Former Conservative cabinet minister Penny Mordaunt has spoken about how shaken she was to learn she was the victim of “deliberately humiliating and violent” deepfake porn when serving as an MP.
Speaking to BBC Newsnight, the former leader of the House of Commons said that her face had been used in AI-generated deepfake porn, adding it happened to “a number of parliamentarians”.
Deepfakes are images or videos that have been digitally altered using artificial intelligence (AI) to replace the face of one person with another.
Mordaunt was being interviewed on the programme about advanced age checks that websites with pornographic material must implement before Friday.
But speaking on the issue of deepfake porn, she said: “The people behind this… don’t realise the consequences in the real world when they do something like that… It plays across into people taking actual real world actions against ourselves.”
Mordaunt became aware that her face had been used in deepfake porn after a Channel 4 documentary by Cathy Newman last year revealed that Mordaunt, Tory colleague Dame Priti Patel, Labour’s Angela Rayner and several other senior female politicians were victims of the practice.
At the time, Newman revealed she was also a victim. “It was violating… it was kind of me and not me,” she said, explaining the video displayed her face but not her hair.
Earlier this year, the government unveiled plans to make the creation or distribution of sexually explicit deepfakes a criminal offence, following a surge in their proliferation over recent years.
“The worry for me is actually more with children,” Mordaunt told Newsnight’s Victoria Derbyshire.
“We wouldn’t want people to see these things on the walk to school. If they did, they’d be in therapy. But we have seemed to be perfectly happy for them to see it online.”
Mordaunt also said she was “with the Australians” on their decision to ban social media platforms for under-16s.
She added that the government needed “to have some courage” in tackling the issue with people like Elon Musk, the owner of X, formerly Twitter.
“[Musk] is taking the human race to Mars. I’m sure he can figure out age verification,” she said.
PA MediaMordaunt has held senior positions within previous Conservative governments, including briefly serving as the UK’s first female defence secretary.
She competed in the 2022 Conservative leadership election, before serving as the leader of the House of Commons and lord president of the Council.
That gave her a prominent role in the coronation ceremony of King Charles III, during which she held a ceremonial sword for more than an hour.
Mordaunt served as the MP for the Portsmouth North constituency for 14 years, before becoming one of several high-profile Conservative figures to lose her seat in last year’s general election.
