Hamas said in a statement on Saturday that the British-Israeli hostage Nadav Popplewell had died of wounds that he sustained in an Israeli airstrike more than a month ago.

Popplewell, 51, was a captive taken from Nirim kibbutz and a video previously released by Hamas’s armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades, showed him displaying visible signs of physical abuse.

Popplewell and his mother, Channah Peri, 79, were abducted on 7 October from their residence in Nirim kibbutz, while his older brother, Roi, perished in the assault.

Peri was freed on 24 November.

In a statement released by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum headquarters, the family of Popplewell requested “that the recently released Hamas video not be published or used”.

The forum stated: “Every sign of life received from the hostages held by Hamas is another cry of distress to the Israeli government and its leaders. We don’t have a moment to spare! You must strive to implement a deal that will bring them all back today – the living to rehabilitation and the murdered to burial.”

Described by the campaign group as “generous and compassionate”, Popplewell was also known for his keen interest in science fiction literature.

A spokesperson for the Foreign Office told PA media that they are “urgently seeking more information following the release of this video. Our thoughts are with his family at this extremely distressing time.”

“The UK government has been working with partners across the region to secure the release of hostages, including British nationals. We will continue to do all we can to secure the release of hostages.”

The unprecedented abduction of approximately 250 individuals into the Gaza Strip occurred on 7 October during the assault by Hamas militants on southern Israel. According to Israeli authorities, 128 individuals are reported to remain in captivity within the Palestinian territory, with 36 confirmed as dead.

The video was released on a day when a series of demonstrations are expected to take place across the country, with families of hostages demanding the release of their loved ones held by Hamas in Gaza and early elections.

Israeli officials told the Ynet news site that hostage and ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas had not completely broken down. Indirect talks would resume “if there are answers from Hamas that we can work with”, the officials told the site.

Hamas said on Friday that efforts to find a deal on a truce were back at square one after Israel rejected a plan from international mediators, while the White House expressed its commitment to try keeping the sides engaged “if only virtually”.

Katie Britt, the Republican US senator from Alabama best known for delivering a widely ridiculed State of the Union speech in March, marked the run-up to Mother’s Day on Sunday by introducing a bill to create a federal database to collect data on pregnant people.

The More Opportunities for Moms to Succeed (Moms) act proposes to establish an online government database called “pregnancy.gov” listing resources related to pregnancy, including information about adoption agencies and pregnancy care providers, except for those that provide abortion-related services.

The bill specifically forbids any entity that “performs, induces, refers for, or counsels in favor of abortions” from being listed in the database, which would in effect eliminate swaths of OB-GYN services and sexual health clinics across the country.

The website would direct users to enter their personal data and contact information, and although Britt’s communications director said the site would not collect data on pregnant people, page three of the bill states that users can “take an assessment through the website and provide consent to use the user’s contact information” which government officials may use “to conduct outreach via phone or email to follow up with users on additional resources that would be helpful for the users to review”.

Britt introduced the legislation on Thursday alongside two co-sponsors: fellow Republican senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Kevin Cramer of North Dakota.

In a statement, Britt said the bill was proof that “you can absolutely be pro-life, pro-woman, and pro-family at the same time”, adding that the legislation “advances a comprehensive culture of life” for mothers and children to “live their American Dreams”.

Critics have noted that the database of “pregnancy support centers” would provide misleading information in an effort to dissuade women from seeking abortions. Axios noted that the bill would also provide grants to anti-abortion non-profit organizations.

The state of Alabama, which Britt represents, already has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country. After the US supreme court eliminated federal abortion rights by overturning Roe v Wade in 2022, the state banned abortion except in cases where there is a serious health risk to the mother.

Britt’s party is in the minority in the US Senate and has only a slim majority in the House. Her bill would need to be approved in both chambers and then be signed by Democratic president Joe Biden to become law, giving her proposal virtually no chance of making meaningful progress in the legislative process as-is.

The speech Britt gave to rebut Biden’s State of the Union was panned by both parties after she invoked a story about child rape that she implied had resulted from the president’s handling of immigration at the US’s southern border. The abuse actually occurred years earlier in Mexico while a Republican was president, George W Bush.

Britt’s delivery – which oscillated between smiling and sounding as if she were on the verge of tears – was also a target of ridicule, though she defended her performance.

Switzerland has won the 68th Eurovision song contest, bringing to an end a fraught and at times tumultuous competition overshadowed by a row over Israel’s inclusion and the disqualification of the Dutch contestant just hours before the start of the grand final.

Swiss singer Nemo, who defines as non-binary, had entered the night as the bookmakers’ third favourite, but saw off frontrunners Croatia and Israel with an enthusiastic performance of their song The Code.

The operatic, drum’n’bass-propelled offering was the runaway winner in the jury vote, which makes up half of the overall score.

The musical performances risked becoming a footnote at the world’s largest live music event, after Dutch contestant Joost Klein was disqualified from the grand final over what the organisers described as an “incident” involving a female member of the production crew.

The Dutch broadcaster who sent Klein to the competition said it was “shocked” by the “disproportionate” decision, and declined to hand out the points of its jury at the end of the show.

The suspension heightened an already politically charged atmosphere, since Klein had appeared to vent his disagreement with Israel’s presence at a press conference on Thursday, vocally backing a journalist who had asked Israel’s contestant, Eden Golan, if she thought her presence might endanger the other acts and the attending fans.

Israel had been cleared to compete by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) in March, after changing some of the lyrics to Golan’s power ballad Hurricane, a song about the traumatic experience of Hamas’s massacre on 7 October, originally entitled October Rain.

But the question of whether Israel should be allowed to compete or not while engaged in a military conflict in Gaza continued to dominate the run-up to the five-day kitsch extravaganza in the Swedish city of Malmö, with pro-Palestine activists unsuccessfully urging participating artists to join their boycott.

At a large demonstration in Malmö city centre on Saturday, several thousand protesters with Palestinian flags proclaimed their view that Israel should not have been allowed to compete in the first place, citing Russia’s exclusion since 2022 as a precedent.

Some protesters later moved on to the concert venue south of the city centre, shouting “Shame on you” at fans entering the arena. About 30 people were detained by police.

Inside the arena, the boos were mostly drowned out by cheers as Golan took to the stage.

Eurovision’s organisers dismissed rumours that the incident relating to Klein’s suspension had involved any other performers or delegation members, or even an altercation with the Israeli delegation.

“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,” they said, reiterating “a zero-tolerance policy towards inappropriate behaviour at our event”.

In a statement, the Dutch broadcaster Avrotros said it was “shocked” by the “disproportionate” decision, saying the singer and rapper had merely made a “threatening move” towards a camerawoman but not touched her.

“Against the clearly made agreement, Joost was filmed when he had just gotten off stage and had to rush to the green room. At that moment, Joost repeatedly indicated that he did not want to be filmed. This wasn’t respected.”

According to the broadcaster, it offered “several solutions” to the EBU, which decided to disqualify Klein anyway. Martin Österdahl, Eurovision’s executive director, drew loud booing from the audience whenever he appeared on the screen during the show.

While rumours about the reasons behind Klein’s suspension ricocheted around the dressing rooms at Malmö Arena, the mood turned febrile. Ireland’s entry, a non-binary singer called Bambie Thug, failed to show up at the final dress rehearsal, fuelling rumours of their pulling out of the event.

In a statement, they later said their absence was over a separate disagreement with EBU, relating to the conduct of Israel’s public broadcaster, Kan, during the first semi-final.

The French performer, Slimane, interrupted the a cappella section of his song Mon Amour during the dress rehearsal to give a speech about “love and peace”.

In Norway, the country’s ex-contestant Alessandra Mele withdrew from her role as the spokesperson for delivering the jury points, over what she called the “genocide” in the Middle East.

At an event marred by political divisions, the Swiss entry offered a comforting rallying point. Singer Nemo Mettler follows in the footsteps of previous queer, transgender or drag contestants who were launched into the world at Eurovision, from Israel’s Dana International in 1998 to Austria’s Conchita Wurst in 2014.

Their song The Code was high-drama, but the stage show was effective for its simplicity, with the artist acrobatically balancing on a spinning platform.

It was one of several entries that defied Eurovision’s reputation as a showcase for the blandest of eurodance mush.

Croatia’s Baby Lasagna, real name Marko Purišić, had not just been the bookkeepers’ but a fan favourite with Rim Tim Tagi Dim, a song that sounded as if Jon Bon Jovi had secured Rammstein as a backing band; Italy’s Angelina Mango reminded the continent of her country’s proud song tradition with a forceful steelpan number on the unlikely theme of boredom.

Britain’s entry, Olly Alexander, came 18th with his song Dizzy, having received zero points in the audience vote.

Klein, a 26-year-old former YouTuber from Friesland, had long been tipped to make an impression at the song contest – just not like this. With lyrics in Dutch, German, Italian and English, and a video that closes on an image of a “European house” in flames, his song Europapa would have also been the first Eurovision song about the European Union since Toto Cotugno’s Insieme 92, which references the Maastricht treaty that was signed that year.

At the pro-Palestine rally in the city centre on Saturday afternoon, one participant waved a “Twelve points go to Joost Klein” placard. Politics and pop had became intertwined in ways that were difficult to untangle.

The odds that Mike and I would ever meet were low. We both grew up in Perth – the only problem being he was in Perth, Scotland, and I was in Perth, Western Australia. We then managed to find ourselves living in the same place (Melbourne) but on different sides of the city an hour’s drive apart.

It was 2014, we’d both been divorced for about five years and neither of us was having much luck with internet dating. It didn’t help that my online profile was set to only show matches who lived within a 5km radius of my house. So while I really wanted to find love, I apparently wasn’t willing to look further than walking distance from my front door. The algorithm very sensibly ignored me and matched me with Mike. I was intrigued by his profile; his heading was: “Looking for a woman who can make me laugh.” In my experience, men usually want to be the funny ones, the centre of attention. I thought, that’s me, I can do that.

Mike was late for our first date, so I thought I’d been stood up (it turns out he just didn’t know how to find his way to Port Melbourne), but he eventually ran into the pub with a big smile and tripped over some low furniture. He was immediately likable, talking up a storm, very funny and witty, and at one stage squeezed my knee, not in a sleazy way but just in a moment of sheer exuberance. It turned out we both loved the same dark comedy show, The League of Gentlemen, and we could practically recite it scene by scene. I’d never even met anyone else who had seen it. When I got home that night, I told my teenage daughter, and she said: “Mum, you have to marry this man.” I thought, well, he’s funny and I made him laugh, let’s see where this goes.

On our second date, it was my turn to be late. I’d completely misjudged how long a tram takes to go down Collins Street on a Saturday night. It was a dark, bitterly cold June night with an icy wind and I was dressed to impress, not for the weather. A frantically on-time person, as the tram moved at a glacial pace I ground my teeth until they were ready to shear off like icebergs. The time for us to eat before the movie was tight and here I was running over half an hour late. Would he even wait?

It was dawning on me that this was the first time I’d been so anxious to impress a man in a very long time. I had to dash up a slippery crowded laneway in heels to the restaurant. I’d assumed he’d just be sitting inside in the warmth, like any sensible person would, but there he was, standing in the dark waiting for me, dressed in a silvery suit with a halo of orange lights behind him. I wish I’d photographed him; the whole scene looked like something out of a movie. I knew with absolute certainty at that moment that we would be together, that this wasn’t just dating any more – here was the next stage of my life.

Three years later, in 2017, Mike surprised me with a romantic proposal at Glenfinnan in Scotland. True to form with us, even that had its funny side. There he was handing me an emerald ring on the shores of Loch Shiel, while over his shoulder I could see a poor hapless man in a yellow waterproof jacket walking towards us, only for it to dawn on him what was going on, get a panicked look on his face and make a sharp 90-degree turn to pretend he was interested in admiring the low scrubby bushes rather than the magnificent sweeping view of the water he’d actually come to see.

When I think back to that second date, everything about Mike was there from the beginning – he was so funny but also down to earth, solid, reliable and caring. I knew the moment I saw him in the laneway that this was a man who would leave the comfort of a warm room to come outside to wait for me in the dark and the cold, just so I knew where to find him.

An Illinois man is facing accusations of a hate crime after he allegedly shot his next-door neighbor while hurling racist slurs at her sons, who are Black.

Prosecutors charged John Shadbar, 70, with nine charges, including attempted first-degree murder, aggravated battery, unlawful use of a weapon and a hate crime. Shadbar is being held in jail without bond after authorities said he had harassed his neighbor and her sons for years.

Investigators allege that Shadbar shot his neighbor, Melissa Robertson, 45, in the back yard of her home in Lockport Township, Illinois, a suburb outside Chicago. Robertson was taken to the hospital in critical condition, and was still recovering from her injuries.

Robertson’s family said she had reported to the Will county sheriff’s office multiple times that Shadbar had been harassing her family, shooting blanks and fireworks from his back yard and using racist slurs. Robertson, who is white, has two sons who are Black.

On 7 May, Robertson was outside with a friend and two children, including Robertson’s eight-year-old son, when Shadbar started revving his motorcycle engine, according to court documents seen by ABC News. Robertson blew an air horn in his direction, prompting him to yell “There’s gonna be dead [N-word] today” and throw a bottle over the fence.

The friend took the two children inside while Robertson walked toward Shadbar, thinking he was shooting blanks from a gun. Shadbar ultimately shot Robertson twice, in her chest and stomach, police said.

After the shooting, Shadbar barricaded himself inside his home, coming out after speaking with a crisis negotiator with the sheriff’s office.

“While speaking to the crisis negotiator, Shadbar made several incriminating statements,” the sheriff’s office said in a Facebook post about the incident.

With a search warrant, officers found five guns in Shadbar’s home, including some that were hidden in the walls. Shadbar’s gun-ownership rights had been revoked after he was arrested for a felony in 1979.

On Facebook, the sheriff’s office said that over the last year, it had “responded to a few calls to the victim’s home that were minor, non-related issues and were resolved on scene”. One call had reported that Shadbar was acting agitated and yelling at Robertson and her children. A second call was about Shadbar shooting fireworks and possibly a gun over Robertson’s fence.

“The victim states that she had ongoing issues with Shadbar. Deputies spoke with Shadbar, conducted an initial investigation, and due to lack of evidence no arrest was made at the time,” the sheriff’s office wrote.

Mikeal Johnson, Robertson’s stepson, said that his mother had surmised such an attack would eventually occur.

“She’s been telling me something like this was bound to happen because the cops won’t do anything – they can’t do anything,” Johnson told CBS News.

Jeanne Beyer, Robertson’s aunt, told the news outlet that “nothing was ever done”, noting that Shadbar didn’t have a firearm owners identification (FOID) card.

“I don’t care if he was shooting blanks – if he’s in his front yard waving a gun and doesn’t have a FOID card,” Beyer said. “I mean, I have a FOID card. I can’t go stand in my front yard and wave my gun around without some consequences.”

Talking to NBC News, Johnson recalled Shadbar calling “me the N-word straight to my face” and coming out of his house with a gun.

“It’s disheartening that it takes something like this to finally be heard,” Johnson said. “I don’t want anyone else of color, people of color, feeling like this, like they don’t deserve to be where they are because they’re Black and in the wrong neighborhood, so to be speak. I wish we could all be treated equally.”

For good and bad reasons, on and off the red carpet, the spotlight is trained on women in the run-up to the Cannes film festival this week. As the cream of female film talent, including Hollywood’s Meryl Streep and Britain’s Andrea Arnold, prepare to receive significant career awards, a dark cloud is threatening. It is expected that new allegations of the abuse of women in the European entertainment industry will be made public, which may overshadow the sparkle of a feminist Croisette.

Streep’s screen achievements will be celebrated with an honorary Palme d’Or at the opening ceremony, while a day later Arnold, the acclaimed British film director, will receive the prestigious Carosse d’Or from the French director’s guild. And on Sunday another influential British film personality will be saluted when diversity champion Dame Donna Langley, the chairman and chief content officer at NBCUniversal, is to be honoured with the Women in Motion Award at a lavish dinner. All this comes in a year that also sees the American director Greta Gerwig, best known for last summer’s Barbie, presiding over a jury that features the campaigning stars Eva Green and Lily Gladstone. But the story of the 77th festival will not be all positive for women.

In the run-up to the annual gathering on the Côte d’Azur, rumours have been widespread in France of the existence of a secret list of 10 men in the industry, including leading actors and directors, who have been abusive to women. The names, described as “explosive”, are believed to have been sent anonymously to the National Centre for Cinema in Paris, along with other leading film finance companies in France.

According to reports in Le Figaro and the satirical magazine, Le Canard enchaîné, festival organisers have set up a crisis management team to respond to the accusations. Films might have to be dropped from the screening timetable if they involve implicated names.

The impending revelations may prove an apt curtain-raiser for the Wednesday premiere of a short French film, Moi Aussi, about abuse in the industry. The film, which was added to the festival’s Un Certain Regard programme at the last minute, is predicted to prove just as incendiary as the list, owing to its emotive content.

Made by actor Judith Godrèche, dubbed the “ambassador of #MeToo” in France, it draws on the words of many female contributors and takes the form of a choral piece, uniting different personal accounts. “Suddenly, before me was a crowd of victims, a reality that also represented France, so many stories from all social backgrounds and generations,” Godrèche has explained. “Then the question was, what I was going to do with them? What do you do when you’re overwhelmed by what you hear, by the sheer volume of testimonies?”

The 52-year-old actor first shook up French cinema in February when she accused the directors Jacques Doillon and Benoît Jacquot of having raped her in the 1980s when she was a teenager. Jacquot, 77, Godrèche said, had a relationship with her when she was under the age of consent. He denies committing any offences and has said that he was “under her spell”. She claims Doillon, 80, forced her to take part in a gratuitous sex scene on his 1989 film La Fille de 15 ans (The 15-year-old Girl). He says she agreed to take part in the scene, in which he also acted, and he denies rape or assault. Godrèche followed up her accusations a month later with a speech at France’s high-profile Cesar awards in which she claimed the film industry had been a cover for exploiting underaged actors.

The effect of new abuse allegations and all the honours being heaped on influential women will certainly mean the opening of the 2024 festival is in strong contrast to last year. Last May, demonstrators on the Croisette opposed Johnny Depp’s appearance in the opening film, Jeanne du Barry. They were angry about recent abuse allegations against him involving his ex-wife Amber Heard that led to his defeat in a British libel trial, although a month later he won a similar libel trial in an American court.

A more progressive tone should be set by Streep’s opening honour, made in recognition of “countless masterpieces” over 50 years of cinema. “To stand in the shadow of those who have previously been honoured is humbling and thrilling in equal part,” said Streep on hearing of the award.

London-born Langley, a “trailblazing” studio chief, is also being rewarded next weekend for fostering “a more inclusive industry” over two decades with films that “provide a platform for women”. Away from film sets, Langley has also campaigned as a board member of Vital Voices and is a founder of the Hollywood Reporter’s Women in Film mentorship programme. Previous winners of the Women In Motion award include Jane Fonda, Salma Hayek, Viola Davis and last year Michelle Yeoh.

Arnold, whose new film, Bird, is showing in the main competition this year, will receive her award after a Wednesday screening of her 2006 film Red Road. Set in Glasgow, it tells of a false accusation of rape made vengefully by a female CCTV operator.

Jury-member Green is one of the more prominent actors to have accused Harvey Weinstein of making inappropriate advances. In 2017 the actor said she had to push away the disgraced producer during a business meeting in Paris. “I got away without it going further, but the experience left me shocked and disgusted,” she said.

The reaction to the #MeToo movement in France has been slower and more nuanced than in America. The legendary actor Catherine Deneuve was among those to initially play down the importance of prosecuting the bad behaviour of men, defending their so-called “right to pester”. But last week French legislators agreed to a government inquiry into sexual and gender-based violence across the country’s performing arts and fashion sectors. And in the autumn, French actor Gérard Depardieu, stands trial on charges of sexually assaulting two women on the set of The Green Shutters. He faces rape charges in another case and is under investigation over allegations of assault. He denies all charges.

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.”