Scarlett Johansson has fallen victim to a wave of fake porn videos featuring her image but believes fighting their distribution online is a “lost cause”. The Avengers star is just one of several famous women whose face has been digitally manipulated onto someone else’s body in a practice known as “deepfake” porn, The Washington Post reports. According to the newspaper, one fake movie featuring Scarlett Johansson’s face — described as a “leaked” film — features on a major porn site and has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.
34-year-old actor Scarlett Johansson told The Post: “Trying to protect yourself from the internet and its depravity is basically a lost cause, for the most part. “Clearly this doesn’t affect me as much because people assume it’s not actually me in a porno, however demeaning it is,” Scarlett Johansson said. “I think it’s a useless pursuit, legally, mostly because the internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself,” Scarlett Johansson explained that she had struggled to get any meaningful action on the fake porn videos because of the different laws governing their distribution in each country.
“Also, every country has their own legalese regarding the right to your own image, so while you may be able to take down sites in the US that are using your face, the same rules might not apply in Germany,” she said. “Even if you copyright pictures with your image that belong to you, the same copyright laws don’t apply overseas. I have sadly been down this road many, many times.”
In 2011, Scarlett Johansson’s smartphone was hacked and Scarlett Johansson private nude photos of the star were leaked onto the internet. “It was so devastating,” she told the Howard Stern Show in 2017. “It was absolutely shocking and devastating at the time … It was such an invasion. I just felt like as a woman, I felt like it’s such a degrading and awful thing to have to go through that.”
