Why former Geordie Shore star Vicky Pattison made a deepfake porn video

Vicky Pattison has uploaded a picture of herself, fully clothed, to one of the new and easily accessible “undressing” apps.

The horror she feels on seeing the almost instant results, as she is digitally derobed, is visceral. She instinctively puts her hand to the screen to block the view of “her” naked flesh.

Then, as she forces herself to look, she feels sick. “I hadn’t expected it to look so realistic,” she says now. “I thought the ‘body’ that I’d be given would be like a porn star’s — so fake that it would be immediately obvious it wasn’t real.

“But it was entirely real, right down to the squishy bits I have.

“I had this reaction, thinking: ‘God, that’s me! And I’m showing everyone this on telly.’

“I had to take a breath and even tell myself: ‘No, it’s not real. This isn’t me.’ “Then your mind goes to, ‘What if I was a 14-year-old girl now?’ This is so, so dangerous. It made me feel physically sick — and angry.”

If she was angry about this, though, imagine how Vicky, 37, felt when she repeated the process, but uploading an image of her husband instead.

All the arguments about these types of apps being ‘just a bit of fun’ immediately went out the window when the ‘undressed’ an image of Ercan Ramadan — her husband of only a few weeks, at this stage — showed him not as a naked male, but with women’s breasts and genitalia.

She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at first. Then the rage descended. “These apps simply don’t know what to do with a man’s body because there is no demand to undress them digitally. The technology doesn’t even exist. It was all the evidence you need that these things are not designed to terrorise people in general, they are designed to terrorise women.”

Strong word, terrorise. She nods. “But it’s what’s happening. It’s a war on women.”

Vicky, a former TV reality star and now an influencer and campaigner, has suffered some collateral damage in this ‘war’ herself.

Last night her documentary Vicky Pattison: My Deepfake Sex Tape, about the murky world of deepfake porn, aired on Channel 4 to a great brouhaha. It had been a controversial idea, she concedes.

To give a novel twist to the investigation, Vicky — who came into public consciousness via the MTV reality show Geordie Shore — worked with programme makers to create her own deepfake sex tape before leaking the hyper-realistic footage on X (formerly Twitter) . . . only to later reveal it was all done as part of the documentary.

Messing about with an ‘undressing’ app was only the start of a very dark journey that saw her employ actors, have them film an entire explicit sex scene — then work with digital experts to splice her own face onto the footage, before uploading it to the web. The theory was that by ‘bringing this issue out of the darkness’, as she puts it, viewers would be shocked, educated and hopefully ‘empowered’ to shout about the rampant misogyny at play.

Running alongside the footage about her creating her own deepfake would be testimony from real-life victims of the phenomenon, and interviews with those working hard to try to change the law around deepfake images.

In fact, earlier this month the Government announced plans to make the deepfaking of sexual explicit imagery a criminal offence punishable by two years behind bars, though there’s no timeframe for introducing the relevant legislation yet. What Vicky didn’t anticipate (‘and maybe I was naive,’ she concedes today) is that there would be a backlash, and that her methods would be strongly criticised.

Several charities who were approached about the project refused to take part — believing that Vicky’s own video (a ‘fake deepfake’, if you like) was a terrible idea, and disrespectful to actual victims. One victim of such digital trickery, Jodie (who asked to remain anonymous), called Vicky’s documentary a ‘PR stunt’ and said it risked actually showing people how to create deepfake porn, rather than highlighting the problem.

“These women have suffered enormous trauma,” Jodie says. “For Channel 4 to curate this experience trivialises the issue. It feels wrong. There was consent throughout the process, which is something real victims do not get.”

Fair comment? Vicky is still shaken when we meet to discuss both the documentary and the fallout.

“I’m in no way trivialising their feelings, and I completely understand from the bottom of my heart,” she tells me.

“I know our methods have been divisive, but for the project we spoke to four victims who did think my tape would be a bold and impactful way of getting the message out there. It was something I did wrestle with, even as I was waiting to upload my video.”

She still feels that, on balance, she did the right thing.

“All I would say to victims is that, if they feel they can, please watch it. There is much more to this documentary than a sex tape.”

If deepfake porn is a relatively recent phenomenon, then so is the trend of reality TV stars moving into the world of serious documentary making. Vicky makes no bones about the fact that this is what she is trying to do. She has previously made films about fertility issues (she has frozen her eggs and had cameras track the process), and sees her future in campaigning journalism – “I’ve always been candid about the fact I’d like to leave reality TV behind and make serious television that advocates for change.”

She says she sat down with the film production company some 18 months ago to work through ideas. The one that soon gained traction was to explore how easy it would be to actually make a convincing sex tape of a celebrity and watch from afar as it went viral. And this has been her life since, seeing herself ‘immersed’ in this vile world.

One of the most striking aspects of Vicky’s process is that she had only just got married when she began making the documentary – and her husband was, for better or worse, part of that journey. It’s very clear that Ercan, 31, who runs a clothing brand, found it difficult.

At the start of the documentary, he is at Vicky’s side as she pokes around in dark corners of the web, often shrieking and slamming the laptop shut as she tries to process what she is seeing. And yet by the time she is ready to upload her own sex video, he has removed himself from the room.

“Regardless of whether it is fake or not, you don’t want a sex tape of your missus being sent around,” he says.

“He’d had enough by then,” Vicky tells me, conceding that the whole process was harder on him than either of them had anticipated. “We also had to explain it to his mam — and to my mam.”

And presumably both were utterly horrified by the idea?

“There were definitely some raised eyebrows. Even in my camp, some people didn’t understand why I was doing it.”

What on earth has the impact been on her relationship?

“t’s not been the most ideal first six months of marriage,” Vicky admits, with a wry smile. “The whole beginning of our marriage has been consumed with this project.

“Ercan has only really seen this version of me as his wife — someone who has been shocked, devastated, sickened by what she’s been discovering. He’s had this horrible version of me the whole time we’ve been married.”

Then there was the anti-men feeling that grew inside Vicky as the project continued and she spoke to victims — including a teenage girl and a woman who discovered her deepfaker was her own brother-in-law. She also interviewed men who did the deepfaking. She says trying to stay calm ‘while I wanted to say “scumbag!” ’ was difficult.

“The whole thing left me feeling quite shaken, quite anti-men. Even me, with a gorgeous dad and a lovely husband, it does leave you feeling scared and unsafe.

“But in a way, Ercan’s disgust about the whole thing was reassuring. He was so supportive and as shocked about the sort of stuff I was discovering as I was.

“You have to tell yourself: ‘They are bad men, but there are good men, too.’

You can’t hate all men — although I do [now] hate more than I’d like.

Whatever you think of Vicky’s methods, the documentary does make the stomach churn, and – her trump card in terms of the means justifying the ends — will likely attract a different target audience to the investigations previously conducted by serious journalists such as Channel 4 News’s Cathy Newman (herself a victim of deepfake porn).

Cathy actually appears in this film, praising Vicky’s efforts to draw attention to the issue — but warning that she feels ‘anxious’ on her behalf; that she is about to open a ‘Pandora’s Box’.

Why did Vicky feel the need to film explicit sex scenes with actors, though, rather than simply use existing porn footage (which is the norm for deepfakes)?

“It was about consent,” she says.

An intimacy coordinator was engaged to make sure the sex would be as authentic and respectful as possible. Cue a cringe-filled day spent watching as two actors got down to action on a bed, with Vicky watching.

“I’ve never felt so uncomfortable,” she tells me.

Even though the simulated sex was designed to be quite tame, Vicky’s discomfort highlights the often gaping chasm between porn sex and real-life sex. She says that even she — someone with a ‘slightly sexy glamorous past’, as she puts it — felt uncomfortable just being in the room with filming going on. When it came to viewing even more explicit online content — as the project required — she was downright horrified. ‘As I was sitting in my room at night chatting to the fellas that make this stuff, I felt so uncomfortable and it reinforced the idea that I’m a bit of a prude.”

There is discomfort here not just about the deepfake aspect, but the general tone of much easily accessible online porn.

“It would be easy to imagine that Ercan and I are having a wild first six months of marriage, swinging from the chandeliers and all sorts. But I’m actually quite ‘vanilla’ and always have been,” she admits.

“For me, sex and things like that are about intimacy, about feeling loved, respected, safe. I think that is what most women really want with sexual relationships. So even just watching the type of deepfake porn that I did felt really uncomfortable.

“This stuff isn’t Pride And Prejudice. It’s degrading and aggressive. It feels like a prelude to something else. A lot of the time it’s dark in itself, but it feels like a precursor to something even darker.

“I kept thinking: ‘What if a 14-year-old lad is watching this and thinks it’s OK?’

“How will that impact on his view of women, and his ability to have a relationship?”

“Ercan and I are thinking of starting a family. What if we have daughters? What sort of world is this to bring them into?”

Once the actors had completed their parts, Vicky had still images taken of herself and head at various angles. A specialist team then spliced the footage together — not that finesse is actually needed. ‘It’s so easy for anyone to do it,” Vicky says.

She was helped by a team from Deep Fusion Films. Owner Benjamin Field (who has presented evidence to a parliamentary select committee on the issue and called for tougher penalties) defended the project, saying: “In 2024 alone, explicit deepfake videos reached record levels, with women accounting for over 90 per cent of the victims.

Vicky’s bravery in lending her voice (and face) to this issue has brought a deeply personal and human perspective to a problem often hidden in the shadows.’ It was just a few weeks ago that Vicky pressed send — uploading the video ‘to let the internet do its creepy thing’. She was shaking and “even sweating behind the knees”.

“Then I immediately shut down the laptop. I wasn’t going to watch what happened next. That night, we had a takeaway and watched a film.”

When she did log back on, she discovered that thousands had viewed the footage — and many had piled in with their comments.

“I hope it is real and there is a longer version,” said one.

“Such a sexy s**t’ and ‘dirty b***h” were some of the other comments.

One ‘fan’ asked: “Why did you do it Vicky?”

The video was live for 24 hours before Vicky put out the word that the film had actually been a fake — entirely her own work.

“I was in control the whole time, but even then it gave me an idea what the real victims go through.”

The project was not finished, though. Another important part was following Vicky through the process of trying to get the tape removed from the web.

There are specialist companies which do such a thing, but as they worked to try to remove this video there was a surprise — they broke the news to Vicky that they had found 1,700 other images of her online which they felt she should know about.

“They weren’t deepfakes as such, but pictures of me within threads about deepfakes, basically saying: “If you wanted to make one of her, you could.”

She thinks some images — including her own fake sex tape for the documentary — have now been removed, hopefully for ever. But she is in a fortunate position of being able to erase the original tape.

“Real victims never have that option,” she stresses.