Anyone know how to do Bruce slash beat up fakes
would love to see with a black eye or two,
or a fantasy involving much harsher treatment would be just
as appreciated.
Speaker 5 (18:23):
Other people were developing way better tools. The deep fake
revolution had begun around twenty seventeen. Deep fakes began popping
up on Reddit. Users were photoshopping celebrity faces on pawn performers' bodies.
(18:44):
Then someone posted a video of the actress gal Gado
having sex with her stepbrother. It was totally fake, but
it really caught people's attention because it looked so real.
One of them was a video of one scantily clad
lying on a bed weaving a sex way around.
Speaker 6 (19:04):
She had Galgadot's face.
Speaker 5 (19:06):
A Vice News reporter named Samantha Cole trapped down person
who had made it. He told her he was just
a programmer interested in machine learning, and that to make
the Galgado video, he had used a deep learning algorithm
to swap the actress's face onto the porn performer's body. Basically,
(19:28):
he taught the algorithm to convincingly edit video by having
a study, lots of porn and lots of images of
Galgado's face. This programmer's name deep fakes, a portmanteau for
deep learning, and of course fake. Developers have been working
on different software to create realistic looking fake images for years.
(19:53):
The work he and other early adopters were doing would
have taken hours and a lot of computing power, but
the source code they needed was already available online. The
Galgado video inspired an army of AI programmers to make
more pornography, mostly of other celebrities like Scarlett Johansson and
(20:17):
Taylor Swift.
Speaker 8 (20:18):
Johansson telling the Post, this can happen to anybody. It
just depends on whether or not someone has the desire
to target you.
Speaker 5 (20:26):
Deep fakes were also getting attention for their potential political impact.
A video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi edited to make
it sound like she was slurring her words, went viral
on Facebook.
Speaker 4 (20:39):
We wanted to give this president the opportunity to do
something historic for our country.
Speaker 5 (20:49):
As more deep fakes were shared online, more and more
people took to the deep fakes reddit and other forums
to swap tips on how to create realistic pictures and videos.
One the technology could repeatedly assess an adjust an image
until it got a convincing perfect match.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
You guys, cool if I play some sports.
Speaker 5 (21:10):
That's when another celebrity video starring a faked Tom Cruise
went everywhere.
Speaker 6 (21:16):
If you like what you're seeing, sweet till what's coming next.
Speaker 5 (21:21):
The AI model that was used to create the uncanny
Tom Cruise was also used to feel the largest non
consensual pornography website at the time, a website called Mister
Deep Fakes. For many people, celebrities and politicians, being victims
of deep fakes feels like a them problem, a price
(21:44):
of fame. What wasn't making headlines was that everyday women
were already dealing with this.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
With changes this fast, no wonder the prosecutors on Long
Island hit a hard time finding a law on the books.
Melissa and Kelsey had just three months to charge Patrick
before risking double jeopardy, but they got what they needed
in one.
Speaker 7 (22:10):
I remember her coming down and like beaming, like we
got it, we got it. And at first they're like,
we got what, what did you get? What did we find?
Speaker 5 (22:20):
You know?
Speaker 7 (22:22):
And then she said I found her picture.
Speaker 1 (22:25):
After all this time talking about faked images. The prosecutors
had finally found something that would allow them to charge
Patrick with a felony, a real image. It was a
nude photo of one of the victims, a real picture
that had been taken by an ex boyfriend, who had
(22:46):
then shared it among classmates, including Patrick. Patrick had then
sent this picture to someone else Overkick, a messaging app
which prioritizes user privacy. Not only is this image considered
to be revenge porn, but because the girl in the
picture was just fourteen when it was taken, it also
(23:08):
qualified as child sexual abuse material. In November twenty twenty one,
Patrick was indicted by a grand jury. Now we faced
multiple felony charges, including promoting a sexual performance by a child,
(23:30):
aggravated harassment, and second degree stalking. Not one of those
charges was related to the eleven hundred non consensual pornographic
deep fake images he had created. Patrick pleaded guilty in
December twenty twenty two, but that didn't solve everything for
(23:51):
the young woman in Leavittown. The website was still up,
along with their photos and their contact info. They were
still exposed to the hundreds of online predators that Patrick
Kerry had called to arms. Did you ever consider going
after the website itself.
Speaker 7 (24:11):
I don't think we have criminal grounds to do that.
It's not hosted in the United States and certainly not
hosted Nasau County, so we don't have authorization to do that.
Speaker 5 (24:22):
Nassau County prosecutors didn't have the power to take it down,
but someone else might.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
Do.
Speaker 5 (24:31):
You work in cybersecurity for security reasons? I cannot answer
that question. Why do you have to keep yourself anonymous?
I have many enemies, some show themselves and others who
like to be invisible and attacked without warning. In cases
of cybercrime, law enforcement is hamstrung by resources, by borders
(24:53):
and by jurisdiction. Hackers, on the other hand, feel hemmed
in by nothing. Accept their own skill. That's next time
on Leavitt Town.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
This series is reported and hosted by Margie Murphy and
me Olivia Carvell. Produced by Kaleidoscope, Led by Julia Nutter,
edited by Nita Tuluis Semnani, Producing by Dara lup Potts,
Executive produced by Kate Osborne. Original composition and mixing by
Steve Bone. Patrick Carey's words were read by Jackson ark Our.
(25:34):
Bloomberg editors are Caitlin Kenney and Jeff Grocot. Additional reporting
by Samantha Stewart. Sage Bowman is Bloomberg's executive producer and
head of Podcasting. Kristin Powers is our senior executive editor.
From iHeart Our executive producers are Tyler Klang and nicki Etour.
(25:55):
Leavettown is a production of Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcast.
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