HEARING her letterbox rattle, Kirsty Pellant looked out of her living room window to see a stranger walking away – and was surprised to see that he had delivered a Valentine’s card.
Inside he had written: “Hiya Kirsty, so nice that we have got in touch. Look forward to meeting you soon.”
Kirsty Pellant was working at a school when her nightmare beganCredit: ITV/Turquoise Television
She spent five years tracking down Jonathan BatesCredit: Refer to source
“I didn’t understand,” says Kirsty. “It was like I knew this person but I had no clue. This was the start of everything I then uncovered and the nightmare seemed unending.”
To her horror, she learnt that the man was looking for casual sex and had and videos of her on various online porn and dating websites with her profile listing some of her fantasies as “gangbangs” and “humiliation.”
It also included her name and where she lived, describing her in such derogatory terms as “sl*t” and “wh***.”
Her world fell apart as many who knew her thought the images really were of her – including some pupils and their mums at the school where she worked as head of inclusion and welfare. But the images were deep fakes.
Although many of them were taken from her , they had been tampered with to portray obscene images. Others were of women whose body shape resembled hers.
“One picture I remember was taken when I was with my friend’s child in a play area and I was holding her hand,” says Kirsty. “But the girl had been replaced with an older male with my hand now holding his penis.”
Kirsty felt alone and frightened, wondering who would do such a thing to her. Nearly everyone she knew became a suspect.
When the were unable to help, she set about investigating herself. It was to bring her in touch with two other women who had been victims of this same online predator.
All lived miles apart but together they unravelled something far bigger than they could have imagined – a network of hundreds of unsuspecting victims with one man at the heart of it all.
Chillingly, it turned out to be someone Kirsty had known and liked and was not even on her list of suspects.
Donna got in touch with Kirsty after seeing the deep fakes onlineCredit: Refer to source
Hayley also teamed up with the womenCredit: ITV/Turquoise Television
Their five-year nightmare is told in the documentary, Faked: Hunting My Online Predator in which the women bravely speak out, including the wife of the perpetrator who was horrified to discover that she, too, was one of his victims.
The sender of the Valentine’s card, called ‘George’ in the programme, also agreed to be interviewed.
“I had been looking for an open-minded lady for a no-strings attached relationship – casual sex,” he explains.
“I looked online and found a couple of sites and one was XHamster. It has profiles and pictures of lots of women who say they are looking for men for sexual gratification. And that’s how I got talking to who I thought was Kirsty. We started exchanging sexual messages online.
“I Googled her name and found out where she worked and what her address was and I went there and posted the Valentine’s card through her letterbox. After that, I messaged her directly and mentioned that I had met her on (a named site). She was extraordinarily surprised. She had no idea what that was.
“She asked me if I could send her some details of what was on there so I took some screenshots of her profile and pictures and she was horrified by what she saw.”
Says Kirsty: “One of the messages I am meant to have sent to him was, ‘I’ve been having naughty thoughts over the last few days about what you might do to me. I can’t say where I work because what I am doing would be frowned upon. Feel free to message as often as you want, even if it’s just to say you want to feel my lips around your sh***.’”
Terrified of attack
To her mounting horror, she discovered similar profiles of her all over the internet. One labelled her “the sl*tty teacher from Canterbury.”
“There was a lady with dark hair, laying down, you didn’t see her face, so it looked like it could have been me. I could see the similarities,” she says. “Underneath it listed what sexual fantasies I was supposedly into.”
On another well known website she found three pictures of a woman performing a sex act on a man as others around her watched. “She had dark hair so I could see how people would think that was me. And they did.”
In one post the fake Kirsty mentions a sexual adventure she had at her local pub. Another about having sex in the school staff room.
“I was scared to go out in case someone attacked me because the messages suggested I was basically up for anything. It felt like my entire world had collapsed around me. I was trying to get my head around who would have done such a thing. I was questioning everybody that I knew.
“I contacted Police and they struggled to track down the perpetrator because they were hiding behind a . They basically said they couldn’t do any more with it until, potentially, he or she was to slip up.”
Kirsty was sickened by the images posted on the sitesCredit: ITV/Turquoise Television
Faceless fiends create deep fake porn without their victims knowingCredit: Getty
School shock
Going to work, knowing word was getting out about it, became unbearable.
“As head of inclusion and welfare at school, I looked at pupils’ behaviour, attendance and safeguarding. One day I was talking to some 10 and 11-year-olds about not saying anything on messages or online that they wouldn’t say to someone’s face, when one of the children said, ‘What about the photographs that you put out there?’
“It turned out they had seen the sexualised pictures supposedly of me on their parents’ phone. I was shocked. It felt very awkward. My mind completely went.”
On Facebook she was bombarded with slurs labelling her a porn star, saying where she worked and that she shouldn’t be around children.
“There was so much nastiness, and knowing I needed to go to work the next day and face the people that had been talking so badly about me was awful.
“I was coming home from work, trawling the website, removing pictures of myself. But every time I did, more and more were put back on. At school, there was playground gossip, parents were making obscene gestures behind my back, it was unbearable.
“It was the not being able to prove it, that was so hard. I had some dark thoughts. I became a shell of my former self. I felt so isolated and that I couldn’t go on like this anymore.”
It was then that she got a message from a woman called Donna.
She had also been going through a similar thing as Kirsty and was first alerted when a man sent her a message on Facebook saying, “Hey sexy. I found you on (named site).”
It felt like my entire world had collapsed around me. I was trying to get my head around who would have done such a thing. I was questioning everybody that I knew
Kirsty Pellant
After contacting him to find out what he was talking about, she found faked photos of her on a host of websites with similar “fantasies” as the fake Kirsty. Some included her postcode.
Checking her Facebook, she saw that the photos that had been taken were available to friends only.
After weeks of trawling the internet, looking for clues, she began to recognise some pictures of women who had been given slightly different names on other websites and suspected that they, too, were victims.
Shock suspect
It led to her contacting Kirsty. Although living miles apart, they looked through their friendship groups to see if they had any mutual friends and found one…. Jonathan Bates.
“Jonathan Bates was a man I used to work with at the school,” says Kirsty. “He had a good sense of humour and seemed like a nice guy. He never came up as a suspect on my list.
“It made no sense why he would do it,” adds Donna. “I didn’t really think it could have been him.
“I first saw Jon Bates at a wake for a funeral. He came over to the table I was sitting on and shook hands with a few people, but he didn’t speak to me. We didn’t know each other. A few months later I had a friend request from him on Facebook.”
Donna and Kirsty started messaging some of the other ladies they thought were victims. One of them was Hayley, who lived in Southend.
For fun, Hayley had Googled her name one day to see if anything came up.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she says. “There were at least 20 pictures that had been taken from my social media, on all these different pornographic and weird dating agency websites. One picture had my young daughter in the background.
“Some of the pictures weren’t even of me but someone similar doing something explicit with a man, with my name and age and where I was from, next to it. I burst into tears because I thought this could ruin my life. Who would do this?”
Meanwhile, Donna focussed on a picture of a naked woman on a porn website and, cross-referencing Jon Bates’s Facebook, realised it was his wife.
“That was when I knew for sure that Jon Bates was responsible for all of the fake pictures and profiles,” says Donna.
She went to the police and mentioned that his wife should be told but was frustrated when they told her that unless she put in a complaint about it herself, then there was nothing they could do. So, Donna contacted her.
“I wanted her to go to the police so I made sure that I didn’t tell her I thought it was her husband behind it,” says Donna.
Donna turned detectives after men contacted her over online imagesCredit: Refer to source
Hayley was tracked down by Donna and KirstyCredit: ITV
Hidden camera
In the documentary, Jon Bates’s then wife, talks about it, using the pseudonym of Lauren.
“When I first met Jon, I thought he was really chatty, friendly and kind and someone you could really trust,” says Lauren.
“But then he became unhappy and a bit more distant and when I was heavily pregnant, I caught him watching a lot of porn and that was really upsetting when you feel big and horrible.
“My heart started pounding when Donna told me my images were on porn websites. It was really frightening. Some of them used my name, my real body, my real face.
“Jon was in the room and I told him what had happened. There was one picture from my wedding day. Who would do something so nasty as that? I asked Jon if he had taken his laptop anywhere to be fixed and he said, ‘Oh yeah. I did.’ I asked him if he thought anyone could have stolen those images and he said they could have.”
After Lauren a contacted the police, Jon said he was happy for them to take his laptop away and have a look at it. When the police arrived, they spoke to Lauren and then took Jon to the station for an informal interview, before he was released.
“When he came back home, I asked him what happened and he said, ‘I told them I must have been hacked and I happily handed everything over to them.’ And he just looked at me and there was a nasty grimace on his face, as if he was angry at me. I knew, looking in his eyes right there, that he had done it.”
The next day she searched for evidence around the house.
“I opened the drawers on his side of the bed and under his shirts were hidden loads of USB sticks. Inside the wardrobe there was a camera I didn’t recognise. I started going through this and found more evidence.
“It was horrible. There was a lot of porn and some were images of me on escort sites, intimate videos of me having sex. So many times he tried to video me naked and he didn’t like the fact that I would say no. There were images of me asleep, undressed, that I didn’t know about. He knew that images of personal intimacy getting out there was my worst nightmare.
There was one picture from my wedding day. Who would do something so nasty as that?
Jonathan Bates' wife
“I got back in touch with the police and they found a load more stuff in the attic. There were printed photos of women with their names and addresses, which were taken from a hospital when Jon was a medical records clerk.
“In his interview with police, he told them that he kept them because he wanted to look them up on social media and see if they looked nice – which is a very scary and bizarre thing to say.”
Bates was arrested and at his trial he pleaded guilty to four charges of stalking, involving serious harm or distress and one charge of disclosing private sexual photographs with intent. He was given a five-year sentence.
Hayley was stalked online by him but he was not investigated for any crimes against her.
“I had no links with this man. I do not know him,” she says. “He picked me because he liked the look of me and decided to destroy me.
“Was he making money from putting these pictures on these sites? Does he just want to degrade women because something has happened to him and he is out for revenge?
“Even now, I don’t want to put my name in , because I don’t want to see what comes up.”
Are deep fakes legal?
It’s illegal to share or threaten to share intimate photos or videos of someone without their consent and this includes deepfake images.
The government announced in April 2024 that it intends to make it a criminal offence to create sexually explicit deepfakes without consent.
This includes creating or designing intimate images of another person to cause alarm, distress, or humiliation.
If the deepfake photo or video appears to be real and is a close likeness to you or someone you know it may be a criminal offence.
It’s illegal to make, share and possess indecent photographs and pseudo-photographs and/or videos, including deepfakes, of someone who is under 18.
It does not matter if the person depicted is real or created using AI.
You can report this to the police.
Every year hundreds of women in the UK become victims of revenge porn and deepfake imagery, yet the chance of conviction for these crimes is very low, while the trauma and misery for women remain.
Sophie Mortimer of the Revenge Porn helpline that helps such victims, says, “We know that that sort of content that is shared online doesn’t just stay in one place.
“It replicates. It gets saved, downloaded and reshared onto other websites. So, it can proliferate really quite quickly. And the harm that causes people is ongoing, potentially endlessly.”
Faked: Hunting My Online Predator, ITV1 Sunday 8 March
Eze Chidiebere Paul
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