These Are Definitely Not Scully's Breasts
Inside one man's crusade to save Gillian Anderson and the rest of the world from the plague of fake celebrity porn.
By David Kushner
The moment he boots up case file 371, the detective gets that twisted feeling in his gut. Ed Lake - blue button-down shirt, gray hair, hangdog jowls - studies the evidence alone in the musty dining room of his tiny apartment in Racine, Wisconsin, a small town southeast of Milwaukee. It's that blonde again. Elisha Cuthbert. He's seen her. The daughter on the TV show 24. And here she is now. Frozen on his computer screen - the smoky eyes, the parted lips. But something's wrong. The plunging neckline. The sheer black blouse. The exposed nipples. It's her, but it's not. It's a sham.
 Carlos Serrao Ed Lake, the Fake Detective, at his home office in Racine, Wisconsin. |
Fakers are DJs of the pixel, manipulating pictures with Photoshop the way Moby tweaks sounds with a sampler. Bad fakes are obvious - Britney Spears' face clumsily grafted on a topless torso. The good ones seem sublimely genuine - a midstride shot of Ashley Judd sans panties at the Oscars, a doe-eyed Gwyneth Paltrow lying naked on a featherbed. If they're particularly well-done, they rise from the underground newsgroups and onto the hard drives of people who take them for the real thing.
So what's the harm in that? For the chivalrous Lake, it's an affront to the actresses. On his site, he bills his mission: Protecting the innocent, defending the truth, and recovering the sullied reputations of beautiful damsels in distress since 1996. "My favorite actresses are being betrayed," he says earnestly.
But for Lake, there's more to it. Fakers undermine the hard work of collectors of legitimate celebrity photos, like Lake himself. To understand why, he tells me, you need to understand the mind of a collector.
One look around his pad makes it obvious that Lake collects to the point of obsession. Stashed inside his closets and beneath the fantasy art posters that adorn his walls is a hoard of objects that many people would call junk: 4,000 miniature liquor bottles; 2,000 jazz tapes; 3,000 books, including more than 400 on World War II. "Collecting can't be explained," he says almost wearily as he cracks open a Diet Coke. "It's like a pack rat thing. I'll collect anything." Most of all, Lake collects photos of celebrities - a passion that dates back to his childhood and the double features he never missed at the local movie house.
Clearly, Lake has an appreciation for beautiful women, but he denies his motivations are prurient. He's on a crusade. He doesn't want anyone pulling the wool over the eyes of guys who are serious about their celeb collections.
Every self-appointed Batman needs a Joker, of course. And the Fake Detective has his. He goes by the name of Trillian.
"No good. The light's all wrong. She's looking in the wrong direction," says Trillian, in heavily accented English. We're standing in a bookshop in the red-light district of Amsterdam, flipping through a porno mag in search of shots suitable for faking. "This is better. See the hairline? See the angle? It's dead-on," he says, slapping the magazine with a grin. "This, this could be Sandra Bullock."
Along the canals, wobbly tourists window-shop hookers. Macy Gray's "Sexual Revolution" pulses from a Rastafarian café. The warm breeze smells like the inside of a bong. As we head out into the crowds, Trillian, a 37-year-old Hollander with a crooked nose, nicotine-stained teeth, and brainiac eyes, declares he's had enough of the Amsterdam scene.
It was a long time coming. After growing up in a German border town, he moved here to live the wild life. But eight years in a small flat on the far side of town got to him - the dopey crowds, the pushy prostitutes, the neo-hippie vagabonds. Now he lives in an industrial burg outside the city and works as a computer engineer at a local high school.
Trillian's not the most prolific of the few thousand online fakers, but many consider him the best. And for good reason. His necklines - the crease where a celebrity's head is pasted to a model's body - are imperceptible. His saturation and hue - the colorings that blend the skins of two different people - are subtle and convincing. He takes pride in his accomplishments but doesn't want his identity revealed. "You end up being a perv to some people," he says.
Fakes date back to the early days of bulletin-board systems, but they emerged as a distinct subculture in September 1996, when a Canadian computer engineer nicknamed Lux Lucre founded the alt.binaries
.pictures.nude.celebrities.fake newsgroup. As the group's archivist, Lucre estimates there are roughly 300,000 fakes in existence, ranging from a black-light poster-style nude of Jennifer Aniston under a waterfall to a spread eagle of, yes, Bea Arthur.
The most popular fakee? Gillian Anderson. She has all the ingredients: girl-next-door accessibility, sci-fi geek cred, and, most important, a symmetrical face that's easy to manipulate. Britney Spears is not symmetrical, Trillian explains, making her difficult to flip. Sandra Bullock is almost perfect. Same for Sarah Michelle Gellar and Jennifer Love Hewitt. "Their heads glue on almost every body," he says.
Many fakers are in it for the cheap thrills. "I'm not really trying to create art, just good masturbation material," emails Yovo, an unemployed 38-year-old faker outside of Seattle. "It's pretty obvious that mine are fake. Anna Kournikova isn't known for doing double penetration shots, ya know."
Trillian professes different motives. "There's nothing erotic when you're working at the level of pixels," he says. He likes the simple nod to a task well-done - something missing from his daily life. "You can seek recognition at work, but you will be disappointed," he says, as we catch a train to his house. "That's part of faking: 'Look at what I've done.' You get cheers or boos. You get recognition."
David Kushner ([EMAIL PROTECTED]), author of Masters of Doom, wrote about Doom III in Wired 11.05
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