French TV show pulled for mocking woman who fell in love with ‘AI Brad Pitt’
The woman described how she had been conned out of more than €800,000
The woman, who says she has been “ruined”, was conned by scammers pretending to be US actor Brad Pitt
Jay Hirano/Shutterstock
A French TV show has been pulled after one of its guests was ridiculed online for describing how she had been conned out of hundreds of thousands of euros by a scammer posing as US actor Brad Pitt.
The broadcast of the TV show Sept à huit, which first showed on January 12, has been taken down from all online platforms and will not be repeated on television, the network TF1 confirmed on January 14.
‘Deepfake’ AI scam
It comes after a guest on the show described how she had lost €830,000, and believed she was falling in love with the US actor Brad Pitt, when she was in fact communicating with a scammer using an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to fool her.
The woman - named ‘Anne’, an interior decorator aged 53, who had been previously married to a millionaire entrepreneur - was conned by the scammers, who sent her a series of selfies and identity documents to ‘prove’ that they were Brad Pitt.
They also sent videos that appeared to show Brad Pitt communicating with the woman, but were in fact ‘deepfakes’. These are videos that superimpose a different face onto someone else’s body, using AI.
The scammers convinced Anne that this ‘Brad Pitt’ needed money to help pay for an operation for kidney cancer. In doing so, they persuaded her to send hundreds of thousands of euros.
The woman was first scammed by an Instagram message, in which Jane Etta Pitt, Brad Pitt’s mother, apparently said: “I’d love a woman like you for my son.” At first, Anne did not believe the message.
But after weeks and months of further messages, including poems and love letters apparently from Brad Pitt himself, the woman was slowly convinced and persuaded to transfer the money to an account in Turkey, in a spirit of compassion.
Since the woman found out she had been scammed, she has said she is “ruined” and is currently in a hospital that specialises in treating severe depression.
‘Wave of harassment’
Anne was later heavily mocked and harassed online after the broadcast of her story, which was watched live by 2.95 million people. This harassment led to TF1’s decision not to repeat the programme or allow it to remain viewable on any online platforms.
“The report broadcast this Sunday (January 12) has sparked a wave of harassment against a witness. To protect the victims, we have decided to remove it from our platforms,” said TF1 on its X (Twitter) account, widely relayed by the Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“Anne was being vilified on social networks, so we thought it best to delete the replay,” the network added, to Le Parisien.
Many X accounts posted fake, mocking photos - many of them having been made by AI - showing Brad Pitt lying in a hospital bed, and later holding up written messages asking for the TV show to be pulled.
Even apparently ‘respectable’ X accounts have mocked the woman and/or the situation. For example, an account belonging to the Toulouse football club (Haute-Garonne) posted a message saying: “Hello Anne, Brad told us he would be at the Stadium on Wednesday…And you?”
The account later deleted the message and offered “sincere apologies” for the post, after receiving pushback from critics.
Online streaming platform Netflix also appeared to reference the issue, with a post listing four Brad Pitt films available on its platform, accompanied with the message “I promise [it’s him]”.
Another X post, from the Gendarmerie of Charente-Maritime, read: “This woman who fell in love with a fake Brad Pitt certainly wouldn't have been fooled if she had been following our account.”
