Lena Schilling said she found nude deepfakes of herself circulating online after seeing images taken from one of her first press conferences. The Austrian Greens MEP said the altered pictures were “digital violence against women” and urged the EU to act before the abuse becomes routine.
She said, “I felt disgusted.” Schilling also told colleagues, “We were stripped naked without our consent,” as she pressed for enforcement of the planned ban on AI apps that undress women.
European Parliament deepfake report
The pressure behind that demand is already visible. A report tied to Agora Digitale Transformation said one in six female MEPs had been targeted by sexualised AI-generated content, and that 50 MEPs were affected overall, including 46 women. Schilling said the images were used to humiliate her and warned that such attacks make public life harder for women who enter politics.
The same reporting said an earlier ADT study found 138 female parliamentarians from 22 EU countries had been affected, with women 33 times more likely than their male colleagues to be depicted in or associated with deepfake pornography. That pattern turns individual abuse into a wider warning for women in the European Parliament who now have to assume their public images can be copied, altered and circulated without consent.
Schilling and Terry Reintke
Schilling and Terry Reintke sent a letter to the EU that was signed by 119 MEPs. The letter called for enforcement mechanisms to match the forthcoming nudifier apps ban on 2 December, and Schilling said the point was to push national authorities to close loopholes or workarounds that could let the apps keep operating across EU countries.
She said, “A ban on paper protects no one until it is enforced.” That is the gap now: the rule is set to arrive on 2 December, but the practical test will be whether EU and national authorities can stop the services from reappearing under new names, new sites or other technical workarounds before they spread again.
