It was some years after my dad died that I discovered he was a liar. I loved him enormously. But he was a liar. I grew up in Inverness where my father Mateusz was a well-liked tailor. He was also a refugee with an East European accent who had fled his village in south-east Poland during the second world war.

Dad had always been a bit vague about his past but I figured that, like many of his generation, he didn’t like talking about the war. It was only when I went to his home village in 2003, now in western Ukraine, that I discovered the stories my father told us about his early years were just that, stories. He told lies about his religion, his family and what he did during the war: they just tumbled out, one after the other.

Fifteen years earlier, in spring 1988, I sat down with dad and a cassette recorder in the workshop he’d set up in my old bedroom. He was 69 and semi-retired. I was 29 and visiting from London, where I was making my way as an actor. Dad had sold his shop in Inverness a couple of years earlier and my parents had bought their council house in Dalneigh, the 1950s estate where I grew up.

I had an idea I might want to write about dad in the future, though I didn’t know what form it might take. Twenty years later, I gave the first performance of my one-man show, The Tailor of Inverness, telling the story of how I found out who my father really was and the secrets that he had kept from his Scottish family for decades.

Although he hardly spoke of the war, dad talked even less of his youth in south-east Poland, or western Ukraine as it’s been since 1945. As a boy in the 1960s, I’d get the occasional inkling when a particular sequence in the documentary series, All Our Yesterdays, would reach into his memory bank. He said nothing as we sat on the settee watching the telly, but the welling up in his eyes revealed something else. But what was it? Normally, he looked forward, energetically living in the present. He was an upbeat, ebullient man, adapting successfully as a master tailor and popular small businessman in the Highlands.

Dad died suddenly, four years after our taped conversations, in 1992. A few months earlier, his social integration was crowned when he became master of his masonic lodge in Inverness. My wife Virginia and I had driven him and mum to Poland in 1990 to visit his brother Adam in Silesia. The Soviet Union collapsed the following year and Ukraine gained its independence. I had been thinking of taking him to his birthplace. That thought was now redundant. I was devastated. He was a great dad.

Six years later, I decided to do something with the tapes. He was in the room again and I was transfixed. I transcribed, and as I listened, my curiosity was piqued by several moments of uncertainty, a lack of clarity about a date or a place. His childhood and teenage memories told a vivid story of village life in Galicia. The problems related to his wartime journey. He told me how, as a young Polish soldier, he was captured by the Soviets in September 1939 as they crushed Poland in league with the Nazis. He was transported to do forced labour on a collective farm in Uzbekistan but escaped in 1941.

In an epic journey overland through the Middle East, he made it to Egypt and with other Polish soldiers joined Montgomery’s 8th Army. They fought in North Africa and took part in the invasion of Sicily in 1943 before advancing up the Italian boot. They distinguished themselves at Monte Cassino, the greatest Polish victory of the war, 1,000 miles from home. When Germany surrendered, dad was in Ancona on the Adriatic coast.

He ended up in a Polish unit of the British army in Italy a month after the war ended. Given the choice of return to Poland or resettlement in the UK, he chose the latter, like most Poles in his position. As the communist takeover became clear, he knew a return would result in imprisonment in the gulag, or worse. He chose survival.

Through a cousin in New York, he discovered that his older brother Kazik was in Scotland. Dad joined him in Glasgow, where he met my mother and resumed the tailoring he’d learned in Galicia. They moved to Inverness in 1957. At least that’s what he told me. And this is typical of the journey many thousands of Poles made. But not him.

In 2003, I decided to visit dad’s birthplace in Ukraine, something he’d never been able to do. The Soviets repeatedly refused him a visa, so he was never reunited with his mother, who died in 1971. Before the war, Pidhaitsi was a predominantly Jewish town where my father went to tailoring school: 90% of Galicia’s tailors then were Jewish. Like all little towns in Galicia, Pidhaitsi had its own ghetto. The people in it were all murdered by the Nazis in 1943. Their mass graves are just outside town. Only a few kilometres further out is Hnilowody, my father’s village.

On that trip, I discovered that the granny I never met was Ukrainian, not Polish; that as borders fluctuated during the war, my father had been recruited into different armies, fighting for both the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. The one that he never joined was the Polish army.

For our family, the most stunning revelation was that he had married in 1940 and had a daughter, Irena, my half-sister. I traced her. It’s hard to convey just how powerful, strange and moving meeting Irena and her mother was.

Once I’d got over the shock that my father spent his life in Scotland claiming a story that wasn’t his, it dawned on me that I’d uncovered a more profound truth about the traumatic impact of war and migration. My father chose that story because he wanted to fit into his adopted homeland. It was more palatable than the messy reality of shifting frontlines, brutal ideological rivalry and an abandoned family. I hope that when people see my play they will look upon asylum seekers who arrive on our shores from war-torn places like Syria and Afghanistan with a bit more compassion because most have a similar story to tell.

When Barack and Michelle Obama visited Ireland in 2011 they drank Guinness, visited the birthplace of the president’s great-great-great-grandfather and made pitch-perfect jokes and speeches. The reception was rapturous.

Their current foray into Irish culture is proving more divisive. The Obamas are not here in person but as executive producers of a comedy drama series, Bodkin, set in Ireland, which launched this week on Netflix. Reviews have been polarising.

“Yet another entry in the worst genre ever – the Irish rural picaresque where booze flows, nuns scowl,” said the Irish Times. “A deeply annoying show that thinks it is critiquing cliches about Ireland when actively adding to the stockpile. Let’s ignore it and hope it goes away.”

It was an eviscerating verdict on the first foray into scripted television by the Obamas’ production company Higher Ground, which signed a deal with Netflix in 2018.

The seven-part series features American true-crime podcasters – and a rude, cantankerous Guardian reporter – who travel to the fictional Cork village of Bodkin to investigate ritualised folk horror killings. Starring Will Forte, Siobhán Cullen and Robyn Cara, its whimsical style has drawn comparisons to Only Murders in the Building.

The Irish Times credited the former first couple with good intentions. “In keeping with the thoughtful and socially conscious Obama brand, it sets out to critique our obsession with true crime podcasts and to have fun with Americans and their misty-eyed vision of Ireland.”

But the show had recreated Father Ted without the jokes or self-awareness, it said. “If the locals in Bodkin are gradually revealed to be putting on a sly act in front of the naive American, the series nonetheless plumbs the depths of diddly dee twaddle.”

The panning, albeit for a show he did not write, was a far cry from 2011 when Obama delighted audiences with a joke skewering American quests for Irish roots: “My name is Barack O’Bama and I’ve come home to Ireland to find my missing apostrophe.”

The Irish Independent review started with a warning. “We know from bitter experience what the result can be when Netflix rubs up against rural Ireland: dross like Irish Wish [an Ireland-set romantic comedy]. At first sight, Bodkin looks like it might be about to plummet into the same dark pit of paddywhackery.”

A west Cork coastal town with a funny-sounding name populated by folksy eccentrics augured poorly, it said. “If this isn’t enough to set your Oirish bullshit-detecting antennae twitching, then the fact that the animated opening titles feature a pint of Guinness, a nun and a St Brigid’s Cross should be.”

The review then swerved. “But wait — don’t run away, because Bodkin is not what you might have feared. It’s clever, funny and properly gripping stuff: a deliciously offbeat concoction of the (intentionally) silly and the sinister that delights in setting up more shamrock-laden cliches than you can shake a shillelagh at and then gleefully shredding them.”

Other reviews hovered in the middle. The Guardian gave it three out of five stars, saying it occasionally matched the fun of Only Murders in the Building. “That it doesn’t ever quite catch fire in the same way as that highly idiosyncratic show is unfortunate, if predictable, but not fatal to enjoyment.”

The Times lauded performances and said writer Jez Scharf’s script was fine and often witty but that little about the characters or plot rang true. “It feels too – what’s the word? – cartoonish, as if we were playing Irish cliche bingo. Everything is thrown into the mix and the resulting pie is uneven, with some parts tastier than others.”

The Netherlands’ entry has been disqualified from the grand final of the Eurovision song contest due to an incident involving a female member of the production crew, the competition’s organisers have announced.

The Dutch singer and rapper Joost Klein, 26, had qualified for the contest’s main event but was absent from Friday’s dress rehearsals.

It’s the first time in Eurovision’s 68-year history that a contestant has been disqualified after the start of the five-day event.

“Swedish police have investigated a complaint made by a female member of the production crew after an incident following his [Klein’s] performance in Thursday night’s semi-final,” Eurovision’s organisers said in a statement.

“While the legal process takes its course, it would not be appropriate for him to continue in the contest. We maintain a zero-tolerance policy towards inappropriate behaviour at our event and are committed to providing a safe and secure environment”.

The organisers said the incident did not involve any other performer or delegation member.

The Dutch broadcaster Avrotros said the decision was “disproportionate”.

“We have taken note of the disqualification by the EBU [European Broadcasting Union],” the radio and TV broadcaster said in a post on X. “Avrotros finds the disqualification disproportionate and is shocked by the decision. We deeply regret this and will come back to it later.”

Friction between Klein and Israel’s delegation at a press conference on Thursday night had fuelled speculation the incident that led to his absence was of a political nature.

When Klein, who was due to perform just before Israel’s entry Eden Golan on Saturday night, was asked if his entry Europapa could live up to the competition’s motto “United by music”, he said pointedly: “I think that’s a good question for the EBU.”

In March, the association of broadcasters ruled that Israel was allowed to compete as long as it changed the lyrics to its entry, then called October Rain, about the trauma of the Hamas massacre on 7 October.

The EBU has defended its decision by saying Eurovision is “a non-political music event” and “not a contest between governments”.

When another journalist asked Golan if she had considered that her presence at the contest might be endangering the other acts and the attending fans, the host intervened to say she did not have to answer the question if she did not want to. Klein, who sat next to her, interjected with: “Why not?”

Europapa, a pop hymn to European free movement wrapped into a story of parental loss, had received frenetic applause at the semi-final and was seen as one of the frontrunners to win Eurovision’s 68th edition.

In 1974 France withdrew its entry due to the death of President Georges Pompidou in the week of the contest, but it did so before the singer Dani had appeared on stage.

Madi Hime is taking a deep drag on a blue vape in the video, her eyes shut, her face flushed with pleasure. The 16-year-old exhales with her head thrown back, collapsing into laughter that causes smoke to billow out of her mouth. The clip is grainy and shaky – as if shot in low light by someone who had zoomed in on Madi’s face – but it was damning. Madi was a cheerleader with the Victory Vipers, a highly competitive “all-star” squad based in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The Vipers had a strict code of conduct; being caught partying and vaping could have got her thrown out of the team. And in July 2020, an anonymous person sent the incriminating video directly to Madi’s coaches.

Eight months later, that footage was the subject of a police news conference. “The police reviewed the video and other photographic images and found them to be what we now know to be called deepfakes,” district attorney Matt Weintraub told the assembled journalists at the Bucks County courthouse on 15 March 2021. Someone was deploying cutting-edge technology to tarnish a teenage cheerleader’s reputation.

The vaping video was just one of many disturbing communications brought to the attention of Hilltown Township police department, Weintraub said. Madi had been receiving messages telling her she should kill herself. Her mother, Jennifer Hime, had told officers someone had been taking images from Madi’s social media and manipulating them “to make her appear to be drinking”. A photograph of Madi in swimwear had been altered: “Her bathing suit was edited out.”

Madi wasn’t the only member of the Victory Vipers cheer team to have been victimised. In August 2020, Sherri Ratel had been sent anonymous texts accusing her teenage daughter, Kayla, of drinking and smoking pot. Noelle Nero had been sent images of her 17-year-old daughter in a bikini with captions about “toxic traits, revenge, dating boys and smoking”. These, too, were “all altered and shown as deepfakes”, Weintraub added.

The anonymous sender had used “spoofing” software to disguise their identity behind an unknown number. The police had managed to trace it to the IP address of Raffaella Spone, a 50-year-old woman with no previous criminal record. In her mugshot, she wears a lime green turtleneck with her hair scraped back in a tight ponytail. Her eyes, thickly lined in black, look up at the camera in a cold stare; her brightly painted lips are pursed with anger. She looks terrifying.

“It appears that her daughter cheers – or did cheer – with the victims at the Victory Vipers gym,” Weintraub told the assembled journalists. Spone had taken it upon herself to smear her 16-year-old’s rivals in an attempt to get them thrown off the team.

As microphone after microphone was placed before him on the podium, Weintraub didn’t mince his words. “This tech is now available to anyone with a smartphone – your neighbour, somebody who holds a grudge,” he said, waving his own phone in the air. “Here in Bucks County, we have an adult with specific intent, preying on juveniles through the use of deepfake technology.”

This went further than cheerleader rivalry in suburban Pennsylvania. Anyone could be a victim of this new kind of crime, and anyone a perpetrator. “All one needs to do is download an app and you’re off to the races,” Weintraub continued. “Sometimes these deepfakes are so good, we can’t even discern them with the naked eye.” The authorities would always be on the back foot, he added: “It takes minutes to make a deepfake video, but it takes us months to investigate.” The woman in the mugshot was the canary in the coalmine: the era of believing your own eyes was officially over.

In 2021, a fresh wave of panic about deepfakes was crashing on a world that had spent far too much time locked down at home in front of screens. Deepfaked pornography – with the faces of non-consenting people crudely superimposed on to others’ bodies – had been a concern for years, but now digitally manipulated videos were beginning to be eerily convincing.

The press conference came only a few weeks after a deepfaked video of Tom Cruise doing a magic trick went viral on TikTok. It was three months after Queen Elizabeth appeared deepfaked and twerking in Channel 4’s alternative Christmas message, sparking outrage. But the cheerleader deepfake story was something else: an irresistible combination of wholesome all-American girls, nudity, teenage rivalry, underage partying and dystopian technology.

As soon as Weintraub stepped down from the podium, the story exploded. It made international headlines, from the BBC News to the Hindustan Times to the Sydney Morning Herald (and, yes, the Guardian). Trevor Noah mocked Spone on the Daily Show.

Madi Hime appeared alongside her mother on ABC’s Good Morning America, the most watched morning show in the US. They shared the vaping footage – the only imagery from the case to be made public – and Madi described how she felt when one of her cheerleading coaches took them aside to tell them what they’d been sent. “I went in the car and started crying, and was like, ‘That’s not me on video,’” Madi said. “I thought if I said it, nobody would believe me, because there’s proof – there’s a video. But it was obviously manipulated.”

Towards the end of the police press conference, a reporter had raised his hand. Given our first instinct is to believe our eyes, how did the police conclude the videos were deepfakes, he asked, “versus saying: maybe this is teenagers lying, and the videos are real”?

“There’s what’s called metadata,” Weintraub replied. “We can look behind the curtain, as we were able to do in this case. We can’t do it in every case because some providers are halfway across the world. Some don’t cooperate. Others are just inundated with requests.”

He threw his hands up, as if overwhelmed by the scale of it all, adding, “We take it as gospel that a picture is a picture, a video is a video, that they’re unaltered, untainted. This is a setback.”

But a little over a year later, when Spone finally appeared in court to face the charges against her, she was told the cyberharassment element of the case had been dropped. The police were no longer alleging that she had digitally manipulated anything. Someone had been crying deepfake. A story that generated thousands of headlines around the world was based on teenage lies, after all. When the truth finally came out, it was barely reported – but the videos and images were real.

If the word “cheerleader” makes you think of girls with pompoms on the sidelines of high school American football games, think again. Competitive, “all-star” cheerleading is a sport in its own right. It demands jaw-dropping nerve and athleticism, a combination of gymnastic, circus and dance skills, as well as – for female cheerleaders – heavy makeup, backcombed hair and rhinestone-encrusted costumes. It’s an overwhelmingly female sport, but it’s not just for girls. Every year, four million Americans take part.

Each team is a delicate ecosystem. “Tumblers” perform stunning acrobatic feats on the mat. “Stunters” throw “flyers” vertiginously into the air to perform flips and somersaults. The pyramid is the centrepiece of any routine, where the entire squad comes together, with “bases” supporting tiers of teammates and a single flyer at the summit. Flyers need to be light, agile and athletically gifted; they are the focal point of any routine.

Cheerleading accounts for 65% of spinal or cerebral injuries across all female athletes in America. But, for some, the high stakes are worth it: all-star cheerleaders can win college scholarships, become social media influencers and gain lucrative branding deals. Simply making the team can be enough to bring young people status in their community: they become a symbol of local patriotism and clean-cut success.

Doylestown, an hour’s drive north of Philadelphia, is a pretty American town within an excellent local school district; this is where parents with sharp elbows come to raise their families. The Victory Vipers gym is on its outskirts, in a huge, nondescript hangar. On any given day, the parking lot will be full of parents in SUVs, either dropping children off or waiting for them to finish practice. You can hear coaches counting beats over high-octane music inside, but other than that, there is little to suggest this is the home of a highly competitive and successful cheer squad. From the outside, at least, it doesn’t look like a place that costs $4,950 (£4,000) a year to be part of (not including travel expenses for out-of-town competitions), if you’re in the top team.

Neither of the Victory Vipers co-owners responded to requests to speak to me for this article. When Spone was charged, they issued a statement, saying the team “has always promoted a family environment” and that “this incident happened outside of our gym”.

Matt Weintraub became a judge in January; his office said that, given his new position, “the ethical rules require him to decline” my interview offer – but he has been declining to comment on the case since May 2021.

In an email, Hilltown Township’s chief of police, Chris Engelhart, said, “This matter may still be subject to civil litigation and as such, we cannot make any comments.” I have tried to contact Madi and Jennifer Hime for two years, over email and social media, and also Kayla Ratel and her parents, Sherri and George; none of them have responded. Of the three families, only the Neros have got back to me, to politely decline my request. Those who made the loudest noise when the cheerleader deepfake story broke have now gone quiet.

But Raffaella Spone has agreed to speak, in-depth, for the first time. She barely leaves her house now, she says, but is willing to meet me 20 minutes from the Victory Vipers gym, in a diner near where her lawyer is based, so long as he can join us. In person, Spone is tiny; she has a soft, warm face that looks almost nothing like her mugshot. She greets me with a hug. We spend four hours with bottomless sodas in a booth in a corner of the diner.

“Allie was my no-fear athletic child,” she tells me of her youngest daughter (she has another, whose name she has managed to keep out of the press). “I would catch her climbing the streetlamp in our neighbourhood. She was practising gymnastic flips in trees.”

Allie made the local gymnastics team at five years old, Spone tells me. “She was talented and she loved what she did. And I loved watching her – that was my excitement, just watching her and her teammates.”

In the summer of 2016, Allie decided she wanted to do competitive cheer and tried out for the Victory Vipers, their local all-star team. Allie was always a flyer, Spone says: “She’s five one, 100lb – just tiny – and naturally super-flexible.”

After we meet, she sends me videos of her daughter tumbling and cartwheeling before being caught in the splits and thrown high into the air. Allie was prepared to work hard, begging her mother to take her to practice even when she was injured. “She felt her teammates were depending on her,” Spone says. Cheerleading became Allie’s world – and hers. “When your kids are in sports, you don’t have a life sometimes because you’re always driving somebody somewhere, dropping off, picking up. It becomes your life.”

Cheerleading depends on perfect synchronicity and complete trust: any mistake or misunderstanding could lead to a broken neck. Allie formed strong bonds with her teammates. Spone says, “They were inseparable. If they weren’t over at my house, she was over at theirs. Whether it was in the pool, at the beach, all they did was practise. They lived and breathed it.” And Spone made friends with their parents. “While we were waiting for our kids to practise, we would go to a local Mexican place and have dinners.” They took each other’s kids on their family holidays.

The way Spone describes it, there was no rivalry between the Vipers. But it’s clear that in 2020 she had been checking the social media feeds of her daughter’s cheerleading friends and had become concerned by what she saw. What happened next caused things in that cheerleading family unit to break down, irretrievably. “They were my friends. They were people I cared about,” Spone says, quietly. “It broke every part of me.”

On the evening of 18 December 2020, five male police officers banged on Spone’s door with a search warrant. “They took our phones. They took my daughter’s Xbox, her school computer, my husband’s work computer – I don’t own a computer, I never have,” she tells me, pointedly. “They took my husband’s phone charger and my daughter’s disposable camera. They took TVs out of every single room.”

She had no idea why the police were there, but she knew they were there for her, because they were asking for her by name. A male officer patted her down in a way that made her feel violated, she says. She was hysterical, hyperventilating.

The police had been in her home for several hours before officer Matthew Reiss told her what she was being charged with. “He said, ‘You know what you did. You created deepfakes.’ I had never heard that term in my life,” Spone tells me. She faced several counts of harassment, including three counts of cyberharassment of a child, but she wasn’t charged until March 2021, when she came into the police station, had the mugshot taken, and became the face of a moral panic.

In the affidavit of probable cause – the sworn police report outlining the basis for the charges against her – Reiss writes that he and his colleagues had spent months speaking to the families of the three teenagers who said they had been receiving anonymous messages. The “behind the curtain” work he describes relates to how police determined that the spoofed texts had been sent from Spone’s IP address. But when it comes to evidence that she was deepfaking images of minors, things get very vague. Reiss takes Jennifer Hime’s word that “an altered” video of Madi vaping had been sent to the Vipers’ coaches. He says he had “reviewed the video and found it to be the work of a program that is or is similar to ‘Deep Fakes’”. There is no detail on what this reviewing entailed, and how he could be certain it had been altered. Weintraub began the March 2021 press conference by thanking Reiss: “He certainly deserves credit for a very thorough and lengthy investigation.”

Unlike his client, Spone’s lawyer, Robert Birch, knew what a deepfake was. “My first reaction was, how does a 50-year-old woman deepfake something on a phone? You need pretty sophisticated editing capabilities.”

Birch argues that the press conference was a ploy by the district attorney to get some attention. “He was running for re-election that year. He took a look at the criminal complaint and saw an opportunity.”

It is certainly true that Weintraub didn’t shy away from the publicity it generated. He appeared on Good Morning America and The Today Show, and gave interviews to the Washington Post and the New York Times, warning that, “This is something your neighbour down the street can use, and that’s very scary.”

But anyone familiar with the technology at the time knew it would be virtually impossible for an amateur to make a convincing deepfake like the vaping video. Four days after Weintraub’s press conference, generative AI and deepfake expert Henry Ajder expressed concerns that ABC was still running the footage under the caption “DEEP FAKE VIDEO” when it clearly was not. He tweeted that “the vape pen/cloud/hand moving over the girl’s face”, “the awkward facial angles” and other aspects of the video “would likely require a huge amount of work by a deepfake expert, with editing in post”.

One of the most widely reported claims from the press conference was that Spone had taken a photo from Madi’s social media and altered it to make her appear naked. “From day one after that press conference, I demanded that the district attorney’s office send me the death threats and the nudes, and I never got them,” Birch says, drumming his finger on the table. When he was finally allowed to see the evidence against his client, in November 2021 – almost a year after she was charged – he found the image that was the basis for the “nude” claim: a screen-grabbed snap from Snapchat sent by someone called Skylar, featuring Madi in a pink bikini that had been blurred so it blended in with her flesh tone, the sort of thing someone could do using basic photo editing software on their phone with a swipe of a finger, rather than any kind of sophisticated AI digital editing. It looked like a silly joke, rather than a serious attempt to make a nude out of an image of a child. Skylar is a real person – a teenage girl in Madi’s circle of friends, Spone and Birch tell me – but the police had never contacted her to ask about the image.

Birch criticises what he calls “a complete lack of investigation” on the part of the Hilltown Township police. They didn’t ask to see Madi’s phone until a year after her mother told them she had been receiving disturbing messages, by which time Madi had got a new one and disposed of her old one. No death threats against Madi were ever recovered. Madi had also deleted several of her social media accounts, which her mother had claimed provided the source material for the manipulated images and video. The police had taken Madi at her word that images had been taken and altered to make her look as if she was drinking and vaping, but there was no way of finding the source videos and images, or seeing the supposed deepfakes that had been created out of them, apart from the video she had shared with Good Morning America.

Either a woman with no background in digital technology had made a sophisticated deepfake on her iPhone 8, or a 16-year-old had panicked and lied to her mother about vaping, or mother and daughter had decided together to explain away behaviour they knew would get Madi in trouble, with an elaborate story about digital manipulation. The police chose to believe the first explanation.

“They never understood deepfakes, and the implications of giving a press conference scaring people into thinking someone could take an image and turn it into something else so easily,” Birch says. “I don’t think they ever thought this thing would spread like wildfire and become a worldwide phenomenon.”

A small police force made a mistake that became too big to fix. “Once it blew up, the police couldn’t extricate themselves without losing face.”

When The Daily Dot, a tech news website, looked into the deepfake claims in May 2021, and asked Reiss about the methods he had used to establish that the videos had been digitally altered, he admitted he had relied on his “naked eye”, adding, “We hope Mrs Spone during the course of the preliminary hearing or trial will enlighten us as far as what her source and intent was.”

These would be the last public comments Reiss made about the case. On 26 May 2021 he was arrested on suspicion of possessing images of child sexual abuse. Two images had been uploaded to his Gmail account, and detectives had traced them to his IP address. When they raided his home and seized his electronic devices, they found more than 1,700 images and videos depicting children, including 84 of toddlers and infants. Reiss pleaded guilty in March 2022, and was later sentenced to 11 and a half to 23 months in jail. To use Weintraub’s language, if anyone was “preying on juveniles”, it was the police officer who led the investigation.

“I had death threats over every social media platform,” Spone says. “Thousands. You can’t even put a number on it.” She had some fanmail, too: from a convicted murderer in a Wisconsin prison. “A three-page letter, back and front, with a picture of himself,” she adds. “He wanted to get to know me better. That scared me – this person has my address.”

Someone maliciously reported her to child protection officers who turned up at her home to interview her daughters. “My kids had to go through this,” she says.

The man who was renting the house next to hers approached her once, after she had just parked her car. “He looked me dead in the eyes and said, ‘I’m going to kill you. You’re a disgusting paedophile.’ I didn’t know if he had a weapon on him. I thought, this is it, this is the way I’m going out.” Her husband intervened and she called the police, who she says took no further action. “I have to be aware of my surroundings 24/7. It’s taken over my life.”

Spone used to be a crisis worker in a psychiatric unit, but says she has felt unable to return to work after the story broke. Her savings have all been spent on legal fees. “I lost everything. Family, friends, people I’ve known my whole life. Nobody wanted to associate with me.” Her eyes fill with tears. “I did contemplate taking my life. It was too much, between the constant threats and knowing that’s the legacy that I leave behind.”

“You can never scrub off the internet what’s on the internet – that’s the thing,” Birch says.

In March 2022, Spone was found guilty of three counts of misdemeanour harassment for repeatedly sending anonymous messages about the three teenagers. A jury found that she had used secret phone numbers to send incriminating photos and videos. The messages – sent to the Victory Vipers and to the teenagers’ families – accused the cheerleaders of drinking, smoking and posting revealing photos on social media. The anonymous numbers used to send the messages had been sent from an IP address belonging to Spone. She appealed against her conviction, but the superior court of Pennsylvania upheld it on 14 November 2023.

“She was convicted of sending five text messages,” Birch sighs. “There wasn’t one threat in any of them. All the messages said was, ‘You should be aware of what your daughters are posting.’” He claims that a fair trial was impossible, after all the publicity his client had received, saying,“Any jury would be poisoned.”

With unfortunate timing, the trailer for a schlocky TV movie “inspired by” the story, Deadly Cheer Mom, starring Mena Suvari, was released at the same time as the trial. But neither Birch nor Spone has made any official complaint about the jury.

I ask Spone if she sent the messages she has been found guilty over. She denies it, without looking up from her phone. Her phone has been a constant presence since we sat down; she illustrates everything she tells me with evidence stored on it. She has photos of Madi she says were taken the same night as the notorious vaping video: she’s wearing the same clothes, sitting in the same spot. “There are loads of videos. When anybody says, ‘I don’t do that’ – I’ve got proof. Yes, you do! Posted on public accounts, for everyone to see.”

Spone may not manipulate videos and images, but she definitely collects them. Still, she says she never sent them. “The charges were that she directly sent messages to the minors,” Birch adds. “That never happened. That’s the point.”

But did she send messages to the gym and the parents? There is a long pause. “No,” Spone eventually says.

I’m surprised to hear her say this, given Birch told the Washington Post Spone messaged the parents out of concern for what their daughters had put online. When I point this out, there’s another long pause. “If I said that, I said it,” Birch says, with a shrug. “It is what it is.”

Even if Spone is guilty of sending the five messages, she is innocent of the claims that made her notorious. Sending anonymous and unwelcome text messages is not the same as digitally manipulating images of minors.

She was sentenced to three years’ probation and 70 hours of community service; she had to undergo a mental heath assessment and wear an ankle monitor for three months. The conditions of her probation bar her from making public statements about the three girls, so she can’t give me an account of how they all came to fall out so badly. When the news first broke, Kayla’s father, George Ratel, told the Philadelphia Inquirer he thought the problems started when he and his wife told Kayla to stop socialising with Allie “due to concerns over [Allie’s] behaviour”. Spone maintains she was never trying to get anyone kicked off the team – her daughter was the flyer, she says, and already had the most eye-catching position – but this doesn’t explain why Victory Vipers coaches were among those who received anonymised messages sent from her IP address.

Spone is now suing Weintraub, Reiss, Hilltown County police and the Himes for defamation and violating her civil rights. The lawsuit claims that, in “a continuing pattern of intentional defamation to continue to falsely paint [Spone] as a child predator”, the then district attorney’s office and the police “allowed the false accusations” of deepfakes “to continue until the day of the plaintiff’s trial in 2022, knowing that it had no evidence”.

“No amount of money can rectify what was wrong,” Spone tells me, and I believe her: she seems consumed with the details of the case, nearly four years after the events. But Birch says she could receive substantial damages: “The jury could award anything from nothing to $20m if they wanted to.” It’s a tough case, he concedes, a David and Goliath battle. “We’re suing the district attorney, who’s now a judge.”

All four girls had left Victory Vipers by the time the story became public. Madi moved to another cheer squad. Since the story broke, she has achieved the kind of fame competitive cheerleaders dream of. There have been rumours about true crime documentaries and film deals; in February 2022, Madi posted on TikTok about “when [cable channel] Lifetime sent me and my mom a script of their new movie”. She now has almost 100,000 followers and close to a billion views on her main TikTok account alone.

Allie stopped doing cheer altogether in 2020. Spone claims she had wanted her daughter to leave the Victory Vipers long before she did because she felt unhappy about the way it was run, but Allie had begged her to stay because of a tradition where seniors get to press their hands into cement on a wall in the back of the gym, leaving a permanent record. “It was monumental to her. So I went against my intuition and let her stay.” In the end, Allie never got to make her mark.

When I ask Spone how her relationship with Allie is now, there is another long pause. “She knows about this interview. She is not happy. She’s like, ‘Mom, when will this ever be over?’ She just wants to live her life – I can’t blame her, at 19. But I want the truth to be told. I will not rest until the truth is out.”

“Truth?” Birch interjects. “What is truth?”

He is half joking – but only half. It’s the day the US supreme court rules Trump was wrongly removed from the Colorado ballot, and the television set on the wall above where we’ve been sitting for hours has been tuned to CNN. Every so often, Birch has pointed a finger at the screen and said, “Fake news.”

The cheerleader deepfake mom story is the ultimate fake news story. Lies can travel around the world for any number of reasons: crying deepfake is just the newest one. Both Spone and Birch tell me they never believe anything they see and hear any more. “My whole world got turned upside down,” Spone says, “so it makes me question whether anything I’m seeing is true.”

In an age of conspiracy, to assume that anything truly is as it initially appears is perhaps a little quaint or naive. The existence of deepfake technology is useful for people who want to sow doubt and have something to gain by distancing themselves from their true words and actions. Lawyers for the first 6 January Capitol rioter to go on trial claimed in 2022 that video evidence against him had been deepfaked. Last year, Tesla’s defence lawyers tried to claim that statements made by Elon Musk about the safety of the Model S and the Model X in a filmed interview might have been deepfaked. As the technology improves and becomes more widely available, more people will be crying deepfake when they are caught on camera. The cheerleader deepfake mom was a canary in the coalmine, after all.

The damage to Spone comes from going viral as the main character in a sensational but false story. “I want to correct those facts,” she repeats. “I don’t want anyone else to go through what I went through. If it can happen to me – and I’m a nobody – it can happen to you.”

Ministers are considering plans to weaken the UK’s carbon-cutting plans by allowing the unused portion of the last carbon budget to be carried over to the next period.

This would go against the strong recommendation of the government’s statutory climate advisers, the Climate Change Committee.

But it would make the next targets easier to meet. The UK has emitted less carbon dioxide in recent years than was expected, owing to factors including the Covid-19 pandemic and sluggish economic growth. This should be ignored, allowing for the next set of five-yearly emission targets to be more stringent, the better to reach net zero by 2050, the CCC has said.

Ministers have until the end of this month to decide, and have only publicly said that such a decision would be made “in due course”.

Campaigners fear they are likely to take advantage of the loophole.

Dustin Benton, policy director at Green Alliance, warned: “The government will make a grave error of judgment if it weakens plans to cut emissions, ‘carrying forward’ a right to burn carbon that only exists because the UK economy has grown less quickly than we thought when we set the third carbon budget in 2008.”

The UK would still have to meet its target of cutting emissions by 68% by 2030, set at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow.

“Cashing in phantom credits wouldn’t change our international commitments – it just means we’d need to double the rate at which we cut emissions late this decade, making the job much harder,” Benton said. “It would contradict advice from the UK’s climate watchdog, which is never a good look. By shifting the goalposts, it sends yet another signal that this government isn’t serious about supporting the green industries of the future.”

He pointed to Green Alliance research that has shown only half of carbon reductions needed by 2032 are covered by confirmed policy. “We need action to close the gap – not excuses for inaction,” he said.

The UK overachieved on meeting its third five-year carbon budget, which ran from 2018 to 2022, requiring reductions of 38% compared with 1990 levels. The emissions cap for the budget was 2,544 megatons of CO₂ equivalent, but the actual emissions were 391 MtCO₂e fewer, or 15% below the budget.

Under the 2008 Climate Change Act, ministers are allowed to count the surplus of emissions savings, compared with the budgetary requirement, towards the next carbon budget. That would make the next budget easier to meet, but could also slow the UK’s path towards meeting net zero greenhouse gas emissions.

In February, the CCC asked the government not to carry over the surplus savings.

The government has yet to make a decision, according to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.

A spokesperson told the Guardian: “We are the first major economy to halve emissions and have the most ambitious legally binding emissions targets in the world. We have overdelivered on every carbon budget to date, and will continue to meet our emissions targets. A decision on whether the UK’s overachievement on the third carbon budget is carried over will be made in due course.”

Global heating is likely to soar past internationally agreed limits, according to a Guardian survey of hundreds of leading climate experts, bringing catastrophic heatwaves, floods and storms.

Only 6% of the respondents thought the 1.5C limit could be achieved, and this would require extraordinarily fast, radical action to halt and reverse the world’s rising emissions from fossil fuel burning.

However, the experts were clear that giving up was not an option, and that 1.5C was not a cliff-edge leading to a significant change in climate damage. Instead, the climate crisis increases incrementally, meaning every tonne of CO₂ avoided reduces people’s suffering.

“Climate change will not suddenly become dangerous at 1.5C – it already is – and it will not be ‘game over’ if we pass 2C, which we might well do,” said Prof Peter Cox, of the University of Exeter, in the UK.

Dr Henri Waisman, at the IDDRI policy research institute in France, said: “Climate change is not a black or white question and every tenth of a degree matters a lot, especially when you look at the socioeconomic impacts. This means it is still useful to continue the fight.”

The aurora borealis has lit up the night sky with rare sightings across the UK, Europe and the northern hemisphere.

The northern lights were spotted in Whitley Bay on the north-east coast; Essex; Cambridgeshire; and Wokingham in Berkshire. They were also sighted in Suffolk, Kent, Hampshire and Liverpool.

Kathleen Cunnea, in Great Horkesley, Essex, said: “It was absolutely stunning to see.”

Sightings were reported in Ireland where the weather service Met Éireann posting images of the lights over Dublin and above Shannon airport in County Clare.

Met Office spokesman Stephen Dixon said on Friday: “Although the shorter nights will limit the visibility window, there’s a good chance to see the aurora, particularly on Friday night and especially in Scotland, Ireland and parts of northern England and Wales.

“There could even be visibility further south if you have the right equipment.

“Those conditions could continue on Saturday night but we still have to work out some details on where exactly that will be.”

Dixon said the combination of clear skies and enhanced activity from the sun reaching Earth would improve the chances of seeing the display.

“I feel like I am having a religious experience – or an alien abduction. Not sure which,” science teacher David Boyce tweeted from England. Another user shared a photo and said Edinburgh in Scotland felt like “a different planet tonight”.

Aurora displays occur when charged particles collide with gases in the Earth’s atmosphere around the magnetic poles.

In the northern hemisphere, most of this activity takes place within a band known as the aurora oval, covering latitudes between 60 and 75 degrees. When activity is strong, this expands to cover a greater area – which is why displays can be occasionally seen further south.

In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) issued a rare severe geomagnetic storm warning on Friday. It alerted operators of power plants and spacecraft in orbit to take precautions. Noaa said the storm could produce northern lights as far south as Alabama and northern California.

“For most people here on planet Earth, they won’t have to do anything,” said Rob Steenburgh, a scientist with Noaa’s space weather centre. “That’s really the gift from space weather – the aurora.”

The “very rare event” is being caused by a large sunspot cluster that has produced several moderate to strong solar flares since Wednesday morning, Noaa said. That meant the lights could be seen further south than usual.

Steenburgh and his colleagues said the best aurora views might come from phone cameras, which were better at capturing light than the naked eye.

Even when the storm is over, signals between GPS satellites and ground receivers could be scrambled or lost, according to Noaa. But there are so many navigation satellites that any outages should not last long, Steenburgh said.

It is all part of the solar activity that’s ramping up as the sun approaches the peak of its 11-year cycle.

The storm is anticipated to peak as at least seven coronal mass ejections converge and race towards Earth late on Friday or early on Saturday, according to an update from Noaa. But geomagnetic storming was “highly likely” to persist through the weekend, the agency said.

Experts suggest finding a location with minimal light pollution and looking north for the best sightings of the aurora borealis. But many of the enthused viewers who shared sightings on social media did not have to look hard at all.

“Pictures of everybod[y]’s #aurora experience is the best, most wholesome thing I’ve seen on Twitter in a long time,” one user wrote, calling the experience “magic”. “Everybody just coming together to appreciate nature.”

Nasa said the storm posed no serious threat to the seven astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The biggest concern was increased radiation levels, and the crew could move to a better shielded part of the station if necessary, according to Steenburgh.

Increased radiation also could threaten some of Nasa’s science satellites. Extremely sensitive instruments would be turned off if necessary to avoid damage, said Antti Pulkkinen, director of the space agency’s heliophysics science division. Several sun-focused spacecraft were monitoring all the action.

“This is exactly the kinds of things we want to observe,” Pulkkinen said.

Additional reporting by Kari Paul. With PA Media and Associated Press

Kylian Mbappé has confirmed he will leave Paris Saint-Germain at the end of the season. The forward released a video on social media in which he confirmed the news many fans had been expecting, with his contract set to expire this summer.

Addressing the club’s supporters, Mbappé said: “I wanted to announce to you all that it’s my last year at Paris Saint-Germain. I will not extend [my contract] and the adventure will come to an end in a few weeks.” PSG host Toulouse on Sunday and the 25-year-old said the Ligue 1 game will be “my last at the Parc des Princes” after seven years in the French capital.

“There are a lot of emotions,” Mbappé added. “For many years I have had the great honour to be a member of the biggest French club.” Mbappé thanked his five managers at PSG – Unai Emery, Thomas Tuchel, Mauricio Pochettino, Christophe Galtier and Luis Enrique – as well as all of his teammates and backroom staff.

“It’s difficult to announce this, to leave my country, Ligue 1, a championship I have always known,” Mbappé continued, “but I think I needed this, a new challenge after seven years.” He reserved a special thank you to PSG fans, admitting: “I haven’t always lived up to the love you all gave me.”

Mbappé arrived at PSG on loan from Monaco in 2017, before signing on permanently for a fee of €155m (£143m) a year later. He has won six league titles in Paris but the time spent in the city of his birth has often been turbulent. The player has repeatedly been linked to Real Madrid, but signed a two-year contract extension in 2022.

“PSG is a club that never leaves anyone indifferent. You can love it or hate it … I made the choice of loving it for seven years, through ups and downs,” Mbappé added. “I do not regret, at any moment, signing for this prestigious club … I tried to give the best version of myself, with my qualities and my faults.”

Mbappé has scored 255 goals in 306 matches for PSG, and contributed 108 assists. This season, he tops the Ligue 1 scoring chart with 26 goals, but speculation about his future has only intensified. In June of last year, the World Cup winner informed PSG he would not be taking up the option of a 12-month contract extension.

In February, Mbappé confirmed with the club hierarchy that he would leave at the end of this season, and will be available on a free transfer. He turned down a world-record £259m offer from Saudi side Al-Hilal last summer. Real Madrid remain Mbappé’s expected destination, but there has been no official update on talks.

PSG missed the chance to take on the Spanish giants in the Champions League final after losing to Borussia Dortmund in their semi-final. Mbappé has been unable to deliver Europe’s biggest prize to Paris for the first time, with the 2020 final defeat to Bayern Munich the closest they came in his time at the club.

The former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s troubles deepened on Friday when he was suspended by WABC radio, for trying to use his show to discuss the lie that the 2020 presidential election was lost by Donald Trump because of electoral fraud.

John Catsimatidis, a New York billionaire, Republican donor and owner of WABC, told the New York Times: “We’re not going to talk about fallacies of the November 2020 election. We warned him once. We warned him twice. And I get a text from him last night, and I get a text from him this morning that he refuses not to talk about it.

“So he left me no option. I suspended him.”

Giuliani said he had been fired.

In a lengthy statement, the former mayor said: “I’m learning from a leak to the New York Times that I’m being fired by John Catsimatidis and WABC because I refused to comply with their overly broad directive stating, word-for-word, that I’m ‘prohibited from engaging in conversations relating to the 2020 presidential election’.”

A copy of a letter from Catsimatidis to Giuliani, dated 9 May and obtained by the Guardian, said Giuliani was “prohibited from engaging in conversations relating to the 2020 presidential election on your programs broadcast on WABC … and otherwise in your capacity as an agent of the station.

“These specific topics include, but are not limited to, the legitimacy of the election results, allegations of fraud effectuated by election workers, and your personal lawsuits relating to those allegations.”

Claiming “a clear violation of free speech”, Giuliani said he would address the situation further on social media on Friday night.

But he went on to say the move by WABC came “at a very suspicious time, just months before the 2024 election, and just as John and WABC continue to be pressured by Dominion Voting Systems and the Biden regime’s lawyers”.

Dominion Voting Systems, a manufacturer of elections machines, reached a $787.5m settlement with Fox News over its broadcast of election fraud lies. It also sued Giuliani and Sidney Powell, another lawyer who worked on Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Now 79, Giuliani was a hard-charging New York prosecutor before becoming mayor and serving from 1993 to 2001, emerging as a national figure after leading the city through the 9/11 terror attacks. He ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008.

Long close to Trump, who reportedly helped him through a personal crisis after the failed presidential run, Giuliani emerged as a steadfast supporter when Trump won the White House in 2016.

Giuliani did not win the prize of being made secretary of state, but he worked on Trump’s behalf in matters including the attempt to extract political dirt from Ukraine, which prompted Trump’s first impeachment.

In 2020, Giuliani worked to try to overturn Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump at the polls, only to suffer a series of courtroom defeats and mounting public embarrassments.

Giuliani denies wrongdoing but his efforts on Trump’s behalf have produced legal disbarment proceedings; criminal charges in two swing states, Georgia and Arizona; and defeat in a defamation suit that left him owing $148m to two Georgia poll workers he claimed had been involved in electoral fraud.

Giuliani filed for bankruptcy in New York last December. Filings showed debts up to $500m.

Earlier this week, a legal filing on Giuliani’s behalf said no accountants “seem[ed] interested” in working with him to meet requirements in the bankruptcy case.

His spokesperson, Ted Goodman, said then: “While it is true that the permanent Washington political class is leveraging all of its power and influence to bully and scare people from defending Americans who are willing to stand up and push back against the accepted narrative, Mayor Giuliani will be appropriately represented when it comes to his accounting and finances.”

The filing on Tuesday said the former mayor, who made millions in consulting work after leaving office in 2001, “currently received social security benefits and broadcasts a radio show and podcast”.

“These are his sole sources of income,” it said.

Catsimatidis told the Times that at the close of his WABC show on Thursday, Giuliani tried to speak about the 2020 election but was cut off by station employees.

“Look, I like the guy as a person, but you can’t do that,” Catsimatidis told the paper. “You can’t cross the line. My view is that nobody really knows [about the 2020 result] but we had made a company policy. It’s over, life goes on.”

In his statement, Giuliani accused Catsimatidis of “telling reporters I was informed ahead of time of these restrictions, which is demonstrably untrue.

“How can you possibly believe that when I’ve been regularly commenting on the 2020 election for three and a half years, and I’ve talked about the case in Georgia incessantly ever since the verdict in December. Other WABC hosts and newscasters questioned me on these topics.

“Obviously I was never informed on such a policy, and even if there was one, it was violated so often that it couldn’t be taken seriously.”

In his letter to Giuliani, Catsimatidis said: “WABC stands for honesty and integrity. You have already signed documents as part of your court proceedings, conceding that the statements you made regarding the election in Georgia were defamatory per se.

“You are now once again stating that there was fraud. You may not do so on our airwaves. This is a clear condition of your continued relationship with WABC. We do not condone these actions, and do not want to be subject to the ramifications of your conduct under any circumstances.”

Catsimatidis concluded: “I have asked you to join me for lunch or dinner next week and you have refused.”

The US says it is “reasonable to assess” that the weapons it has provided to Israel have been used in ways that are “inconsistent” with international human rights law, but that there is not enough concrete evidence to link specific US-supplied weapons to violations or warrant cutting the supply of arms.

In a highly anticipated report to Congress, the state department said that the assurances given by Israel and a handful of other countries under scrutiny that they had been using US-supplied weapons in accordance with international humanitarian law (IHL) were “credible and reliable”.

In Israel’s case, the report expresses deep misgivings about Israeli compliance but says the US does not have sufficient evidence about individual cases to recommend that US arms supplies be suspended.

The report is mandated by a national security memorandum (NSM-20) signed by Joe Biden in February to assess whether recipients of US arms are complying with human rights law.

The state department report found that: “Given Israel’s significant reliance on US-made defence articles, it is reasonable to assess that defence articles covered under NSM-20 have been used by Israeli security forces since October 7 in instances inconsistent with its IHL obligations or with established best practices for mitigating civilian harm.”

A senior administration official said that while that assessment reflected a general view of Israel’s conduct in its war in Gaza, the state department has yet to find definitively that a US weapon was used in a specific incident, in which the intent or the level of negligence constituted a war crime.

Multiple incident reviews have been under way in the state department for months, but if there have been any findings, the secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has yet to make them public.

The NSM-20 report said: “Although we have gained some insight into Israel’s procedures and rules, we do not have complete information to verify whether US defense articles covered under NSM-20 were specifically used in actions that have been alleged as violations of IHL or international human rights law during the period of the report.”

Similarly, the US found shortcomings in Israel’s provision of humanitarian assistance in Gaza.

“During the period since October 7, and particularly in the initial months, Israel did not fully cooperate with United States government efforts and United States government-supported international efforts to maximize humanitarian assistance flow to and distribution within Gaza,” it said.

However, the report also claimed that Israel had “significantly increased humanitarian access”. The senior administration official argued that the period under consideration ran up to the end of April, so did not cover the subsequent closure of entry points into Gaza as a result of the Israel offensive on Rafah.

More details soon …