미국 펜실베이니아주의 래드노 고등학교에서 남학생이 AI 딥페이크 앱을 이용해 5명의 여학생 얼굴을 합성한 성적 허위 영상을 제작해 동료들에게 유포한 사건이 발생했습니다. 학교 측의 미온적인 대처와 피해자 격리 조치 등은 학교 밖 일어난 사이버 성폭력에 대해 학교가 어디까지 책임져야 하는지에 관한 법적·사회적 논쟁을 촉발시켰습니다. 이 사건은 딥페이크 기술이 청소년들 사이에서 얼마나 쉽게 악용될 수 있는지 보여주며, 교육 당국의 실효성 있는 보호 정책과 대응 지침이 시급함을 시사합니다.
번역된 본문
12월 초의 어느 학교 수업이 있는 날 저녁, 펜실베이니아주 래드노 고등학교(Radnor High School)의 1학년 남학생이 스냅챗(Snapchat) 메시지로 친구들에게 부모님이 자신의 휴대전화를 압수했다고 적었습니다. "왜?"라고 한 명이 물었습니다. "그 앱 때문이야."라고 그가 답했습니다. "오 세상. 그게 뭔지 실토했어, 아니면 돈만 썼다고만 했어?"라고 다른 친구가 물었습니다. 첫 번째 남학생은 그저 돈만 썼다고 대답했을 뿐이라고 했습니다. "형, 부모님이 형이 그 동영상에서 뭘 하고 있었는지 알았으면 진짜 지금 죽었을 거야." 그는 학교에서 지급받은 기기에서 이 메시지들을 보내고 있었다고 말했습니다. "그 년한테 250달러나 썼어."라고 그는 답했습니다. "푼 돈도 아닌데 완전 가치 있었어." 그는 그 돈을 애플 앱스토어의 'Movely'라는 앱 구독에 사용했으며, 이를 통해 여학생 5명의 얼굴을 나체 신체에 합성하고 성적 이미지를 만든 혐의를 받고 있습니다. 앱을 사용해 동영상을 만든 이 남학생은 다음 날 아침 학교에 나타나지 않았습니다. 하지만 여학생들은 학교에 왔습니다. 그의 친구들도 마찬가지였습니다. "남자애들은 그 애를 두둔하고 있고, 아무것도 보지 않았다고 말하고 있지만 분명히 봤어요." 피해 여학생 중 한 명이 엄마에게 문자를 보냈습니다. "이건 절대 괜찮지 않아요." 래드노는 해당 주에서 최고 수준의 고등학교 중 하나로 꼽힙니다. 2026 학년도에는 1,000명이 조금 넘는 학생이 등록했습니다. 학군은 수년 동안 괴롭힘, 성희롱 및 성폭력과 관련된 정책을 시행해 왔으며, 펜실베이니아주법은 2024년에 악의적인 딥페이크를 범죄로 규정했습니다. 2025년에는 수사관이 한 남성의 휴대전화에서 미성년자를 묘사한 AI 생성 콘텐츠 파일 24개 이상을 발견한 후 아동 성학물 소지 혐의로 30건 이상의 중범죄 기소가 이루어졌습니다. 404 Media와 인터뷰한 학부모들, 사건 직후 학부모와 의무 신고자 간의 이메일 교환, 학교 당국과 경찰 간의 상충되는 진술, 그리고 조시 샤피로(Josh Shapiro) 주지사의 학교에 대한 관심 등에 따르면, 이 모든 것에도 불구하고 래드노의 행정부는 학대 사실을 알게 된 후 며칠, 몇 주 동안 학생들을 보호하는 데 실패했습니다. 언론과 학교 위원회 회의에서 공개적으로 목소리를 내고 있는 피해자 학부모 중 한 명인 오드리 그린버그(Audrey Greenberg)는 기자에게 이렇게 말했습니다. "솔직히, 저는 이런 일이 다른 누구에게도 다시는 일어나지 않기를 바랄 뿐이에요." 이 사건은 학교에 새로운 논쟁을 촉발시켰습니다. 캠퍼스 밖과 등하교 시간 외에 아이들의 휴대전화에서 일어나는 일이, 특히 제9조(Title IX, 성차별 금지법) 요건에 따라 학교의 책임 범위 내에 있는지에 대한 논쟁이었습니다. 그린버그는 말했습니다. "우리 딸은 학교에서 같이 만나지 않았다면 그 다른 남자애를 알지도 못했을 거예요. 학교 전체가 이 사건을 알아요. 딸은 몇 주째 계속 일찍 집으로 오겠다고 전화해 왔어요. 집중할 수 없고, 학교에서의 매일 일상에 영향을 미치고 있어요." 사건이 있은 후 며칠 동안, 학교는 여학생들이 수업을 일찍 마치고 혼자 점심을 먹도록 허락했는데, 이는 그들을 또래 친구들과 학업에서 더욱 격리시키는 결과를 초래했습니다. 한편, 학부모와 옹호자들은 매 학교 위원회 회의에 참석하고 주 대표 및 입법자들과 행사를 조직하여, 자신들의 딸이나 다른 누구에게도 이런 일이 다시 발생하지 않도록 노력하고 있습니다. 12월 4일 아침, 모두 14~15세인 5명의 9학년(한국 기준 고등학교 1학년) 여학생이 래드노 고등학교 수업에 등교했습니다. 오전 8시, 즉 해가 뜬 지 1시간도 채 되지 않았을 때 학교 전체가 전날 밤에 일어난 일을 이미 알고 있는 것처럼 느껴졌습니다. 1학년 남학생 한 명이 앱을 사용해 여학생들의 AI 생성 성적 노골적 동영상을 만들고 친구들에게 보낸 혐의를 받은 것입니다. 그곳에서 동영상과 소문은 10대에서 10대로, 학교에서 학교로 퍼져나가며, 결국 딥페이크에 얼굴이 도용된 여학생들에게까지 알려졌습니다.
💡 학교 내 딥페이크 괴롭힘과 관련된 경험이 있으신가요? 제게 이야기해 주시면 감사하겠습니다. 업무용 기기가 아닌 개인 기기를 사용하여 Signal(sam.404)로 안전하게 메시지를 보내주시거나, sam@404media.co로 이메일을 보내주시기 바랍니다.
학부모들에 따르면, 여학생들의 얼굴을 합성해 이미지를 만든 남학생들은 몇 주 전부터 래드노 학교의 매점과 식탁에서 이를 사람들에게 자랑하며 돌아다녔습니다. 12월 3일 밤에 아이들이 이를 공유하고 이야기하기 시작하자, 누군가 사이버 폭력에 대해 펜실베이니아주의 Safe2Say 핫라인에 이 이미지들을 신고했습니다.
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. 💡 Do you have experience with deepfake harassment in schools? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at sam.404 Otherwise, send me an email at sam@404media.co. 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