How a deepfake changed Brooke Curry’s life, and what she’s doing about it

Brooke Curry. Image via A.G. Gancarski.

From the outside looking in, Bishop Kenny senior Brooke Curry has an idyllic life. She’s a cheerleader at the Jacksonville parochial school, and is the daughter of former Mayor Lenny Curry and Molly Curry.

But while her real life was going just great, the virtual world presented a different challenge in July 2023, when she was a rising junior at BK.

Brooke Curry had just finished a game of pickleball with friends when she checked her phone, and “it was flooded with notifications from people I knew and people I didn’t know, sending me this photo that had been taken off my Instagram by a boy I didn’t know.”

“He used AI to generate a fake nude of me and posted it to his main Snapchat story,” she related. “I didn’t know why he chose to pick me out of all people. Never met him. Never spoke with him. We don’t have mutual friends.”

Meanwhile, the picture was “spreading like wildfire.” And Brooke Curry was tagged, indicating an extra layer of malice.

She told her parents. Former Jacksonville Mayor Curry reached out to Sheriff TK Waters and State Attorney Melissa Nelson thereafter to see what recourse he had.

But the story didn’t stop there.

A couple of weeks later, someone contacted Brooke Curry to let her know that yet another person was going to recirculate the image to “embarrass” her.

“Multiple people had the photo. And I was basically getting a warning that they want to use it against me,” she related. “That’s when I really realized that a bunch of people have the photo. To this day, I don’t know who has it, what they could do with it, where it’s put out.”

To this end, Speaker Pro Tempore Wyman Duggan introduced “Brooke’s Law” (HB 1161), which is designed to require internet platforms to remove altered sexual depictions and copies of such depictions from their platform upon request of the victim.

“It surfaced on multiple platforms, and I didn’t have the option of going to the platform to have it taken down, so it had been up for hours on end, which is why I think it’s very important for people who are going through this to be able to take charge and have the platform take it down.”

Brooke Curry’s identity wasn’t widely known before Monday in association with the bill. But she will be in Tallahassee later on Monday to tell her story to the Commerce Committee, the final stop before the full House considers it.

That’s not easy for her.

She notes that she lived through this once and in testifying, now has to “relive it.”

“But I’m looking at the bigger picture of how it can help a lot of people become aware about this issue that people deal with every day,” she said. “At the time, I felt like there was nothing I could do. Once I saw that there were things that can be done and people that could help, I wanted to extend that to other victims.”

If “Brooke’s Law” passes, other victims will have recourse that she did not in 2023.

The legislation would require internet platforms to develop and prominently promote a policy by the end of 2025 for removing deepfake images and videos of this type after someone is victimized in this way.

The bill, which envisions the Florida Unfair Trade and Deceptive Practices Act as its enforcement mechanism, expands on legislation championed by former Senate Democratic Leader Lauren Book, which imposed criminal and civil penalties by creating law to force sites to take the objectionable image down.

The Senate version of the proposal (SB 1400) will be heard in its final committee on Thursday.