A physical education (PE) teacher found herself in a distressing situation when a manipulated deepfake video of her engaging in racist behavior circulated online, causing her to face potential legal consequences and be sent home from work.
The incident took place on May 2 last year when 27-year-old Cheryl Bennett agreed to support her colleague, Qasim Mughal, during the local elections by distributing campaign materials for the Labour Party.
Cheryl Bennett, who holds the position of head of year 9 at Stuart Bathurst Catholic High School in Wednesbury, West Midlands, spent the day campaigning alongside Mr. Mughal, who serves as the school’s Head of Maths and was a candidate for local councilor in Dudley.
According to The Sunday Times, Ms Bennett said she is not political, is not a Labour Party member and did not cast a vote in last year’s general election.
Her role was simply to post leaflets through the letterbox if no-one opened the door for Mr Mughal to talk to.
However, what seemed like a day of innocent doorknocking quickly turned into a nightmare for Ms Bennett after a CCTV camera above one household’s door unknowingly filmed her.
That footage was then digitally-manipulated using so-called ‘deepfake’ technology to include audio calling the inhabitants of the house a racial slur.
The video shows Ms Bennett approach a homeowner, who tells her he has already voted. She then asks him if he voted for Labour and he informs her that he voted for one of Mr Mughal’s rivals, independent candidate Akhmed Yakoob, who was running for Mayor.
However, this short interaction was then edited, removing audio of Mr Mughal and adding in a section in which Ms Bennett launches a verbal broadside at the homeowner, calling them ‘F***ing p*kis. P*kis’ as she walks away from the house.
It is unclear who doctored the footage but the clip went hugely viral after being posted by Lamborghini-driving ‘TikTok lawyer’ Akhmed Yakoob, who was closely affiliated with George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain.
Mr Yakoob initially put himself forward to represent the two men who attacked police officers at Manchester Airport in July last year, before ultimately stepping aside.
In Mr Yakoob’s post on May 6 of last year, in which he appears wearing sunglasses and with warms folded, he says ‘I have no words for this, you can just make your own judgement’ before playing the doctored clip.
He then ends the post with ‘Those who are still with the Labour Party, now is your time to leave.’ Mr Yakoob additionally posted Ms Bennett’s name and workplace.
The post exploded online, racking up 2.1 million views across TikTok, Facebook and X, and leading to furious parents calling the school at which Ms Bennett works – which has a large number of British-Pakistani pupils – to demand she be dismissed.
The post was also leveraged by Yakoob and his supporters as evidence of Labour’s distance from the Muslim community, many of whom were upset by Sir Keir’s stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict.
Ms Bennett, who is pregnant, said shortly after Mr Yakoob’s post her phone began blowing up with emails.
Many of the emails contained vitriolic abuse – including messages of outrage from pupils at the school where she worked.
Ms Bennett protested her innocence but, having watched the doctored video, few of her detractors were inclined to believe her.
More than 800 formal complaints followed, with furious parents penning letters to the school’s head teacher demanding an investigation and demanding a response from the school’s governors.
Ms Bennett was told to stay home from work for her own safety but also felt threatened in her own property – with strangers descending on her parents and grandmother to demand they give up her whereabouts.
Feeling in danger she opted to stay at a friend’s home, meaning she was absent when West Midlands police visited her house at 2.30am to arrest her, instead putting a postcard through her door and asking her to get in touch.
Ms Bennett said: ‘I was just constantly in survival mode. I was just trying to get through every single day. And it’s only because I’ve been raised by a very strong family, by very strong women, in terms of you keep fighting and pushing through.
‘Because there was days where I just thought: ‘Would it be easier if I was to just end my life?’ Just because I felt like my career would never be same.
‘I just felt like it threw me off completely. I started having, like, trust issues and a lot of paranoia. I’d go out and someone would only have to make eye contact with me, and I think they’re looking at me, because they know what’s going on.’
Ms Bennet said the whole experience underlined the need to interrogate everything on social media since ‘Just because you see it, doesn’t mean it’s always true.’
Labour said it had employed an external digital forensics company, which found evidence that the video had been manipulated.
West Midlands Police likewise said officers had examined the original footage and concluded no offensive words were uttered.
Ms Bennett returned to work two weeks after police exonerated her and said her first task was to address the issue and put it to bed.
Calling herself a ‘workaholic,’ she said that her pupils were always her priority. She added: ‘I didn’t speak on it for too long. I said if you want to know anything, you come and see me, I’ll answer honestly, you can make an opinion of whether you believe it or not.’
Despite being cleared by police, Ms Bennett has received a legal letter from the Department for Education saying the accusation will stay on her record for years, despite her innocence.
Mr Yakoob, who remains under investigation by the Solicitors Regulation Authority for as a result of his actions in this case, has paid ‘substantial’ damages to Ms Bennett.
Experts say it is the first case of a political ‘deepfake’ being tried legally in the UK, with many of the other convictions around deepfakes being tied to sexual content.
Mr Yakoob had reportedly refused to apologise as part of the final agreement between the two parties, but did so after being contacted by the Sunday Times.
He told them: ‘Of course I’m sorry. If I wasn’t sorry, I wouldn’t have agreed to settle with her and give her a sum of money… If I wasn’t sorry, I would be in court trying to defend myself but I acknowledged my mistake, that’s why I’m sorry.’
He also said that he had taken down the deepfake video well before he was contacted by Ms Bennett’s lawyers.
Ms Bennett said: ‘I don’t need an apology. I just need people to be able to know the truth, because those that know me for me, whether they questioned me at some point or not, they know the truth, and they know my true character.’
Deepfakes have become a huge problem for the political establishment. Even relatively sophisticated video manipulation can now be done at minimal expense – often simply at the push of a button.
In February 2024, Silicon Valley bosses signed a pact to voluntarily adopt ‘reasonable precautions’ to prevent AI tools from being used to disrupt democratic elections around the world.
However, crucially, this pact did not commit to banning or removing deepfakes – with many circulating in the run-up to the US general election last year.
