One weekday morning last November, Narinder Kaur discovered she had been the victim of a shocking, humiliating crime.

The day had started like any other – getting her teenage children out of the door for school and liaising with her husband about their respective work commitments.

But then, when the 54-year-old GB News broadcaster had a moment to herself, she opened the X app on her phone, where she has almost 80,000 followers, and was confronted by horrifying pornographic images of herself.

The pictures weren’t real – someone had screenshot photographs she’d shared on her Instagram account and removed her clothing using a so-called ‘nudification’ app – but they were so convincing that no one, other than Narinder, would have guessed.

‘I felt utterly degraded. Seeing what looked like my naked body exposed to the world, I thought I was actually going to vomit,’ says Narinder, who lives in north London with husband Jatinder, director of sales for a software company, and their two children.

‘Shaking, I handed my phone to my husband. There had been other fake images and videos of me in the past, mocked up to make it look like I was being deported, and he’d seen all those. “Look what they’ve done to me now”, I said.

‘He was just as horrified but did his best to comfort me. Then I called my sister, sobbing so much I could barely get my words out.

‘Like me, she was baffled as to why on earth anyone would want to create nude images of me, a married mother of two in my 50s, and then share them with thousands of people online.’

But this is to misunderstand how the pernicious trend for creating deepfake pornography – using artificial intelligence (AI) to alter images in sexually explicit ways – has developed. Though younger women and even teenage girls are most often targeted by malicious posters, middle-aged and older women are increasingly becoming victims too.

Earlier this month the Daily Mail columnist Nadine Dorries, 69, the former Conservative MP and now member of Reform UK, was warned by police that pornographic deepfake videos of her had been created and circulated on the internet.

A 36-year-old man has been arrested and electronic devices containing thousands of AI-generated images and videos, also featuring at least three other female politicians and several celebrities, have been seized.

Newsreader and journalist Cathy Newman, 52, has also spoken out about her terrifying experience of deepfake porn, as has the 53-year-old former Cabinet minister Dame Penny Mordaunt.

It remains an under-reported crime because of the shame and stigma victims feel, but in a recent UK police-commissioned survey, 7 per cent of respondents said they had been depicted in a sexual, or intimate, deepfake without their consent.

Meanwhile, the results of a poll of 2,000 UK women carried out by campaign group End Violence Against Women (EVAW) and domestic abuse charity Refuge, published this month, revealed that 18 per cent had experienced ‘image-based sexual abuse’.

Unsurprisingly, while 96 per cent of the artificially generated material online is sexually explicit, 99 per cent of it depicts women.

The motivation, it seems, is often to debase and silence the outspoken – Narinder frequently appears on TV panels commenting on issues from immigration to poverty and crime – but it can also be an act of ‘punishment’ or simply spite against women with no public profile at all. Indeed, so widespread has this form of abuse become that last year the End Violence Against Women Coalition joined forces with another campaign group, #NotYourPorn, to help bring about an amendment to the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

In February this year, under Section 138 of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, it became a specific criminal offence to create or request a deepfake intimate image of an adult without their consent.

This means that those attempting to use apps to turn innocent pictures and videos into something obscene now face up to six months in prison, unlimited fines and a criminal record.

But the problem is finding them: as Narinder has repeatedly discovered, perpetrators hide behind anonymous online profiles and delete their accounts as soon as they are reported.

Since that first image appeared on her X page last November, she has been tagged in messages containing at least 20 more deep-faked pictures and videos of her.

As well as ‘nudes’, shared images have included depictions of her on her hands and knees, naked and wearing a dog collar; images of her being undressed by Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, and pictures of her cuddling up to Jeffrey Epstein.

‘It’s incredibly humiliating and, of course, designed to undermine me. As someone who speaks up for women’s rights, suggesting I went to Epstein’s parties is also an attack on my integrity,’ says Narinder. ‘Even when the original post is deleted, these images get shared over and over, and I’ll never know how many people have seen them, believing they were real. I’m as tough as old boots, having faced a lot of harsh criticism for sharing some of my opinions on TV over the years, but this has really taken a toll.’

Narinder, who grew up in Newcastle, found fame 25 years ago, as a contestant in the then Channel 4 series Big Brother, before going on to present a reality TV show, Undercover Lovers, as well as local radio shows.

These days she is a regular contributor on TV current affairs programmes, including the Jeremy Vine show, Good Morning Britain and GB News.

‘I felt such despair in the early weeks that I fell into a depression, not wanting to get out of bed. As crazy as it sounds, I blamed myself for expressing my views publicly, as if, as the old saying goes, because “I live by the sword, I must die by the sword”.

‘My family persuaded me to see my GP, who suggested antidepressants. Although I took them after my brother died six years ago, and think they can be fantastic, I didn’t want to go down that route over this. I decided instead, rather than hiding away in shame, I’d join the Stop AI Abuse campaign and speak out about my experience in the hope of raising awareness, so that other women experiencing similar abuse feel less alone.’

Narinder has lost count of the number of victims who have contacted her since, some of them middle-aged and older women who are not in the public eye. ‘Several of them, having left abusive relationships, discovered that ex-partners have used their innocent videos to make obscene footage,’ she says. ‘The men have then sent these to friends with accompanying messages saying things like, “This is why I left her”.

‘It’s a misogynistic crime, intended to shame, silence, demean and undermine women, and it often works. Although it’s humiliating for this to happen at any age – and I’m not sure how teenage girls, who are often victims, cope with it – younger people are better at detecting when AI has been used, while those who haven’t grown up with it are more likely to believe these images are real.

‘Almost as devastating as the images of me were the comments underneath, from people who believed they were real.

‘They’d say: “Who wants to see an old bag like you with her kit off?”, “Talk about mutton dressed as lamb” or just add a string of vomit emoji faces.

‘It’s bad enough having to confront these images myself but it fills me with dread, as I’m sure is true for many other older victims, thinking my teenage children might come across them online.’

The same fears play on the mind of Lowestoft’s Labour MP Jess Asato, who first raised the issue in Parliament in January. Back then Jess expressed the deepest concerns about Grok, the tool developed by xAI – Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company – which was widely used to create explicit content. Shortly afterwards, she herself became a victim of deepfake porn – with images taken from her social media, digitally manipulated to put her in a bikini and then shared on X.

‘I reported the images to X but a message came back to say that their policies hadn’t been violated, so the images stayed up for quite a long time,’ says Jess, a mother of two.

‘My only recourse was to ask a lawyer to send a letter to X, which then did remove them. Other images were made of me pregnant with quintuplets and in a kitchen saying: “This is where you deserve to be”. The final thing that was really disturbing was a video that was created after Elon Musk had retweeted a picture of me with a comment from another user.

‘It was a video of me being chloroformed by a group of men, fainting and then my skirt being lifted up by them as if I was going to be raped.’

While being confronted with these disturbing images is distressing enough, Jess believes that the backdrop – ‘an absolute explosion of free online pornography’ over the past two decades – makes it a trend with even more sinister implications.

‘Violence is endemic in pornography, which is one of the reasons why the AI that’s then used to deepfake involves so much brutality,’ she says.

‘Just as worrying as some of the sexualised content, for me, were the reports of it being used to put bullet holes in women, break their bones and put bruises on them.

‘The more we allow this sort of thing to happen online, the more it will happen and damage women offline too.’

Determined to keep up the pressure, Jess is taking legal action against xAI, filing a case with the High Court which she hopes will set a precedent, holding owners and developers accountable for what their platforms produce and the harm their tools facilitate.

Jill Salt, 44, a mother of two, is another politician who believes she has been targeted by deepfake criminals, because of her outspoken views.

A lecturer at Staffordshire University, Jill has decided not to stand for re-election to Biddulph Town Council after innocent images shared on Facebook were used to create obscene material.

The first image, manipulated from a fully-clothed shot, showed Jill in a bikini and was posted on a local Facebook group last November. ‘My sister spotted it and called me,’ she says. ‘Although I knew it wasn’t real, seeing it was so distressing, I couldn’t believe someone had done something so degrading to me.

‘I’m an Independent councillor, with strong Left-wing views and I think the divisive nature of politics now means that people who don’t agree with outspoken women, whatever side they’re on, Left or Right, feel they have a right to demean them in this way.’ 

Shortly afterwards, a Facebook profile picture of Jill eating a vanilla ice cream cone was turned into a highly suggestive video of her licking it and ending up with ice cream all over her face. This was also shared on the Biddulph Facebook group.

Jill managed to get both deepfakes taken down within 24 hours. However, in May, another video, purporting to show her doing yoga, accompanied by lyrics too obscene to repeat, was posted in the same group. ‘My sister, who keeps an eye on it for me, called again and said: “Have you seen what they’ve done now?”’

While the video was also taken down within 24 hours, Jill is acutely aware that thousands of people, many of them her constituents, could have viewed it during that time.

‘For me, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back,’ she says. ‘I’ve had enough of being humiliated in this way and decided not to stand for re-election next May.

‘I’m not the only one impacted by this abuse – it’s also my husband and two teenage sons. When my eldest went out for a drink, for the first time after turning 18, he was asked about this material by other lads in the local pub.

‘I don’t want to keep putting my family through that, when none of this is about my politics, but about sexualising me.

‘I need to retreat from local politics for a while, though hopefully not forever, as I do feel bitter about the fact that, 100 years on from women winning the right to vote, new ways are still being found to repress and undermine female politicians.’

Meanwhile, a police investigation into the online abuse against Jill is underway, which she is hoping will result in charges being brought. ‘This is happening more and more to women and I don’t think a letter of apology cuts it, so I’d like to see the case go to court,’ she says.

Narinder has, meanwhile, reported each image and had numerous visits from the police but still none of the perpetrators has been identified.

Janaya Walker, Interim Director of the EVAW Coalition, is campaigning for greater regulation of online platforms, insisting that government ‘needs to confront the business model of big tech, with a regulatory system which has the teeth to hold them to account’.

Of course it takes courage for deepfake porn victims, like Jill, Jess and Narinder, to speak publicly about their experience, drawing attention to the offensive material and perhaps even encouraging copy-cat abuse.

Certainly, Narinder believes the more she has spoken out against this misogynistic crime, the more of a target she has become.

‘It’s deeply upsetting to have your image exploited in these ways but when I’m at my lowest, and want to stop fighting back, I remember the words of Gisele Pelicot, whose husband allowed countless men to rape her while she slept, and who is now the poster woman for victims everywhere,’ says Narinder.

‘Shame must change sides. The burden and guilt for sexual abuse – whatever form it takes – belongs entirely with the perpetrators, not the survivors.’