I have been predicting this day would come for decades. It is still chilling to see it arrive.
Both today’s Sunday Times and the Mail on Sunday carry the story of an ordinary woman whose life was nearly ruined by an AI-edited version of some doorbell footage that falsely showed her uttering racist abuse. The Mail’s story is here. It has the original video without a paywall, but I had started writing this post using the Sunday Times version before I was made aware by commenter JuliaM that the Mail had the same story, so in what follows I will mostly quote the Sunday Times story, ‘I doorknocked for Labour then racist deepfake ruined my life’. An archived version can be found here.
It started harmlessly enough. A PE teacher called Cheryl Bennett said that she would help deliver leaflets for her colleague, Quasim Mughal, who was standing as a Labour candidate in the local elections in May last year.
For that display of friendship, she has paid a heavy penalty. What happened that morning — or, rather, did not happen — has changed her life forever. For a time, it cost Bennett her reputation and her career. She was at risk of a criminal conviction too, and police visited her home to arrest her.
As she approached the door of a household in nearby Dudley, she was accompanied by two people: Mughal, the candidate who is of south Asian heritage, and her previous head teacher, who is not. At first, the owner did not answer.
By the time the door was opened, both colleagues had moved on to the next property, leaving Bennett to ask the person whether they intended to vote. Unbeknown to her, a CCTV camera perched above the door was filming.
Within days, a short segment of the footage had been leaked, edited to remove Mughal, and given subtitles. The resulting video falsely depicted Bennett launching into a racist tirade against the homeowner, with subtitles declaring: “F***ing p*kis. P*kis,” as she walked away from the front door.
Nobody has been able to establish who maliciously doctored the footage, but it was given to Akhmed Yakoob, a Lamborghini-owning criminal solicitor, nicknamed the “TikTok lawyer”, who was an independent pro-Gaza candidate for West Midlands mayor and had close links with George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain.
Yakoob posted a narrated version of the fake video on TikTok. He also posted Bennett’s name and place of work.
The video caused a sensation. Within days, it had received 2.1 million views across TikTok, Facebook and X, and prompted hundreds of people, including dozens of parents at her school, which has a large British-Pakistani community, to demand she be sacked. Yakoob and his followers cited Bennett as an example of Labour and Sir Keir Starmer’s lack of interest in Muslim and minority ethnic voters in the wake of the Israel-Gaza war. She was forced into hiding.
Yakoob has since paid substantial damages for his publication of the video.
For a time, however, it looked as though vindication might never come. Within a short time of Yakoob’s TikTok post at 7.30pm, her phone started to vibrate while she was at a friend’s house.
“My phone just started going off like I’d just stepped out of Love Island or I’d just become famous. It was going absolutely berserk on the table. So I picked it up thinking: ‘Family, is there something going on?’ So I looked at my phone and I had loads of work emails going through.”
Most of them contained abuse. Some were written by children at her own school. “Appalling,” one pupil said. “Being racist is harmful because it disregards the inherent worth and dignity of individuals solely based on their race.” Another wrote: “I didn’t expect a teacher of your standard to be discriminative of races.” Bennett, confused, protested that she had said no such thing, but the messages kept on coming through Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. “Stop lying.” “Ur not getting away with this.” “Racist little bitch.”
Then came the formal complaints, as well-meaning parents wrote to the head teacher demanding an investigation and threatening to contact the board of governors. The secondary school received 800 complaints in a short time, some from parents at her school, others from her previous school.
Within hours, the head teacher had told Bennett not to return to work for her own safety. She was not safe at home either, where she lived alone. Strangers arrived at the homes of her parents and her grandmother demanding information as to her whereabouts. Even her car number plate was circulating online.
She stayed at a friend’s home that night. At about 2.30am, West Midlands police went to her home to arrest her, putting a postcard through her door asking her to call them.
The Mail’s version of the story makes it clearer that Ms Bennett having fled to a friend’s house was the reason that she was not present when the police arrived at her home to arrest her at 2.30am. Even if she had been guilty, I do not see why the police thought it was necessary to turn up at that hour to arrest a woman for a non-violent crime.
The Sunday Times account continues:
“I was just constantly in survival mode. I was just trying to get through every single day. And it’s only because I’ve been raised by a very strong family, by very strong women, in terms of you keep fighting and pushing through. Because there was days where I just thought: ‘Would it be easier if I was to just end my life?’ Just because I felt like my career would never be same.”
Before long, police discovered the video was a hoax. They obtained the original doorbell footage, which specialist officers could see bore no resemblance to the subtitles in the video. On May 8, a spokesman for the force said they had found “no evidence of any racist slurs or language used”.
Lucky for her the original footage was still available. How long do they keep it on file? Round here we tend to assume surveillance is bad in itself, but we may soon end up being grateful for it more often than not.
The police do this in order to instill terror……whether in the UK, the USA, Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, one disappears into the “Nacht und Nebel”.
As a sort of side note, people who drive should have one of the many new dashcams running, which keep the last several hours of video in memory – for the same reason as why the original video here saved the day.
People always believe video, until they can be shown the difference between real and fake.
Ostensibly, it’s for the safety of the police, by kicking in doors at zero dark thirty, when everyone is asleep and unable to think clearly, there is less resistance and that means less violence on either side. But, as Vinegar Joe points out above, it also has the added effect of terror for normal people. It’s like when the cops show up with SWAT teams kicking in doors and tossing in flash-bangs for minor warrants instead of just showing up with a pair of cuffs and a cruiser. It’s all for intimidation.
Thanks Natalie! Until I read this I was enjoying a pleasant day. The picture of that git with George Gollumway put a dampener on that. Cheers!
Obviously this is absolutely horrible, but I think it is worth considering that this is an area where social media is both a victimizer but also an educator.
Since everyone uses social media, or almost everyone does, as this sort of AI deep fake becomes more and more common, people are going to see it more and more and are going to begin to lose faith in video sources. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it certainly, in the long term, will help with this sort of situation. As people see more and more of this they will become more and more skeptical of video footage.
Of course social media is also full of really stupid people too. People who believe that 5G is incinerating your brain cells, who think that Hillary Clinton is putting microchips in their children’s brains, or that evolution is a government plot to turn your children into Satan worshipers. So who knows? I suppose one should never underestimate the depths of human stupidity.
And as to the police. I mean my God. This is Britain, mother of free speech and civil rights. That the police would be arresting someone for muttering “F*king P*kis” while walking away? It is beyond comprehension. And that fact that the great British people are not marching en masse on Westminster to demand that these outrageous laws are thrown in the Thames makes me despair of a once great people.
This story sent a chill up my spine, disturbing on so many levels. Guilty until proven innocent; arrested merely for saying something not nice; frightening uses of new technology; a government turned against its people. For me, the most novel aspect was this:
“Yakoob and his followers cited Bennett as an example of Labour and Sir Keir Starmer’s lack of interest in Muslim and minority ethnic voters in the wake of the Israel-Gaza war.”
Is this indicative of a turning point in the Islamization of Britain? It seems the Muslims are ready to jettison their “useful idiot” allies (Labour in this case). Are they dropping the fiction of being one among many “oppressed” groups in the leftist coalition? It would seem to indicate openness about who the enemy is—all native Britons, of any political persuasion. Note: I am not located in Britain, so I don’t know if these attacks on erstwhile allies is already happening with any regularity.
we tend to assume surveillance is bad in itself, but …
Other people’s surveillance is bad, exactly because it can be used against us in this way. Our own surveillance – as bobby b points out – is the best counter. Relying on getting hold of other people’s video of an incident would be foolish. So we end up back in a situation of “he said, she said” but now with pictures.
Yakoob, who runs Maurice Andrews law firm in the city, is still under investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority over the incident. Its investigations, launched last summer, are ‘ongoing’.
I would have thought this as open and shut a case of libel as you will ever come across even before considering the fact damages have already been paid but what do I know? I’m not a solicitor. Maybe they’re just taking their time before deciding nothing more than a small fine and the legal equivalent of one of Paddington’s “Hard Stares” is required.
I’m not an expert but I find it difficult to believe that footage can be edited so much and not be detectable. Subtitles is an example of edited footage and today with the growth of AI any edited video should be discarded.
I remember when Terminator 2 came out and at that point I said I wouldn’t automatically believe any video I was shown. That was in 1991 and things have improved by magnitudes since then.
We have been in a KGB style UK for some time. Hopefully the worldwide backlash against woke will swing the pendulum back here and we regain the rights we had a century ago.
How did the faker get hold of the original footage? Did the householder post it online? Why?
Why hasn’t the fraudulent shyster Yakoob been struck off?
Any description of these ‘strangers’?
Vinegar Joe – the United Kingdom is a country where people are punished for things they say, sometimes (yes) rude things (such as the things that the lady was falsely claimed to have said) sometimes things that are not rude – but are still punished.
The United States was very much going in the same “Critical Theory” (the opposite of Critical Thinking) Marxist direction – but people such as President Trump and Elon Musk have, at least for a time, pulled the United States back from this.
As for the present Prime Minister of the United Kingdom – he is very much in line with this movement, just as my half brother (the Marxist academic Tony Marks) was. Keir Starmer wrote essays for the Haldane Society (the society for socialist lawyers in the United Kingdom) showing his deep opposition to traditional liberties (Covid lockdowns and the general attack on “Hate Speech” shows that modern “Human Rights” have nothing in common with traditional liberties) and the principles of limited government – including private property and freedom of contract.
It must be stressed that Sir Keir is NOT some sort of freak – he is very much in the mainstream of the Collectivist establishment here in the United Kingdom.
Many people have been sent to prison supposedly for rioting – but really because they are believed to be “right wing” (and had this lady not been a Labour Party supporter she might now be in prison – whether she said the offending words or not, it might not have mattered if the video was faked, not if the courts thought she was “right wing”) – yet leftists and Islamists (who are in a bizarre alliance) are NOT sent to prison for years for protests that are just as much riots as he events of last summer.
Whether someone is sent to prison, for years, sometimes depends not upon their actions – but upon their perceived political opinions – that is what is meant by “two tier policing” and “a two tier justice system”.
Sir Keir could most certainly not have done this on his own (although he said that the people last summer would be “sent to prison” before they were convicted of anything – the principle of innocent till proven guilty meant nothing to this experienced lawyer) – the British state, as former Prime Minister Liz Truss has pointed out – in relation to economic policy NOT being made democratically, is rotten – it is broken.
This has international implications – for example the alliance with the United States is not based on geography (America and Britain are far apart geographically) it is based on “common principles” – but is there such a sharing of basic values with a place where the establishment regard such things as the Bill of Rights (American or British) as “Crime Think”.
Does anyone really believe that the British establishment support such things as “Freedom of Speech” and “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms”?
The British establishment may well have believed in these principles when my father was born (back in 1913 – when, for example, the British National Rifle Association was bigger than the American one, and there was an extensive Constitutional Club network) – but do the British establishment believe in these principles now? Not in 1913 – NOW?
How did the faker get hold of the original footage? Did the householder post it online? Why?
Many cheap security camera systems simply run a local web server with an open internet port and a default admin password.
Yes, it really is that bad.
Or because at heart, like so many public sector workers, they are lazy and cowardly and they knew a schoolteacher would by unlikely to violently resist?