based on a true story
Despite the feverish heat of San Angelo’s afternoon, the interrogation room was cold. Stale. I pulled at the ends of my sweater, attempting to cover as much of my body as possible. In front of me was the very picture of defeat: a girl staring back at me with bloodshot eyes and swollen cheeks.
I suddenly wished I had worn makeup.
That morning, I had woken up in the center of my childhood bedroom’s disarray. My best friend slept soundly next to me, her skin tinted gold by the sheer curtains that hung loose beside my bedframe. Our prom dresses from the previous evening laid strewn across my hardwood floor, the ballgowns shedding glitter with every passing minute, creating a gorgeous blur of color. A smile tugged at my lips as an echo of the night before crossed my mind. But as I rolled over to check my notifications, my heart sunk deep into my stomach.
“We have something you should see.” the bright blue text bubble read.
I shifted in my sheets to wake my best friend, staring at yet another text from an unknown number.
I remember receiving my first one deep in exam season in 10th grade, much too sleep-deprived to care, brushing it off as an internet scam. The messages were so outlandish, so movie-like, I ended up laughing off its dramatism.
Even now, I didn’t panic. I never did. Truth be told, I had been receiving messages like this for years. Always from a different area code, always with empty threats. But this time, it was different. The number sent me photo after photo, each more threatening than the last.
Attachment 1: A screenshot of me at a pool party at fifteen, the pixels stretched and zoomed on my tits.
Attachment 2: A photo of me through my bedroom window, my bare back turned and lit in bright yellow light.
Attachment 3: My face, tongue hanging loose in my mouth and cheeks painted rouge, posed on the edge of a bed frame — completely naked.
Someone behind this screen had access to my camera roll. They knew where I lived. They somehow had pictures of me that I had never taken. And they wanted me to know it.
“Just do what I say, and your parents don’t have to know.” the next text read. “You don’t have to bring them into this, slut.”
I threw the blankets off of my body, swallowing the bile rising in my throat as I became sickeningly aware of what was happening to me. I didn’t bother responding. I’ve never been very good at keeping secrets.
By the time I reached the police station, my breath was shallow and my cheeks were wet with tears. I wasn’t even wearing socks. The small building was deserted, except for two officers who sat, bored, at the front desk. Nothing ever happens in this town.
“Look. Please.” I choked out, sliding my phone across the counter. It somehow felt childish, as if I was telling on a boy for a series of very ill-advised jokes.
The officer’s face contorted as she scrolled through the messages, her eyes widening as she reached the pictures.
“Are these you honey? Is it okay if I look?” She asked, her voice tinted with a Texas drawl.
“They’re me. I mean, it’s my face. But I don’t think that’s me. It can’t be. I never took those pictures.” I replied, embarrassed by my sputtering.
…
As I shifted in my seat my skin writhed in contact with the cold metal. I imagined soaking myself in bleach, turning and folding my limbs over until they were soft and clean and pure. With my eyes squeezed tight, I could almost feel it.
“Aimee?” A man asked as he stepped into the room, his voice warm and deep. His lips stretched into a small smile, his blue belly covered with a large, black binder. He looked like he owned a large backyard, spotted with yellow patches of grass, worn down from his family dog’s piss and the violence that permeates eight-year-old boys. He seemed safe. Or nice, at least.
I nodded in response.
“I’m Officer Moore. I’ll be your investigator. Can you tell me again what happened?”
We ran through the formalities. I hated every second. I was supposed to turn eighteen the following month, making the pictures criminal.
“You need to be honest with me. You never took these pictures? You don’t have to be embarrassed — a lot of girls do it. Think. Do you have any ex-boyfriends, old friends, enemies, anyone who would want to threaten you with them?”
“I didn’t take the pictures,” I said, my cheeks burning scarlet, knowing he had seen them, too. “Look at them,” shoving the prints into his hands, “they’re like, professional. It’s my face. Or someone who really fucking looks like me. But it isn’t me.”
I watched his Adam’s apple scrape the skin on his throat as he paused. He scratched the stubble under his chin, parting the brush of his beard. He looked uncomfortable holding a teenage girl in an interrogation room. I felt sorry for him.
“There might be someone who would want to hurt me,” I said, deciding to throw him a bone.
“When I was thirteen, I got like, internet famous or whatever. Not hype-house famous or red-carpet famous, but primarily male-following famous. There was this guy. He’s only a year older than me — he started texting me and we played games over iMessage — you know, like Pool and Wordhunt and stuff.”
I swallowed, embarrassed at what followed, mourning the innocence of our thirteen-year-old girls. “He started sending me stuff. Flowers, at first. Then clothes… and other things. He didn’t want nudes,” I said, making a face.
“He said he was in love with me.” I braced for the judgement — but none followed. “I was thirteen, okay? It was stupid — when you’re thirteen and someone tells you they love you, you believe them.”
Officer Moore nodded. I knew he would never really get it.
“I thought he was sweet. Then I went on vacation with my friend — and he followed me to Miami. He was spam-texting me, trying to send an Uber to my hotel room. I didn’t want to go. I was super creeped out, so I blocked him on everything. I don’t really think about it now.” I took a breath.
“I just always assumed it would be harmless.”
I turned over on my tongue the ecstasy of pre-teen internet fame in the boredom of suburbia — the tender pink and white spots prodding at the memory of such validation with ease, saliva on a hot, leaking open wound. The flavor of my name in lights no longer tasted like custard that melted in my cheeks. I, instead, spit up the iron of washed-up, sold-out, vile perversion.
Over the next six weeks, I cooperated with the investigation, despite a crawling feeling under my skin that begged me to let it go. I gave them my phone and laptop, letting them wipe each of my devices, scanning them for bugs or secret, implanted cameras. I went in for questioning three times a week. I was an honest citizen. I was a good girl.
I won’t bore you with the suspense. They found an online ring for buying and selling pictures of my dismembered parts, copied and pasted in every sex position you could imagine. Buried perhaps an inch under the surface web, these corners of the internet were far from hidden. After all, profit has always been the goal. The chat circles were littered with screenshots of private accounts, blurry pictures of street sightings, but mostly deepfakes.
Thousands upon thousands of deepfakes.
They’re shockingly simple to make. Developing a deepfake photo or video typically involves feeding hundreds or thousands of images into the artificial neural network, training it to identify and reconstruct patterns—usually faces. It’s nothing but a formula. Once you’ve got the content, the subject is yours to own. And it’s convincing.
Everything I have ever put into the world had been broken down and repackaged for perverse consumption, my face imitating their wildest fantasies.
I ran. It was easy, running. I moved to London. I took down my social media. I ghosted the police. I told no one. I left it all behind.
I like it here. I like the fog and patter of rain on cobblestone outside my apartment, the indie-cult films we insist are strokes of genius, and the coarse accents of men in dive bars. By the time I turned twenty-one, I met someone new. I let his calloused hands run their course over my hips, welcoming his grunts and thrusts into my pink flesh as I inhaled the smell of cigarettes on his lips. He told me he loved me. I believed him. Some things never change.
We got sex down to a simple formula, an eight-minute race to orgasm, four times a week in my studio apartment. Thursday, we performed the usual routine. I rolled over as he finished on my stomach, reaching for my phone between my stained sheets.
Three notifications. My mother.
Attachment 1: A photo of Officer Moore’s business card, slipped under the door of my childhood home. Scribbled in smudged blue ink, atop “SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT” it read, Aimee, come to the station at your earliest convenience. We have been trying to reach you.
Attachment 2: A screenshot of an article in our San Angelo Times, James Perault, a registered sex offender on four counts. The article read, “Small town sex offender has allegedly struck again, this time luring dozens of teenagers into his orbit, persuading them to pose in compromising positions and then extorting them for money, Texas federal prosecutors charge.”
“Come home, please. You are safe now.”
I read off the bright white texts in the suffocating grey of the afternoon gloom, the screen glowing.
Bile rose in my throat. I lost control of my breath, my diaphragm shaking as the tears fell. I pulled my knees to my chest, hoping he didn’t see me cry.
“Did I do something wrong? Are you okay? What happened?” the man next to me asked as he placed a hand on my bare back.
“No. Leave, please.” I whispered, praying for his compliance. “Just please leave.”
He scrambled for his clothes tossed idly on the floor, hopping as he tied his shoelaces. “Goodbye, Aimee. I hope you get better.” He paused, hoping I would ask him to stay. I didn’t. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he mumbled, barely comprehensible over the ringing that pressed against my eardrums.
There was never a point in running. It’s everywhere anyway. I see my body pressed against the glass rooms of the red-light district, in every stupid cutting-edge French film, in the blares of sirens below my balcony. The feeling never left. I hear it in the helplessness of my sobs, the decay of my brittle bones, the slow gnaw of my liver, and everything that has remained.
I have a choice: I can let it rot, or I can face it.
This is me facing it.