Australian teacher Hannah Grundy made a horrifying discovery online - and it turned out a close friend was to blame. Photo / Australian Story
Australian teacher Hannah Grundy made a horrifying discovery online - and it turned out a close friend was to blame. Photo / Australian Story
WARNING: This story discusses details of sexual abuse
Australian teacher Hannah Grundy was horrified to discover deepfake pornographic images of her published online.
A New Zealand-based private investigator and former police officer spotted the photographs while investigating an unrelated image-based case on the same website. ”I was watching the accounts that were posting,” he told Australian Story. “There was quite serious potential for harm.”
He was compelled to reach out as the images were “incredibly graphic in nature, using AI technology”. Grundy isn’t the only person he’s contacted to warn them.
Turning detective herself, Grundy soon realised the culprit was someone she knew very well.
When science teacher Hannah Grundy started receiving emails from a stranger called John Doe, she assumed it was a scam and decided to ignore them.
The messages were warning her that her image had appeared on a website, and urged her to take action to get the pictures taken down.
She dismissed the strange email, until she got another from someone called Sally who claimed to be another victim.
“That email freaked me out,” Hannah told Australian Story.
She asked her partner Kris to open the link for her while she watched on. “He kind of just went white,” she said. Kris then turned to Hannah and said “oh f**k, it’s real”.
At the top of the page was a poll where people were voting on their preferred way to rape Hannah.
“There were hundreds and hundreds of votes,” said Kris.
According to the Daily Mail, the website was found by a New Zealand private investigator who alerted the couple of the danger its contents had put Hannah in.
Hannah Grundy and her partner Kris discovered that a mutual friend was behind the images. Photo / Australian Story
The website listed Hannah’s full name and Instagram page, and that she lived in Sydney.
Some of the pictures were incredibly graphic and used AI technology to add features such as bruising.
Hannah realised that the pictures had been taken from her Facebook and Instagram, which were both private, meaning that the person behind the deepfake images was one of her mates.
There were also pictures on the website of some of Hannah’s very close friends.
One was Rachel McGinty and another was Jessica Stuart, who had both worked at a university bar with Hannah and her partner Kris, and were part of their tight-knit friendship group.
Comments on the women’s photos were disgusting.
One person had written: “Where would you blow your load over this.” Another wrote: “What a filthy s**t.”
“It was obvious to us that the culprit had some connection to Manning Bar [at the University of Sydney] but we thought it might be a patron,” said Kris.
Hannah and Kris turned into online detectives, running the names of the women through Facebook to see which mutual friends they all had in common.
The list of mutual friends got smaller and smaller until it could have only been one person.
“It became more and more obvious that it was our friend Andy,” said Kris.
Andy Hayler was a supervisor at Manning Bar when Hannah started there as a student.
“I thought of him as a very good friend,” said Hannah.
“It was so shocking because Andy was someone we trusted so much. He’s been to our house. We’ve been on holidays with him.
“A lot of the big moments of our lives over the past 10 years have been with him there.
“I felt very betrayed. How can you trust anyone when you’ve known someone for 10 years and they can say stuff like that about you online?”
The next day Hannah and Kris went to the police with their evidence, but cops said it wasn’t enough to charge Andy.
Andy pleaded guilty to 28 counts of using a carriage service to cause offence involving 26 women. Photo / 123rf
They approached criminal lawyer Sidnie Sarang, who started to build a case against Andy while he continued to post sexual images of Hannah online.
Hannah and Kris distanced themselves from their friendship group as tipping Andy off that they knew about his heinous crimes would have jeopardised the case.
Andy continued to contact the couple asking to go for drinks, but they declined.
“It was pretty unsettling considering what he was doing,” said Kris.
They even bumped into Andy at a footy festival. He was friendly with the couple and asked them about their lives.
About five months after Hannah reported the website she had a phone call from the police who said there was nowhere else for the case to go.
The couple approached the private investigator who prepared a report into the evidence the couple had collected.
The report was sent to police who now had the evidence they needed to raid Andy’s home. Andy gave over his passwords and police were able to charge him.
Hannah was finally able to tell Jessica and Rachel what had happened.
“I was really scared,” said Rachel. “I broke into tears. This fire and vitality that I always had just got put out.”
Jessica said her “stomach dropped” when she learned it was Andy who was behind the pictures.
“I couldn’t really comprehend that it was someone so harmless and safe,” she added.
Andrew Thomas Hayler pleaded guilty to 28 counts of using a carriage service to cause offence involving 26 women between July 2020 and August 2022, including his close friends, former housemates and colleagues.
Outside court, he said he was “really, really sorry” and blamed a “dark part of his psychology” for his actions.
In court, Hannah and Kris heard that Andy had suffered from an alcohol and drug problem during his offending and also had an addiction to violent porn.
He was sentenced to nine years in prison on June 21 this year, with a non-parole period of five years.
