BERLIN: Germany plans to crack down on sexualised deepfakes, the government said Friday, as a prominent TV personality accused her ex-husband of spreading AI-generated pornographic images of her online.
The charges brought by Collien Fernandes, 44, who is also a TV presenter, have triggered intense media debate about the "digital violence" increasingly perpetrated against on the internet, mostly against women.
German Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig will "very shortly" present a draft bill to punish the creation and distribution of sexualised deepfakes, ministry spokesman Eike Hosemann said.
"We want to ensure that perpetrators can no longer feel safe, that they must expect to be identified and effectively prosecuted," Hubig told the NTV news channel, adding that police would be given greater powers to search suspects' computers.
Hosemann said "the aim is to make the production and distribution of such deepfakes a criminal offence", adding that Germany was "lagging behind technological developments in this area".
News weekly Der Spiegel first reported this week on the case of Fernandes, who spoke of her shock at discovering that hundreds of fake pornographic images of her had been circulating on the internet.
It was only more recently that she started to suspect they had been created and shared by her former partner, fellow actor Christian Ulmen, 50, via fake social media accounts that appeared to be hers, she said.
Fernandes has filed a legal complaint against him in Spain, where the couple had lived together on the island of Mallorca before they separated in 2025, according to the report.
Writing on her Instagram account, she repeated her accusation of "sexualised violence" against her former husband.
German media cited Ulmen's lawyer as saying the reports contained "untrue facts based on a one-sided account".
Hubig, herself a former judge and prosecutor, told Der Spiegel that sexualised online crimes had a "devastating" impact on victims.
"That's why I make no distinction between analogue and digital violence. Every attack, no matter where or how it occurs, is one too many." – AFP
