Read on for the rest of GLAMOUR’s interview with Naga Munchetty…
GLAMOUR: Can you remember how you felt the first time you saw one of these fake nude images?
Naga Munchetty: A neighbour got in touch and said, ‘Are you okay? – I’ve just seen these images of you.’ And I was like, oh, more clickbait. People come up to me all the time [and say] ‘I’ve seen this article about you…’ I rang my neighbour and said, ‘What was it’? And he just said, ‘They’re pictures of you naked’. And I went, well, they’re not pictures of me… I can tell you that much.
I was a bit worried about it. Literally about five days later, he messaged me again and showed me the screenshots, which I’ve got. I sent them to my team at BBC Radio 5 Live. We’d been talking about how Stacey Solomon’s gone through this, and Martin Lewis has been faked.
First of all, [the team] were just like, are you okay? And I said, yeah, I’m fine. But this is happening. We need to talk about this. We need to talk about what’s going on.
In your article about this experience, you describe the images as “crudely mocked-up images of me naked – my face badly photoshopped onto someone else’s body”. Does it make a difference at all than if the images were hyperrealistic?
No, it makes absolutely no difference. How dare anyone take my image and manipulate it? Someone asked me, ‘Were you worried about pictures of you naked being on the internet?’ I’m like, no, there are no pictures of me naked, not since I was a baby. I know there are no pictures out there of me naked. So no, I wasn’t concerned, but whether they’re realistic or not is kind of irrelevant. It’s just the sheer bloody cheek of someone thinking they can take a woman’s image and manipulate it.
And I had so many messages from friends saying, ‘This is horrific. Are you okay?’ after I spoke about it on 5 Live, they were just like, ‘I know you are absolutely fine. You are a tough cookie, and you put these things in their place, but it is bloody horrible. It’s insulting, it’s misogynistic, it’s abuse of your image.’ And genuinely, I don’t feel hurt, but I am angry.
You mention that these scams have impacted other high-profile individuals, such as Chris Packham and Martin Lewis. But to my knowledge, they haven’t had these crude, fake nude images of themselves being shared…
That’s so interesting. I haven’t looked for those. The way I protect myself is I don’t look for stuff. And I’m very fortunate; my production team would’ve looked into those, but I didn’t know that Martin Lewis, Steven Bartlett or Chris weren’t impacted by fake nude images. But, of course, women are the easy targets. Look at all the latest AI tools… I was watching Vicky Pattison’s documentary on deepfakes the other day, and the thing I found most fascinating was when she put her husband’s image through a [nudification app]. It put his head in on a naked woman’s body.
It’s fascinating. They haven’t got the technology to deepfake men yet. There’s no market for it. Is it too obvious a question to ask why there is such an extra sexualised layer when it’s women who are targeted over men? Obviously, in both scenarios, it’s horrific, but there does seem to be this additional need to humiliate women.
