Big TakeLevittown Episode 2: ‘I’m Also on the Website’
Months after Kayla’s discovery, dozens of women in Levittown, a New York suburb on Long Island, learn they, too, are subjects of faked porn. Most are recent graduates of the local high school, and they zero in on a culprit. One of them sets out to prove it.
Levittown is a real-life horror story for the AI generation. In this six-part series from Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts, reporters Olivia Carville and Margi Murphy take listeners from quiet suburbs of New York to as far as New Zealand and into the darkest corners of the Internet. Where tech moves faster than the law, and it’s up to everyday people to hold back a rising tide of explicit deepfakes.
For official transcripts and additional information on this series, go to bloomberg.com/levittown
A quick note, this is episode two 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.
I got a call when I was working up my old job at a clothing store, and I see one of the classmates popped up on my phone. She goes, I saw you on the website. I just want to let you know I'm also on this website.
It was New Year's Eve twenty twenty, nearly a year after Kayla's father had knocked on her bedroom door to show her the images he had found of her online.
And I remember just like walking away from the register and I was just like, okay, Like, how many other people are on there?
Kayla wasn't the only one whose phone was lighting up.
I got a text. I was parked in the mall parking lot outside of the entrance to the movie theater with my boyfriend at the time, who was about to start his evening night shift.
Cecilia was tucked in the driver's seat while rain pelted the windshield. She'd planned to drop her boyfriend off at his job at the mall near Leavitt Town, the New York suburb where they lived. Before heading home, she.
Said, Hey, can I talk to you for a second And I said, yeah, my boyfriend's going into work in fifteen minutes. You could call me then, and she texted back, he's going to want to hear this.
The text was from a former last night, someone she hadn't talked to in months. When the phone rang, Cecilia put it on speaker.
She said that her friend came across this website called come on Printed Picks, in which someone was posting photos of many of the girls that we had gone to school with, and she said that there are pictures of you on there, and I just wanted you to know, And she also sent me the link to the website. I opened the link immediately, with my boyfriend over my shoulder looking at it with me. The first things I saw when I opened that link, I remember, were photos of girls that I graduated with. A lot of them were just pictures from their instagrams. A lot of them had lengthy captions saying their name and their age and describing them in gross ways. I remember coming across mine.
The photo was a selfie. Cecilia had taken it in the changing room of a clothing store a few months earlier. It was exactly the same photo she'd posted to social media, except in this one she was completely naked.
He described me as a ripe latina plaything.
And there were others, including one of Cecilia when she was a lot younger.
I remember seeing a photo of myself as a child. I was in elementary school. I had to be five or sex.
In the photo, she has chubby cheeks and ringlets that she's since grown out of.
Next to that.
Innocent image was an erect penis just resting there like.
Like it wasn't and she's away from a digital image of a child's face.
She started crying, describing it as that kind of cry where you sound like you're dying.
It was such a terrible feeling, and I remember looking over at my boyfriend at the time, and he looked back at me, and we didn't share any words, but his the look his eyes.
Several young women shared a similar experience.
I felt gross. I felt like I needed to take a shower. I felt like I wanted to cry. I wanted to throw up, I wanted to scream.
I didn't really want to look, but I had to look.
It was the most horrifying thing.
But you just can't look away, Like a car accident, but I'm the car accident. I was just like paralyzed on my couch for hours because it felt so surreal.
And then that's when I went to my mom and I was like, there's like a whole thing going on.
The news came while they were working a shift at their retail job or sitting at home watching New Year's Eve celebrations. Others were away at college parties and ran home in tears. In all, more than forty young women found themselves living some version of the story. And they weren't strangers. Most knew each other from MacArthur High School, they were on the same cheerleading squad, or they lived to feudors down from one another. So what are the chances that they were all targets of someone? They didn't know that this was all just a weird coincidence. Absolutely zero.
I'm Olivia Carvill and I'm Margie Murphy from iHeart Podcasts, Bloomberg and Kaleidoscope. This is Levertown. That night, Cecilia drove back to her boyfriend's house and called the cops. An hour later, detectives from the Nassau County Police Department were knocking at the door. She hadn't been the first to call them interviewed her alone, a painful process that left her wrung out.
After the meaning that I had had that night with the detectives, it became a little bit too much to bear again. That was the first night of knowing, and with that came a shark in betrayal and a lot of heavy emotions.
At least four of the young women and their parents called the police that New Year's Eve. They were told pretty much the same thing Kayla had heard all those months before. The poster was anonymous, the photos were fake according to the law at the time, there was no real crime, but pretty soon messages were flying between the young women.
I reached out to a bunch of people and let them know.
Leah, who was a sophomore in college at the time, remembers two things hit her as she scrolled through the sod like one the shock of seeing her face tacked onto a naked body that was not hers, and two, the realization of just how widespread this was. She spent hours scrolling as she saw one classmate after another defiled in the same way.
It was just a whole chain reaction of girls in our community that were involved in this.
Unfortunately, by New Year's Day, they weren't just offering each other support, they were determined to figure out who was behind this. As they texted back and forth, the women throughout names of potential suspects. One thought it was a guy from school who'd been stalking her for months, but there was another name that kept coming up. It was a guy most of them barely knew, but Cecilia did.
I first met him when I was a freshman in high school. I remember he was very talkative, you know, easy to talk to.
She described the group she used to hang out with.
I hate to say it, but they were the Stoners. That's who I was with. We would hang out, they would have these great philosophical talks about whatever it was, the state of the world, you know, and I felt I felt so worthy, being deemed like valuable enough to kind of hang out with them and spend time with them while they were doing this. I'm just the girl that they, you know, let hang around. Honestly, it was probably just because I was pretty. They just let me hang out because I was a pretty girl and they could invite me over it. It was validating and reassuring to have a kind of association that I was a part of, like a little group that I was a part of that was mine. You know. They were all really.
Really nice, except for this one guy.
He was really sarcastic and condescending, but it was part of his charm. You know, he's just an asshole. We've all met this guy usually in high school. He's small and quick with a comeback. Nagging is basically how he talks to girls. 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, so 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.
The rest of high school was awkward between them. Some weeks they were friends, he wanted to partner up in class and asked her for a ride home from school. Cecilia remembers looking up to him thinking he was really smart. Then it was like a switch would flip and he would start icing her out again. She hated it, but no matter what, he'd always pop up in Cecilia's socials to troll or debate her, like after she posted about the importance of mental health in the LGBTQ community.
I remember he said, I know you see a lot of your ideals as common sense, but you need to know you're basically a fascist, and I'm just trying to advance you past the next five to ten years of irrational thinking, Like he's doing me some grand favor by coming into my social media and debating my ear off about whether this sentence is grammatically correct or not. You know.
So on New Year's Eve, when Cecilia was staring at those doctored photos of herself and hearing from her former classmates that they suspected this old friend of hers, it was extra personal.
It's hard to describe the kind of sinking feeling that I felt in my stomach. There are things you don't want to believe about your friends or people that you know are close to you.
Some of the young women remembered getting notifications that he had taken screenshots of their pictures on Snapchat, like ones of them in bikinis. Then they'd see the same pictures on the website, now altered to make them appein it. Some recognized his handwriting on images where words like haw and slat were scrawled across their faces. For Cecilia, the tell was the long, detailed fantasies posted on the tributing website. She recognized the writing style.
I know how he types, and reading his paragraph long dedications to these girls that he finds disgusting, I read them in his voice, so it was enough to make me not a question that it was him.
One after another, the young woman showed up to the police station, and when asked who they thought was behind the posts, many of them had the same answer. They figured the police would take it from there, but the police told them that these suspicion weren't enough. They would need hard evidence, the kind that could help them prove in court who had written the posts and as far as the women and their families knew, that's where the police were leaving it. They didn't hear much, if anything, from the detectives after giving their statements. But as the new year turned into spring and then summer, the anonymous poster got bolder, uploading hundreds of new photos. These young women watched in horror as a barrage of deep faked nude images, pictures of them as young as thirteen flooded the tributing website.
Seeing these horrible things and people commenting on what we look like and you know, putting our faces on screenshots of foreign videos.
New accounts with names like tween Hunter were posting and reposting increasingly graphic fakes. Some of the threads reached thirty thousand views. Full names, addresses, phone numbers, and actual social media handles went up next to the images. The poster was encouraging others to reach out to the women, to send them voice notes threatening to rape them to death. By the spring of twenty twenty one, some of the Levittown women were getting direct messages to their Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat accounts their photos beside male genitalia or covered in semen. Others got late night calls from foreign numbers. When they picked up, they only heard heavy breathing and moaning. Kayla told me that she didn't want to live in fear, but she did. She lived in fear of going outside, in fear of men, and fear of being herself. She had nightmares of me and hunting her.
But I could hear them like trying to find me, and they would like say my name, and like they would say the things from the website, like the milk me and pea on her, like they were saying those things while trying to find me.
She also dreamed that the images on the website had come true, that she had the words rape me tattooed on her forehead, just as she'd seen on the website.
I mean, I live every single day scared of man. I mean not all men, but strangers, yes, all the time. Because God forbid, it's someone that was on that website that has just passed me on the street. You don't know that, and that's scary.
Suddenly I'm not post seeing my face on my Instagram because I don't know who's gonna find it, you know? And I directed so much guilt and uh so much of his hate towards myself.
Most of the Levettown women turned their social media accounts to private, but many deleted them all together. One dropped out of college, another told me she lost twenty pounds from the stress. Two confided that they had started carrying knives everywhere they went. These are the stories we heard from the women who agreed to talk to us. We reached out to many others who either didn't respond or didn't want to talk about it.
I felt horrible for the main victims. I mean, we are all victims, but there were some people who had it much worse.
Leah not have been the main target. Others found dozens and dozens of posts with their image and likeness, but still whoever was doing this posted Li's full name and phone number on the site. She worried what would happen if someone, anyone really an employer, a romantic partner, ever googled her.
I was really worried about my future because I wanted to, you know, like go to medical school, and I was worried about the safety of all of my friends, and what if these pictures, you know, get lead to like their family members, and they can ruin relationships. Because some of them were so realistic. This could ruin many people's lives.
As the months went by, the women reported that the harassment was escalating. Their parents were terrified, not only because of what their children were going through, but because the police didn't seem to be doing much. Cyber harassment cases are notoriously hard to prove. Gathering digital evidence can be time consuming and hard to capture, and most perpetrators cover their tracks. Many of the parents created their own group chats to brainstorm what to do. They were outraged that their daughters were still being targeted, while the person they believed was responsible for all this was right there among them in Levettown. If law enforcement couldn't do anything about it, they were going to have to do something themselves.
That summer twenty twenty one, one of the Leavettown women saw an image that almost broke her. We recorded an interview with her, but she wasn't comfortable using her actual voice, so the things she said in that interview will be voiced here by someone else.
I've learned not to trust anybody very private with things now I don't really talk to anybody that I don't trust and obvious naive because that was my problem. I'm too nice.
The photo that almost broke her was a photo of herself smiling, wearing jeans and a white tank top. Beside that appeared to be a deep fake of a woman in the exact same outfit, her hands tied behind her back, covered in blood, with a plastic bag over her head. The caption said her body had been found near an abandoned construction site, that she had been raped. We're calling her Cat because she asked not to be identified by her real name, but the post she found listed her real name and claimed a snuff video of her murder was circulating on the dark.
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 was aware that others thought they knew who was behind all this, but the suspect was a guy she'd known since she was five. They grew up three blocks away from each other.
In my head, I was almost defending him. I was like, I don't think it's him, There's no way it's him.
In high school that had a lot of classes together, including a photoshop class, and while they didn't hang out, they were still sort of friends, like they would snapchat occasionally outside school.
In high school, he got a little bit more like I don't really give a shit vibe about anything. He was smart, so like he knew what he was talking about, you know, but anybody who said anything to him is just like, Okay, I don't care. I'm smarter than anybody.
Kat talks about him in the same way Cecilia does. He would troll her at times, but was also smart and could be fun. He knew how to push her buttons, calling her naive. He'd tell her the world was full of shitty people and sure, you want everything to be okay, but it's not. She knew all this, but she didn't think, or maybe didn't want to think it was him. She thought, perhaps that she would be able to both clear his name and figure out who was doing this once and for all.
Then that's when I went on the website. I sat there for like, I had to look at things I did not want to look at.
From her bedroom at night, she carefully examined every post. The suspected harassment made I spent.
Like hours going through it, and then I went to video of his own page where he would post himself.
Cat found that the person posting deep fakes of her and her classmates was also posting explicit pictures of himself on the website.
He would post things of himself, pictures of himself, not his face, like his body and his parts.
She found one picture where he appeared to be wearing girls underwear while standing in a little girl's bedroom.
Let me look in the background, Let me see if I could see anything in the background. So I saw stuffed animals and I was like, all right, let me see.
She saw a white dresser with brown trim and a stuffed toy sloth on the bed. Kat knew the guy everyone suspected had younger twin sisters.
So I went on his TikTok and I looked up his sister and then I had the same exact stuffed animals in the same background, and I was like, okay.
His sister was posting dance videos to TikTok and they were filmed in the same bedroom with a white dresser and brown trim. Even that stuffed toy was in the same spot on the bed.
Oh my god, this is crazy. It really is him.
His name was Patrick Carey. He definitely wasn't a stranger. He was nineteen years old and he had also gone to MacArthur High. His dad, like Kayla's, was a cop. He lived three blocks away from cat just over the back fence from their old elementary school in Levettown. She went back to the police.
They came to me with a photo of Patrick Carrey in the bedroom.
In August, Kat and her mum printed out the screenshots the images on TikTok and on the website, and they brought them to the lead detective on the case, Timothy Ingram.
These girls they did their own investigating and they did excellent work. They would make great detectives.
But when I recently sat down with Detective Tim Ingram, he told me that from the first day the woman came in, the police were proactive.
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, He said. They immediately filed subpoenas for information connected to users of the website, but getting an answer takes time and Ingram said he didn't want to talk to Patrick until he had enough evidence to arrest him. The police did eventually find out that one of the users on the website was posting from an ip address that traced back to Patrick's family home, but even that wasn't enough to arrest Patrick, and the police still had to figure out what exactly to charge him with, because while New York State had laws on the books for revenge porn and child sexual abuse material, the images had to be real, and in this case, they were fake.
Being that it was a very new type of crime where we it was a gray area per se, where we weren't even sure if this met the criteria it's filipenal law charge.
We attempted to speak to Patrick Carrey for the story and he declined. But while the police may have been closer to making an arrest for the young woman of Leavittown, the fear didn't just go away. Kat was glad that she helped match Patrick Carrey with the postings, but she was still terrified, and Cecilia was struggling to cope with the fact that the person who had done this to her was someone she had considered a friend.
It kind of touches a part of your soul and just breaks it in. Hah, because you watched me kind of grow up. You know, you spent most of my teenage years with me, 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 turning to rape me. It kind of feels like he hallowed me out of that made me who I am, And that is one of the most horrifying things I think I've ever experienced. They don't mind that he didn't respect me, you know, or see me as a friend. I mind that he didn't even see me as a person, you know, And that.
Sense of horror it wasn't limited to Cecilia and Kayla and the other women in Levittown, because powered by this one website, that sort of harassment is hugely scalable. As Detective Ingram started looking into the site, he saw that the more than forty women in Levittown and their alleged tormentor, which is a small part of a much bigger ecosystem of men exploiting women in an interactive global arena.
Somewhere in Scotland, somewhere in Russia. They were everywhere.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of women and girls all around the world were on the site. Olivia and I started to get interested in what or who was behind this global clearinghouse of non consensual pornographic images. Turns out we weren't the only ones. Next time on Leavettown.
You have certain police officers there that will wait for calls to come in and then now go and respond to those courts. I like to identify myself as a hunter. I'm the person that will go and hunt people. If you're given pray, you want to go and get it.
This series is reported and hosted by Margie Murphy and me Olivia Carvell. Produced by Kaleidoscope, Led by Julia Nutter, Edited by Nidda tuluis Simnani, Producing by Dara luck Potts. Executive produced by Kate Osborne. Original composition and mixing by Steve bone Our. Bloomberg editors are Caitlin Kenney and Jeff Grocock. Additional reporting by Samanthus Stewart. Sage Bauman 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 Etoor. Levettown is a production of Bloomberg, Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts. If you liked this show, give us a follow and tell your friends
