He said, she said, AI said: Wall Street sexual harassment lawsuit rivets and confounds

A Wall Street banker’s explosive sexual harassment lawsuit against a female executive has triggered a torrent of salacious falsehoods muddying the waters — with AI-created deepfakes and memes fueling the frenzy. The social media storm erupted soon after the suit — packed with allegations of sexual abuse, coercion, and racial harassment — was filed last month in a New York court by a former JPMorgan Chase banker identified by US media as 35-year-old Chirayu Rana. Lawyers for the defendant Lorna Hajdini, who remains at the bank, have called the accusations fabricated. JPMorgan Chase has said it investigated the claims and found them meritless. But even before any legal outcome, the suit’s tawdry claims have become a source of public fascination, spawning a wave of AI-generated clips and sexually suggestive memes — at a time when high-profile sexual harassment cases against women remain rare. “This trend hints at how AI is going to increasingly pollute our feeds and pollute public discourse on both important and frivolous topics,” Timothy Caulfield, a misinformation researcher from the University of Alberta in Canada, told AFP. “This content can be produced incredibly quickly and can be specifically framed to play to our fears, interests, and grievances. In the attention economy, it is all about clicks. Find a trending story and exploit.” One hyper-realistic AI video circulating on Elon Musk’s platform X purports to show the pair laughing and drinking wine at a restaurant, with a voiceover claiming “they are on a date”. The video also surfaced on other platforms, including Meta-owned Facebook, where some posts used it to baselessly claim that the lawsuit was “fake” and the two had been involved in a “consensual relationship”. ‘Real story fakes’ Another AI clip circulating across platforms including Instagram — dubbed by users as a “Fifty Shades of Gray”-style trailer — presents a dramatised visual reconstruction of the alleged harassment, racial slurs and threats descr