Scarlett Johansson facing ‘useless’ fight to stop ‘deepfake’ porn

Scarlett Johansson has revealed she has fallen victim to a growing number of “deepfake” porn videos — but there’s a reason why the actor isn’t fighting back.

Scarlett Johansson has fallen victim to a wave of fake porn videos featuring her image but believes fighting their distribution online is a “lost cause”.

The Avengers star is just one of several famous women whose face has been digitally manipulated onto someone else’s body in a practice known as “deepfake” porn, The Washington Post reports.

According to the newspaper, one fake movie featuring Johansson ’s face — described as a “leaked” film — features on a major porn site and has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.

Scarlett Johansson. Picture: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images

The 34-year-old actor told The Post: “Trying to protect yourself from the internet and its depravity is basically a lost cause, for the most part.

“Clearly this doesn’t affect me as much because people assume it’s not actually me in a porno, however demeaning it is,” Johansson said.

“I think it’s a useless pursuit, legally, mostly because the internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.”

Johansson explained that she had struggled to get any meaningful action on the fake videos because of the different laws governing their distribution in each country.

“Also, every country has their own legalese regarding the right to your own image, so while you may be able to take down sites in the US that are using your face, the same rules might not apply in Germany,” she said.

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Johansson’s private photos were leaked by a hacker in 2011. Picture: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images/AFP

“Even if you copyright pictures with your image that belong to you, the same copyright laws don’t apply overseas. I have sadly been down this road many, many times.”

In 2011, Johansson’s phone was hacked and private nude photos of the star were leaked onto the internet.

“It was so devastating,” she told the Howard Stern Show in 2017.

“It was absolutely shocking and devastating at the time … It was such an invasion. I just felt like as a woman, I felt like it’s such a degrading and awful thing to have to go through that.”

In 2012 the man behind the hacking, Christopher Chaney, pleaded guilty to the cyber attack and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, according to The Hollywood Reporter.