Laurie Segall has launched Searching for Mr. Deepfakes, a 13-part TikTok investigation that tries to find the owner of a site that creates explicit sexual images of women without their consent. Paris Hilton is a central part of the project, appearing in the series and helping push it out to a wider audience.
The timing matters because the series arrives as deepfake abuse keeps spreading faster than the people targeted by it can respond. Hilton, who has spent years speaking about how public exploitation can follow a woman long after the fact, says the experience was one of the most painful, traumatizing, humiliating and degrading of her life.
Segall is not packaging the story as a traditional documentary. She is releasing it on TikTok in short bursts, with many episodes running only two to four minutes, while also extending it through her podcast Mostly Human. The podcast will include a four-part version of the investigation, beginning June 4 and rolling out on Thursdays for four weeks. Segall said she wants the story to be available to anyone who needs to see it, and that she loves the idea of building a new playbook for unscripted content. The format, though, is clearly built for speed and reach, not depth.
That is where the project’s sharpest contradiction sits. Segall is trying to make a broad public warning about a hidden digital industry, but the main delivery system is a stream of bite-size videos that can easily be swiped past. She has called it a beta test and said content does not have to sit in one place, a belief that reflects her move after a decade at and work on a new 60 Minutes concept that played out on Quibi. With Hilton promoting the project across her own channels and Segall’s company Mostly Human working with BFD and 11:11 Media, the investigation is being built to travel. Whether it can also force accountability for the man behind Mr. Deepfakes is the question the series is now carrying into its next chapter.
For Hilton, the story reaches back to when she was not even 20 years old. For Segall, it is a test of whether a serious investigation can live where younger audiences already spend their time, and still land with enough force to matter.
