Believe it or not

Raffaella Spone was accused of faking an incriminating video of teenage cheerleaders. She was arrested, outcast and subjected to death threats. The problem? The video wasn't fake after all. She talks for the first time about being the centre of a story that created headlines around the world, yet nothing was as it seemed...

- Jenny Kleeman

MADI HIME IS TAKING A DEEP DRAG on a blue vape in the video, her eyes shut, her face flushed with pleasure. The 16-year-old collapses into laughter, causing smoke to billow out of her mouth. The clip is grainy and shaky - as if shot in low light by someone who had zoomed in on Madi's face - but it was damning. Madi was a cheerleader with the Victory Vipers, a highly competitive "all-star" squad based in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The Vipers had a strict code of conduct; being caught partying and vaping could have got her thrown out of the team. And in July 2020, an anonymous person sent the incriminating video to Madi's coaches.

Eight months later, that footage was the subject of a police news conference. "The police reviewed the video and other photographic images and found them to be what we now know to be called deepfakes," district attorney Matt Weintraub told journalists at the Bucks County courthouse on 15 March 2021. Someone was deploying cuttingedge technology to tarnish a teenage cheerleader's reputation.

The vaping video was just one of many disturbing communications brought to the attention of Hilltown Township police department, Weintraub said. Madi had been receiving messages telling her she should kill herself. Her mother, Jennifer Hime, had told officers someone had been taking images from Madi's social media and manipulating them "to make her appear to be drinking". A photograph of Madi in swimwear had been altered: "Her bathing suit was edited out." Madi wasn't the only member of the Victory Vipers cheer team to have been victimised. In August 2020, Sherri Ratel had been sent anonymous texts accusing her teenage daughter, Kayla, of drinking and smoking pot. Noelle Nero had been sent images of her 17-yearold daughter in a bikini with captions about "toxic traits, revenge, dating boys and smoking". These, too, were "all altered and shown as deepfakes", Weintraub added.