She has over 100,000 fake explicit images of her circulating online — and now Paris Hilton is fighting back in the most public way possible.
The hotel heiress and media mogul has teamed up with award-winning investigative journalist Laurie Segall for a brand new 14-part docuseries, Searching for Mr. Deepfakes, which chronicles a three-year hunt to unmask the anonymous operator of one of the internet's most disturbing websites.
The Site That Sparked a Three-Year Investigation
Mr. Deepfakes was no ordinary corner of the dark web. At its peak, the site attracted a staggering 17 million monthly visitors and hosted hundreds of thousands of AI-generated sexually explicit images — featuring both celebrities and ordinary members of the public. In short, it was a factory of abuse, and for years, nobody knew who was running it.
That changed when Segall, a former CNN and 60 Minutes journalist, stumbled across the site in 2022 and decided she couldn't look away.
"It's the story of innovation without guardrails, where women and girls are some of the first to be impacted negatively," Segall explained. "So I decided that we needed to track the guy behind the anonymous site, and that took quite a bit of investigating."
Assembling a team of journalists, cybersecurity experts and digital specialists, Segall spent three years on the trail — eventually confronting the site's owner in Markham, Ontario, Canada, face to face. The investigation is widely credited with helping contribute to the site's shutdown in 2025.
Why Paris Hilton Got Involved
For Hilton, this is deeply personal. At just 19 years old, a private intimate video was shared without her consent by a former boyfriend and distributed online — a violation she has spoken about openly for years. That experience, combined with the knowledge that more than 100,000 deepfake images of her now exist on the internet, made her the obvious — and powerful — ally for Segall's mission.
"People assume that because these images are fake, the impact somehow isn't real, but it is," Hilton told PEOPLE magazine. "Knowing strangers are creating and sharing content designed to humiliate or exploit you is something no one should have to experience."
Segall recalls the moment she knew she had to bring Hilton on board. In January, she watched the star travel to Capitol Hill to advocate for the DEFIANCE Act — bipartisan legislation that would allow victims of deepfake exploitation to take legal action against those who create and distribute such content — standing alongside Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Laurel Lee.
"I said to my husband, 'I've got to team up with Paris Hilton on this, she gets it, and she's speaking out,'" Segall recalled. "It's not just about her lending us a platform — her story is important as a part of this."
Streaming Directly to TikTok — and Already Going Viral
In a bold move that reflects just how much the media landscape has shifted, the docuseries is streaming exclusively on Paris Hilton's TikTok account, in collaboration with Segall's production company Mostly Human Media. Within just one week of release, the campaign had already racked up 26 million video views across Hilton and Mostly Human Media's social channels — proof, if any were needed, that audiences are hungry for this conversation.
Hilton has also been candid about the exhausting reality of managing the fallout from deepfake abuse, even with a full support team behind her.
"I'm fortunate to have a team helping report and remove them, but the process is incredibly time-consuming because you have to go platform by platform," she said. On a more hopeful note, she added: "Thankfully, the Take It Down Act is now law, which means platforms are required to remove this content quickly and face consequences if they don't."
Why This Matters
The statistics alone are sobering. Hilton revealed that one in eight girls knows someone who has been impacted by deepfake pornography — and, crucially, victims don't even need to have shared an image of themselves for it to happen. As Segall grimly put it: "Now you just have to exist."
For UK viewers, the issues raised by the series are just as urgent. The Online Safety Act has put pressure on British platforms to tackle non-consensual intimate imagery, but campaigners argue enforcement remains inconsistent. Searching for Mr. Deepfakes is available to watch now on Paris Hilton's TikTok — and given its viral momentum, it seems the conversation is only just getting started.
