# How Deepfakes Tore a High School Apart > Source: > Published: 2026-05-21 14:41:16+00:00 On a school night in early December, a freshman at Radnor High School in Pennsylvania wrote in Snapchat messages to his friends that his parents took his phone away. “why,” one replied. “the app,” he answered. “o shi. did you admit to what it was or just the money,” another asked. Just the money, the first boy replied. “Bro u would literally be dead rn if ur parents found out what u were doing in ts” He was sending these messages from a school-issued device, he said. “I dropped 250 on that hoe,” he replied. “Worth every penny.” He spent that money on a subscription to an app from Apple’s App Store, called Movely, and allegedly used it to put five of his female classmates’ faces onto nude bodies and make sexual images of them. The boy who used the app and made the videos didn’t show up to school the next morning. But the girls did. And so did his friends. “The boys are defending him, and they're now saying that they didn't see anything, but they did,” one of the girls texted her mom. “It's not okay.” Radnor is ranked one of the top high schools in the state. It has a little more than 1,000 kids enrolled in the 2026 school year. The school district has had policies in place concerning bullying, harassment, and sexual violence for years, and Pennsylvania law criminalized malicious deepfakes in 2024. In 2025, a man was charged on over 30 felony counts of possession of child sexual abuse material after investigators found more than two dozen files of AI-generated content depicting minors on his phone. Despite all this, Radnor’s administration failed students in the days and weeks after it learned about the abuse, according to parents who spoke to 404 Media, email exchanges between parents and mandated reporters in the aftermath, conflicting narratives between the administration and the police department, and spotlight on the school from governor Josh Shapiro. “Candidly, I just want this to not happen again to anybody else,” Audrey Greenberg, a parent of one of the victims who has been speaking publicly to the press and at board meetings, told me. The incident also started a new debate for the school: Whether what happens on kids’ phones while off campus and outside of school hours is within the purview of the school’s responsibility, especially under Title IX requirements. “My daughter would not know this other boy if they were not in school together,” Greenberg said. “The entire school knows about it. She's been calling me for weeks on end to come home early. She can't concentrate, it's affecting her every day at school.” In the days following the incident, the school offered to let the girls leave class early and eat lunch alone, isolating them further from their peers and studies. Meanwhile, parents and advocates have shown up to every school board meeting and organized events with state representatives and lawmakers to try to ensure this doesn’t happen again, to their girls or anyone else. On the morning of December 4, five ninth grade girls, all 14 or 15 years old, showed up for class at Radnor High School. By 8 a.m.—the sun had been up for less than an hour—it felt like the entire school already heard what happened the night before. A fellow freshman boy allegedly created AI-generated sexually explicit videos of the girls using an app, and sent them to his friends. From there, the videos and gossip spread from teenager to teenager, school to school, until they made their way back to the girls whose faces were in the deepfakes. For weeks prior, parents of the girls say, the boys creating the images were showing them off at lunch tables at Radnor. When kids started sharing and talking about them on the night of December 3, someone reported the images to Pennsylvania’s Safe2Say hotline for cyberbullying, shooting plans or threats, and other violent activity. The images originated from one boy, who used an app called Movely, the girls and their parents believe. The app is similar to dozens hosted in the Apple and Google app stores and advertised on Instagram and TikTok that promise to create AI images and videos of users as superheroes, animals, or influencers; behind a paywall, however, users could edit photos and videos with text prompts. Movely’s capabilities to make deepfakes were tested by the Tech Transparency Project in their latest report released in April: “To test this feature, TTP uploaded an image of a woman in a white T-shirt standing next to a river. After using the selection tool to highlight the woman’s shirt, we entered the prompt ‘topless.’ The app immediately generated four versions of the woman nude from the waist up. It required a paid subscription to download the AI images.” Apple told 404 Media it removed the apps mentioned in TTP’s report, and Movely is not available in the App Store as of writing. No one I spoke to for this story had viewed the images in question directly. The images are of minors, and would likely be considered child sexual abuse material under federal and state law. Viewing, sharing, or storing AI-generated child sexual abuse material is illegal. This has made the process of understanding the harms, and responding properly, confusing for school administrators, who were seemingly caught unprepared for this technology that has existed at a consumer level for more than eight years and bears little difference from the non-consensual intimate imagery that’s plagued young girls and teenagers since the invention of the camera. Because the images aren’t “real,” authorities grapple with how to handle them. But the harms they perpetuate are extremely real. The girls allegedly depicted in them are silenced, isolated, and punished in numerous inexplicit ways by the people meant to be protecting them. Radnor leadership initially called the alleged child sexual abuse material tearing through their district “rumors.” In an email sent to parents on December 8, days after they went viral within the school, Radnor High School Principal Joseph MacNamara wrote: “Dear Radnor High School Parents and Guardians, I am writing to address concerns and rumors regarding an AI-generated video that was reported to depict several of our students in an inappropriate manner. We understand how upsetting and serious this situation is, and we want to assure you that we are treating it with the highest level of urgency and care. Please know that all families of students who may have been affected have already been contacted and provided information about available supports.” MacNamara continued, writing that “as soon as this matter was brought to our attention,” they contacted Radnor Township Police Department, and said that RPD is “actively involved.” Radnor Township Police Department declined to comment for this story, and declined to confirm or deny whether Radnor in fact worked “closely” with the police department following the incident. “We are referring all media to the Delaware County DA’s Office,” Radnor Township Superintendent of Police Christopher Flanagan told me in an email. District Attorney Tanner Rouse did not respond to my request for comment. School administrators offered a series of “supportive measures” for the victims, according to emails viewed by 404 Media. These included permission to leave class early for a few weeks following the incident, access to the student counselor and social worker, and an open door policy from Assistant Principal Gabriel Presley, who would “review any requested accommodation related to specific classes or assignments,” according to an email sent from Radnor’s head of HR to parents. In effect, the girls had the option to cut their own learning short—and not much else from the school. The girls also weren’t sure what repercussions their bully would face, which added to the trauma they felt. Administrators sent conflicting messages to parents about the situation. On January 14, Radnor Township police informed parents of the victims that the boy who made the images was charged with “summary harassment.” Two days later, on January 16, the Radnor community received an email signed by Radnor Township School District Superintendent Kenneth Batchelor, Flanagan, and MacNamara that claims no crime was committed and during an investigation, no images were found. In that email, Flanagan, Batchelor, and MacNamara informed parents that Radnor Police “have concluded their investigation” and found “during a small gathering off school grounds and outside of school hours, students used a personal cell phone to copy publicly available images of other students. The student used an app that animates images, making them appear to move and dance. On the day the high school administration first heard of the rumors and learned of the alleged images, they immediately began investigating, contacted the police, and reached out to all parents and students involved.” They wrote that the police and county forensic teams investigated the situation, and “no evidence shared with law enforcement depicted anything inappropriate or any other related crime. Individuals involved have cooperated with the investigation allowing searches of personal technology. All school district technology was also searched. After a thorough investigation, the alleged images were never discovered.” Parents of the girls were shocked. Their daughters had spent the previous weeks in and out of school, dealing with the trauma of their images being sexualized and shared rampantly, as well as more harassment and bullying associated with the fallout. They were trying to get back to normal, but at Radnor, they watched their harasser high five his friends in the hallways. For some of them, focusing on their studies became impossible. Some started therapy. Some just wanted to move on and never think about it again. And here, six weeks later, the police chief, school district superintendent, and high school principal were claiming nothing happened. On January 23, a week after Radnor administrators and the superintendent of police sent the email claiming no crimes were committed, the Radnor Township Police Department posted a notice to its Facebook page noting that a crime had indeed happened: “After being alerted in December of 2025 of the possible use of Al to generate non-consensual sexualized imagery of multiple juveniles that occurred within Radnor Township, the Radnor Police Department conducted an investigation in collaboration with the Delaware County District Attorney's Office and specifically the Delaware County ICAC Detective Division. As a result of the investigation, a juvenile offender was charged with the crime of harassment for their conduct. Please be alerted to the dangers of Al and that criminal use of it will be investigated and charged appropriately.” Rouse also sent this statement to Greenberg and another parent, Morgan Dorfman, writing that it came in response to “some well-thought out requests by you all.” “We believe this is almost exactly what Ms. Greenburg[sic] had envisioned and thoroughly in line with Ms. Dorfman's wishes,” Rouse wrote in the email. “While it does not mention credibility explicitly, clearly the fact that charges were filed (correctly) implies that the girls were believed. Again, we are terribly sorry for what your daughters have endured and hope that this grants them some solace that law enforcement took their claims seriously, and that they can begin to resume life as they knew it before this incident.” District Attorney Rouse did not respond to my requests for comment. In a January 28 email, Juvenile Division Deputy District Attorney Katie Magee wrote to the girls’ parents: “I can confirm that the Radnor Youth Aid Panel (YAP) has held their meeting with the juvenile,” referring to the boy who allegedly made the images. “As YAP stated, their resolutions with the juvenile are confidential. However, I can advise all parties that the YAP, in addition to their own resolutions, did impose the two requirements that the District Attorney’s office