Man in Brisbane found guilty of creating sexualized deepfakes of schoolgirls
A jury at the Brisbane District Court found 56-year-old Antonio Rotondo guilty on all 17 charges in a case involving the creation and distribution of sexualized deepfakes of current and former female students and staff of Brisbane high schools. As ABC News Australia reports, Rotondo was taken into custody ahead of a sentencing hearing scheduled for the following day.
17 charges
At the start of the trial, Rotondo pleaded not guilty to 17 charges: 11 counts of stalking, five counts of distributing intimate images, and one count of distributing child sexual exploitation material. After several hours of deliberations, the jury returned guilty verdicts on all counts.
The court heard details of actions that took place in September 2023, when Rotondo was living in the Philippines. Using a website, he digitally altered publicly available photographs of women and girls, removing their clothing or replacing it with underwear.
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Distribution of images
According to the court, Rotondo emailed the altered images to a school and other recipients. Among them was an image of a 13-year-old girl. He also sent another woman associated with Brisbane Fashion Week altered photographs of participants in that event.
Rotondo uploaded more than a dozen images from his emails to a website. During a police interview, a recording of which was shown to the jury, he admitted sending the emails and publishing the images online. The man told police that he thought it was funny and called the activity a hobby.
Rotondo, who represented himself, argued in his closing statement that some complainants could not have suffered serious emotional harm because they had not seen the relevant images. At the same time, several complainants told police that they experienced severe distress and felt that their privacy had been deeply violated.
