Our dialog usually returns to Vienna, who’s on the forefront of Cally’s activism. Vienna was born in tough circumstances. “The birth was stressful,” Cally displays, referring to being in labour for 32 hours earlier than having an emergency C-section, “and I went through a lot with her dad [Luis].” In 2018, Cally publicly accused Luis of being untrue to her whereas she was pregnant with Vienna – one thing he would later deny. “I didn’t have the motherhood experience that I would’ve liked,” she provides, “but I knew I had this little girl there with me… I felt like I had somebody watching me. And when she gets older, I want her to look up to me and understand what things are acceptable, what boundaries are, and things like that.” She finishes, “It was a tough time, but I think she was there to save me, in a strange way, and now we’re inseparable.”
Motherhood profoundly influenced Cally’s determination to talk up about her expertise of deepfake abuse. She tells me, “I kind of just forgot about me and thought more about the future generation, my daughter, and how I can help change this. And that’s when I thought, ‘No, I need to do something.’ And I said to my management, ‘Look, I’ve got a little girl, and this is scary. I didn’t know this was this big. And it’s getting bigger, so it needs to be stopped.’”
Cally continues, “I want Vienna to grow up in a safe environment and to not worry about her identity being used in a form that she didn’t consent to – that’s important not just for my daughter, but for anyone that has children growing up in this world; that they’re protected and that they’re safe.”
We return to the second Cally first found the deepfake photographs. What was going via her thoughts? “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” she begins. “I was really, really shocked.” Cally’s (very comprehensible) shock subsided, solely to get replaced by panic. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, my career… Me being a mum… Who’s seen this? Who thinks it’s real?’”
“It makes you feel like you should be ashamed,” Cally continues. “And really, you shouldn’t have to feel like that – even if you have taken a nude photo of yourself and shared it with a partner. That doesn’t make it OK for them to share it without your consent.”
Cally instantly took to Instagram to share her expertise. “I got floods of messages from everybody telling me [deepfake abuse] is a thing, it’s happening, it’s a pandemic, and we need to do something about it. So, then I thought, ‘Right, I’m going to have to do something about this and make some change.’”
For Cally and her administration workforce, the following few days had been spent manically attempting to get the deepfake photographs eliminated and reporting the incident to the police. This concerned a “long, draining process” of contacting Google, Ofcom, and the web site internet hosting the offending photographs. “I spent a lot of time and energy chasing [them],” she notes. “It was such a stressful time.”
Nonetheless, Cally describes her state of affairs as “lucky” as a result of, shortly after she shared her expertise on social media, the offending photographs had been eliminated. “However,” she notes, “there was no justice for me.” Thanks, partially, to the inadequacy of the legal regulation on image-based abuse, no efforts had been made to search out the one who created the deepfake photographs of Cally. “There was no follow-up, there was no IP address tracing for who created this image, and there’s nothing to stop them from taking another image off my social media and doing it again.”
