{"id":84727,"date":"2026-09-01T05:53:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T05:53:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/84727\/"},"modified":"2026-09-01T05:53:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T05:53:09","slug":"antonio-rotondo-found-guilty-of-creating-sexualised-deepfake-images-of-brisbane-high-school-students","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/84727\/","title":{"rendered":"Antonio Rotondo found guilty of creating sexualised deepfake images of Brisbane high school students"},"content":{"rendered":"

A man who created and distributed sexualised deepfake images of current and former Brisbane high school students and staff has been found guilty of more than a dozen charges.<\/p>\n

Last week Antonio Rotondo pleaded not guilty to 17 offences at the beginning of his Brisbane District Court trial.<\/a><\/p>\n

This included 11 counts of stalking, five counts of distributing intimate images and one count of distributing child exploitation material.<\/p>\n

After deliberating for several hours, a jury returned a guilty verdict on all charges.<\/p>\n

\"a<\/p>\n

Antonio Rotondo is charged with 11 counts of stalking and five counts of distributing intimate images. (ABC News)<\/p>\n

During his trial, the court heard details about the 56-year-old’s offending, which took place in September 2023 whilst he was living in the Philippines.<\/p>\n

Using a website, he digitally altered publicly available photographs of several women and girls to remove their clothing or replace it with lingerie.<\/p>\n

Rotondo then sent the images, including one of a 13-year-old girl, via email to her school and various other recipients.<\/p>\n

He also emailed similar altered photographs of women who had participated in a Brisbane Fashion Week event, to another woman involved in the same event.<\/p>\n

More than a dozen images included in the emails were also uploaded to a website.<\/p>\n

Rotondo was arrested a month later after he travelled to the Gold Coast.<\/p>\n

Rotondo told police it was ‘funny’<\/p>\n

In his police interview, which was played to the jury, he admitted to sending the emails and uploading the images online.<\/p>\n

When asked why he did it, he told officers because it was “funny” and described it as a “hobby”.<\/p>\n

He also claimed you “cannot stop deepfakes” and given the software to create them exists, they must be “acceptable to a percentage of community”.<\/p>\n

In order to find him guilty of some of the charges, the jury needed to determine the offending caused distress to the complainants.<\/p>\n

Man pleads not guilty to making deepfake images<\/a><\/p>\n

A jury has heard a man accused of making sexualised deepfake images of former Brisbane high school students and staff told police he did it because it was “funny”.<\/p>\n

Rotondo, who represented himself during the trial, told jurors during his closing address there was reasonable doubt some had suffered serious emotional harm as they had never viewed them.<\/p>\n

“They didn’t see that image so it’s not possible for them to have a psychological problem with that image,” he said.<\/p>\n

Rotondo also said there was a lack of evidence he controlled the website.<\/p>\n

The jury heard numerous complainants describe the impact of the images in police interviews, with one woman saying she was “very distressed”.<\/p>\n

Another woman told police she felt “extremely violated” and her “trust is gone” in general society.<\/p>\n

“I’ve since significantly self-censored how I show up, how I present publicly,” she said.<\/p>\n

Rotondo was remanded in custody ahead of his sentencing hearing tomorrow.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man who created and distributed sexualised deepfake images of current and former Brisbane high school students and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":84728,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1131,123991,99,823,1820,123992,4379,10235,31751,1047,17763,25431,211,212,15781,1714,9757,5473],"class_list":["post-84727","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brisbane","tag-ai","tag-antonio-rotondo","tag-brisbane","tag-child-exploitation","tag-deepfake","tag-deepfakes","tag-high-school","tag-internet","tag-online","tag-police","tag-pornography","tag-private-school","tag-qld","tag-queensland","tag-sex","tag-stalking","tag-students","tag-teachers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84727","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84727"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84727\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/84728"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84727"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84727"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84727"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}