The Completely Unbelievable Story of the ‘Deepfake Cheer Mom’

When Bucks County, Pennsylvania District Attorney Matthew Weintraub stepped up to a podium on March 15, 2021, he set in motion a chain reaction of events that would capture the attention of millions and manifest a host of festering anxieties about the dangers of deepfake technology.

Police from Bucks had recently arrested 50-year-old Raffaela Spone, whose 17-year-old daughter was part of a highly competitive local cheer squad called the Victory Vipers All-Stars. Weintraub accused Spone of using artificial intelligence to fabricate salacious images and videos of the other teenagers on the cheerleading team, a sinister ploy to harass the girls, ruin their reputations, and get them kicked off the Vipers. Weintraub recounted those shocking allegations to the room and warned of an impending deepfake crisis that would jeopardize the very nature of truth.

“This tech is now available to anyone with a smartphone,” Weintraub said to a crowded room of reporters. “All one needs to do is download an app, and you’re off to the races.”

But evidence shows Weintraub’s deepfake Cassandra was built on a lie.

A grainy video shows then-17-year-old Victory Vipers cheerleader Madeline Hime, inhaling from what looks like a vape pen and blowing out a cloud of smoke. A short clip of the video first shared with Insider Edition by Hime shows the blonde, sweatshirt-clad teen, eyes closed, taking a long pull from a bluish-black metallic device in a dark room during a sleepover with other members of the cheer squad. The device resembles a Juul vape. Madeline laughs and then puffs out a long plume of white smoke into the air. Another section of the clip shows Madeline briefly holding the smoke in her lungs before releasing it during a fit of laughter.

A mysterious, anonymous phone number sent the video to Hime and the Vipers’ head coach in July 2020, charging documents note. Vaping was a violation of the cheer squad’s code of conduct and would have gotten Hime axed from the team. Weintraub, police, and Hime would reference the clip again and again in interviews and press conferences for the next several months, making it seem like the keystone of their case against Spone. Hime and her mother would repeat her deepfake claims, taking her story to The New York Times, Good Morning America, Inside Edition, and dozens more publications.

“I was shocked and surprised and scared because I didn’t know who would be able to manipulate a video like that,” Hime nervously told Inside Edition in 2021 when asked about the videos.

“That’s not me in the video,’” the teen said in a March 2021 interview with Good Morning America. “I thought if I said it, no one would believe me because obviously, there’s proof, there’s a video—but obviously that video was manipulated.”

Yet, despite Hime’s insistence the media was faked, multiple deepfake experts said the vape video was far too intricate and nuanced of a composition for even the most advanced AI models in Silicon Valley to create, let alone any tools available to a mom in suburban Pennsylvania.

What’s more, another teenager at the sleepover told the district attorney the day of the press conference that the video was real, according to court documents obtained by Gizmodo. In a sworn affidavit after Spone’s trial, the teammate said she saw it being filmed. Neither Madeline nor her mother responded to Gizmodo’s multiple requests for comment.

For several months leading up to the trial beginning on March 23, 2022, Weintraub and others involved in the case continued to repeat the shoddy deepfake claims in TV appearances and prominent national newspapers. Nearly overnight, media had labeled Spone “the deepfake cheer mom,” with Sports Illustrated even comparing her to Wanda Holloway, a Texas cheer mom who was convicted of solicitation of capital murder in 1991 after she recruited her brother as a hitman to kill a rival cheerleader’s mother.

Spone’s name appeared in headlines of articles in the Washington Post, CNN, The New York Times, and hundreds of other US publications. International news outlets like the BBC and India’s Hindustan Times jumped in on the action as well. In total, more than 6,000 articles have been written about Spone linking her to the deepfake allegations, according to her complaint.

“She gets trashed all over social media, she doesn’t work anymore.” Ali Spone, Raffaela’s daughter said in a 2021 interview with Inside Edition “I feel really bad because nobody should have to go through something like that.”

“We’ve always taken for granted that a photo is a photo, a video is a video,” Weintraub said in a 2021 interview. “We can’t take that for granted any longer.”

That sense of certainty evaporated on March 23, 2022, the day of Spone’s trial. In the months leading up to the criminal cyberbullying trial, multiple deepfake experts analyzed one of the supposedly doctored videos released by prosecutors and found no evidence to support the claim it was digitally altered. Weintraub and his team of prosecutors admitted they were “unable to confirm the video was falsified” during a pretrial court hearing in May 2021. Prosecutors, unable to prove the salacious deepfake claim, dropped the cyberbullying charges altogether the day they were supposed to begin proving them. Spone had originally been charged with three additional counts of cyber-harassment of a child. Those charges contained the allegations of doctoring photos and videos. They were dropped in the May 2021 pretrial hearings. Spone was ultimately found guilty on three charges of misdemeanor harassment in March 2022—she did send the anonymous text messages to the teens. She didn’t doctor the video or photos; the images and videos that she sent the texts were real. She was sentenced to three years probation. She’s appealing the conviction Weintraub never delivered on his threat to Spone’s defense to produce more evidence of Spone’s deepfake mastery and malfeasance.

Raffaela Spone’s revenge

The mother, who became the face of a panic based on a deepfake that wasn’t, is now suing Weintraub, the officers who arrested her, and the Himes for defamation. Her lawsuit, filed in The Eastern District of Pennsylvania on January 13 of this year, has not been previously reported. If she wins the suit, she could receive up to $500,000. Newly sworn affidavits from a cheerleader and parent involved in the case shared with Gizmodo appear to support Spone’s claim that Weintraub, Bucks County detectives, and Hime knew the vape video was authentic but chose to continue the “deepfake cheer mom” allegations for months.

“Weintraub’s false statements caused a national media circus about deepfake technology against (Spone),” Robert Birch, the mother’s attorney, said in the defamation suit. “These false stories have destroyed (her) life.” Birch says his client is under medical care for PTSD and “severe emotional distress” as the result of death threats and can no longer work in her chosen field.

Birch described Weintraub’s decision to run with the deep fake charges as a “brazen, bold, and desperate effort to advance his political career.” Weintraub is up for reelection this fall. He and his attorneys declined to comment for this story.

How Raffaela Spone became the ‘Deepfake Cheer Mom’

Over a dozen court documents related to Spone’s case viewed by Gizmodo suggest the inception of the false deepfake allegations dates back to the months preceding her arrest. Two police officers involved in the case, Matthew Reiss and Louis Bell, had spent months speaking with Madeline Hime and her mother Jennifer, who contacted police after her daughter told her about a barrage of threatening text messages she began receiving around June 2020, including one instructing the teen to “kill yourself.”

In addition to the written texts, Madeline claimed she received multiple images appearing to show her drinking, vaping, and in various states of undress. The teenager called the mysterious number back only to find it was out of service. When she texted the number, she received an automated response from the app Pinger, which can be used to send anonymous messages. Around a month later, Madeline’s mother told The New York Times the Viper’s cheer coach approached her and said he had also received a text from an anonymous number with “incriminating doctored media,” that included the vaping video. That was a problem. The competitive cheer squad abides by a code of conduct that prohibits the activities the photos showed Hime engaged in. Weintrab would later tell a reporter for Sports Illustrated the goal of the videos “was to shame (the cheerleaders) and get them knocked off the team.” Madeline assured police that she had never smoked or posted nude photos before.

“I felt like if I said anything, nobody would trust me,” Madeline said in a March 2021 interview with Today. “They had the video as proof, even though the video wasn’t real.”

“I didn’t know how to protect her,” Jennifer said in that same interview.

Reiss and Bell soon found out the Himes weren’t the only ones receiving messages. Another teen named Kayla Ratel received a text accusing her of “drinking at the shore, smokes pot, and uses ‘attentionwhOre69’ as a screen name,” per the same filing. Yet another cheerleader had received a photo of herself wearing a bikini with the words “toxic traits, revenge, dating boys, and smoking,” written in text atop it, according to a criminal complaint filed against Spone

Police said they traced the unknown numbers back to Spone’s address in Chalfont, Pennsylvania, a small town about 35 miles north of Philadelphia. They obtained a search warrant for the home. On a December 18 raid, police rummaged through Spone’s home looking for any evidence linking the mother to the string of harassing texts and images. Officers seized multiple mobile phones, laptops, a smart television, an Xbox gaming console, and even a Facebook Portal. When Spone argued, one of the detectives allegedly asked her how it would feel when she was “in every newspaper and known as the soccer mom who harasses juveniles.”

An attorney representing Reiss declined to comment for this story. Bell did not respond to Gizmodo’s multiple requests for comment.

Teen reveals the true origin of the ‘deepfake’ vaping video

Madeline Hime told Officer Bell several of the images sent to her were digitally altered, according to the defamation suit and court transcripts from Spone’s harassment trial, but the officers allegedly failed to preserve those tweaked images. Months later, after multiple requests by Spone’s defense to see the supposed deepfakes, it was discovered Hime had disposed of the original phone with the alleged deepfakes stored on it, Spone stated in her defamation suit. She had also deleted multiple social media accounts during the process of the police investigation, trial transcripts show. Kayla Ratel, a friend of Madeline’s, confirmed the cheerleader was deleting social media accounts in a sworn affidavit filed on April 16, 2023, and seen by Gizmodo. When Ratel asked Hime why she deleted the accounts, Madeline said it was for “legal reasons,” according to the Ratel affidavit. The claims in the affidavit have not been previously reported.

“The police and Weintraub allowed Hime’s phone to be destroyed so that Plaintiff’s expert could not examine the evidence,” Birch, Spone’s attorney, alleges in the defamation suit. The complaint alleges Hime’s mother even discussed purging evidence from the phone with another mother, describing Jennifer Hime as “willing to pay someone” to surface evidence against Spone.

Ratel’s sworn affidavit calls into question multiple elements of Madeline’s story, which served as the bedrock for the case against Spone. Ratel said she personally saw Madeline smoking “frequently” despite Hime’s claims otherwise.

Weintraub alleged in multiple press conferences that Spone had used AI to create nude photos of Hime, who was underage. Spone denied doctoring the images in pre-trial hearings and again later in her defamation suit. The prosecutor never produced the pictures during legal proceedings. The images were real, though, according to court transcripts of Spone’s trial included in Spone’s response to Officer Bell’s motion to dismiss. During Spone’s trial, Madeline’s mother testified that a nude picture of Madeline was authentic, created by one of Madeline’s friends and sent to the cheerleader via Snapchat, per the same transcripts filed in response to Bell’s motion to dismiss.

The other images may have come from a far more outlandish source: according to the defamation suit, Hime had been filming and selling videos of herself naked to older men she met on Tinder using the handle “mads956”—no deepfakes involved, investigators discovered. In her affidavit, Ratel claims Hime admitted selling nudes to older men on Tinder “numerous times.” Hime acknowledged owning a Tinder account during Spone’s harassment trial, according to a transcript. Hime’s own mother was aware her daughter was selling nudes on the dating app, according to court transcripts cited in Spone’s response to Bell’s motion to dismiss.

Perhaps most damning of all, Ratel said she and Spone’s daughter were in the room during a sleepover watching one of their friends film the very same video that Madeline would later tell police was deepfaked.

“What Madi told the police and the news were all false,” Ratel and her mother Sherri said in an affidavit they both signed. “Madi was being filmed vaping the night of the sleepover when the video was made and which Madi posted on social media.” Gizmodo could not find this particular video on Hime’s social media sites; the defamation suit and the Ratel affidavit alleges the ex-cheerleader deleted multiple accounts in the years since the incident.

When Gizmodo reviewed Hime’s current social media accounts, there was little in the way of acknowledgement of her multi-year tango with Spone. On TikTok, where Hime has 94,000 followers, there was one post about the saga, created last February but since deleted. It shows Madeline in her bedroom with a caption reading “when Lifetime sent me and my mom a script of their new movie.” Dramatic music plays and halts just before she turns away from the camera and asks “Wait, is this fucking play about us?” a line clipped from the finale of Euphoria’s second season.

In another since-deleted TikTok referenced in Spone’s suit, Madi was seen laughing while scrolling through a list of news articles accusing Spone of using deepfakes. Around the same time, the Himes created a GoFundMe asking for donations to pay for the family’s legal fees. The GoFundMe, which had a goal of raising $20,000, claimed Madi was targeted by deepfakes. Madeline left the Vipers for a cheer squad in New Jersey, Cosmo reported; Spone’s daughter Allie likewise quit the Vipers, and the two no longer speak to each other.

UK-based generative AI and deepfake expert Henry Ajder pointed out numerous elements of the video in March 2021 that he said made him believe it was “highly unlikely” to be fabricated. Ajder said the low resolution and high saturation of the video, as well as the moving plume of smoke expelled by the vape, were clear red flags. Though it’s theoretically possible to create such an image using AI, Ajder said it would require enormous amounts of data and deepfake editing skills Spone certainly didn’t possess.

Multiple prominent deepfake creators interviewed by The Daily Dot agreed with Ajder’s assessment.

“From my perspective, it isn’t a deepfake,” a deepfake creator who goes by the name Shamook told the publication. “The smoke from the vape would be too hard to create… I just can’t see any plausible evidence that it’s a deepfake.”

Credulous cops

In his affidavit of probable cause, Officer Reiss claimed he viewed some of the videos the cheerleaders received and determined they were the work of a deepfake program in which “a still image can be mapped onto an existing video to alter the appearance of the person in the video to show the likeness of the victim’s image instead.” He would later tell The Daily Dot he relied on his “naked eye” to make that assessment.

When asked by Spone’s attorney whether he had ever received “any type of training in working with deepfakes or spotting deepfakes,” Reiss answered, “No,” according to transcripts of his trial testimony. The more likely scenario, Spone alleges, is that Hime claimed the material was doctored and Reiss and Bell simply took the teen’s word for it. The shoddy police work, they allege, had far-reaching consequences.

Reiss and his legal team declined to provide comment for this story. In a recent motion to dismiss Spone’s defamation suit, though, Reiss’ lawyer said the officer had become aware of the “falsity of Ms. Hime’s claims,” though not until four months after the criminal complaint was filed against Spone.

A pedophile cop investigates teenagers

A lack of technical expertise in analyzing deep fakes wasn’t the only factor complicating Reiss’ involvement in the case. On April 16, 2021, as the investigation into Spone was ongoing, Montgomery County detectives received a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which maintains a database of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The NCMEC said its staff was aware of an individual in the area uploading two suspected CSAM images to a Gmail account. The email address belonged to Officer Reiss.

Reiss asked multiple Victory Viper cheerleaders involved in the case to hand over the usernames and passwords to their social media accounts as part of the investigation into the allegations against Spone, according to Birch. It’s not clear from court documents what evidence he obtained from the cheerleaders’ accounts that was relevant to the case. Kayla Ratel, in her affidavit, also claims Reiss asked for her password. The Ratels did not respond to Gizmodo’s requests for comment.

Detectives obtained a search warrant and entered Reiss’ home on May 26, 2021, seizing his cell phones and other electronic devices. Authorities conducted a forensic analysis of the devices and said they found 1,437 image files and 258 video files showing children under the age of 18 engaged in sex acts or nude. At least 84 of those files depicted toddlers and infants. Reiss, who investigated the nude photos in the Victory Vipers case, pled guilty to three counts of possessing child pornography earlier this year.

Who knew what, and when?

Spone’s defamation suit accuses Weintraub, Reiss, and the Himes of knowing that the images and videos of the cheerleaders weren’t altered. The district attorney first made the deepfake allegation publicly during a March 15, 2021 press conference. He promulgated that same narrative in public media appearances for months, describing Spone as a dangerous “deepfake cheer mom” on Good Morning America, in The Washington Post, and in other prominent outlets. The DA went a step further during a May 2021 interview with Sports Illustrated, saying, “As this example very starkly points out, we’re not safe in cyberspace. Anyone can grab any image we put out there and manipulate it to look unseemly.”

But according to Ratel’s affidavit, Weintraub had good reason to doubt the veracity of the deepfake allegations long before he conducted his “media circus.”

The Ratels, in their affidavit, said they weren’t aware of the full extent of the allegations against Spone until they had happened to see Weintraub speaking at the press conference, more than three months after police raided Spone’s home. They said they immediately noticed multiple inaccurate statements, including the allegations about the deepfake and claims that police had conducted an extensive investigation. In reality, the Ratels say they were never contacted, even though texts referencing Kayla’s online screen name were being presented as evidence.

“We were frustrated that no one would talk to us,” the Ratels wrote.

Sheri, Kayla’s mother, in her affidavit, claims she called the DA’s office following the press conference and told staff there that multiple statements expressed by Weintraub were untrue. Despite Kayla attesting in her affidavit to having seen the vaping video being filmed firsthand and informing the DA’s office of the apparent misstatements moments after his March 15 press conference, Weintraub continued to use the video as a central piece of evidence proving the deepfake allegations for around two months.

Offense, defense: Spone files a civil suit and appeals her criminal conviction

Spone is suing Weintraub and the officers involved in the investigation for defamation in civil court. Separately, she’s also attempting to appeal her criminal harassment conviction. In the latter case, Birch claims the prosecutor’s decision to continue the deepfake narrative in public statements up until the very day of the trial influenced the way the jury perceived the lesser charges. In recent responses to Weintraub’s motions to dismiss, Birch said jurors had continued to hear the false deepfake claims even after the cyberbullying charge was withdrawn by the prosecution. Spone was eventually found guilty of using anonymous phone numbers to send threatening text messages to the teen cheerleaders and sentenced to three years probation.

Weintraub’s attorneys have pushed back against Spone’s defamation claim. Letting defendants sue prosecutors over comments made to the press would “entitle criminal defendants to nearly endless authority to seek civil suits when charges are dismissed or they are acquitted of a crime,” they said in a recent motion to dismiss Spone’s suit.

“With regard to the defamation claim asserted against Matthew Weintraub,” the DA’s legal defense argued in a recent response to Spone’s opposition to his motion to dismiss, “The Plaintiff does not even rebut the implausibility assertions, nor the assertions that the Plaintiff failed outright in her Complaint to produce sufficient factual allegations to sustain those claims.”

Loyola Marymount University Professor Rebecca Delfino is an expert in legal cases involving deepfakes who has written multiple academic papers highlighting their dangerous implications for the court system. Delfino, who has followed Spone’s case, told Gizmodo she believes Spone, has a strong claim.

“They did have reckless disregard for the truth,” Delfino said. “I think she can show, even if they consider her a public figure for a limited purpose, actual malice.”

“Despite knowing that he had made false press statements and had fabricated evidence, as evident from the sworn affidavit,” Birch said in an April response to Weintraub’s motion to dismiss, “Weintraub still proceeded at trial to use the same fabricated evidence and false statements, and presented a witness, Madeline Hime, another ‘victim’, to make and prove the allegations of doctored videos in order to secure a simple harassment conviction.”

What happens when the deepfakes are real?

Spone’s story presents one of the starkest examples yet of the threat deepfakes pose, which academics have warned about for years. As generative AI technology becomes more convincing, attorneys representing the defense and prosecution will have strong incentives to claim legitimate evidence has been digitally altered. Weintraub himself predicted that the concept of verifiable truth would come under attack, and so it has.

These scenarios, which some academics have dubbed “the liar’s dividend,” create insidious situations in trial settings where attorneys can instill doubt into a jury to sway the consideration of the evidence. Lawyers are often allowed to get away with knowingly deploying this deception, Delfino said, because courts grant them a wide runway to fiercely defend their clients. Lawyers have an incentive to make members of a jury distrust what they can see with their own eyes. Seeing, in the world of deepfakes, may no longer mean believing.

This is already happening. Lawyers representing a rioter involved in the January 6 attacks on the Capitol tried to convince a jury that video footage presented at trial clearly showing their client jumping a barricade with a holstered weapon was, in fact, a deepfake. The rioter was convicted and sentenced to seven years in prison. In another recent case, a lawyer representing billionaire Elon Musk attempted to use the deepfake defense to cast doubt on a legitimate and widely covered 2016 interview of Musk in which he claims his vehicles can drive autonomously “with greater safety than a person.” The judge in that case called out the lawyer’s maneuvers, which she called a “deeply troubling” obfuscation that could do lasting damage to the legal system.

Professor Delfino believes rapid improvements in deepfake technology have collided with a political environment uniquely receptive to conspiratorial thinking. That combination of tech advancement and shifting societal forces, she says, makes the public and the legal system particularly vulnerable to deepfakes or false claims of deepfakes. Delfino fears we may already live in a world where a random group of 12 jurors may not believe an image or video is authentic even if a court explicitly instructs them that it is.

The onus, the professor said, is on lawyers and law enforcement to refrain from deploying false deepfake arguments, even if they believe it will advance a case. A headfake by deepfake may result in a victory in the short term, but the undermining of reality risks fundamentally damaging the public’s confidence in the legal system, she said. That breakdown of trust in the rule of law could have devastating long-term consequences. New laws or tech policies can only do so much. For now, Delfino says the public generally needs to take the initiative and step up to guard themselves against these attacks on truth.

“We need this society as a whole to develop, to mature, and to be a little more sophisticated in the way that we’re thinking about things that we see and that we’re putting out in the world,” she said. “Be better citizens.”

Spone and her legal team have spent the better part of this year arguing for their day in court. Weintraub, Reiss, and Bell have all filed motions to have the defamation case dismissed.

The sensational, at times unbelievable sage of the so-called deepfake cheer mom serves as a cautionary tale of the profound consequences of an incorrect deepfake allegation. Rapid advancements in the quality and believability of images and videos churned out by advanced large language models means liars and defamers have more ammunition than ever to cast doubt on reality and distort the truth for their own gains.

Deepfake detection companies and AI-conscious lawmakers are racing to create transparency standards for AI-generated content but for now, the field resembles a Wild West. For Spone, that muddying of reality has manifested itself. Regardless of the facts, she’ll likely never shed the title “deepfake cheer mom.”