Florida’s judicial watchdog has filed formal charges against a judge for promoting a salacious tell-all & a deepfake recording during her 2024 campaign.

According to the South Florida Sun Sentinel (Judicial watchdog files charges against Broward judge who promoted salacious rumors, AI recording in campaign, written by Rafael Olmeda and available here), Lauren Peffer, whose term on the bench began in January after she won a County Court judge seat in August 2024, campaigned on a platform of restoring public confidence in the judiciary. As evidence that of that loss in confidence, Peffer made public references to a self-published book called “The Ninth Circus Court of Florida,” a tell-all written by a former employee of the Orlando-area court system.

Those references to the book were made in an interview with the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s Editorial Board when seeking (without success) the media company’s endorsement.

The book painted the Ninth Circuit as a hotbed of corruption, but as Peffer’s 2024 campaign was taking shape, there was no indication that the book Peffer promoted had any impact in that judicial circuit. It had no published reviews and no news organizations wrote or broadcast any stories about it.

Asked by the Sun Sentinel in June about the apparent silence surrounding the book, Peffer provided a link to a recording that purported to be a conversation about the book between Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz and Lisa Munyon, chief administrative judge of the Ninth Circuit. On the recording, those two judges are supposedly joined by Florida Supreme Court Justice Renatha Francis.

The recording was a fake, according to all three judges and the Judicial Qualifications Commission notice of charges, which accuse Peffer of failing to maintain the “dignity appropriate to judicial office and act in a manner consistent with the impartiality, integrity, and independence of the judiciary,” as outlined in the state judicial canons.

“Artificially created deepfakes are a tool for misinformation and digital impersonation used to influence elections and spread disinformation,” the Judicial Qualifications Commission wrote in its announcement of formal charges. “Your campaign theme was to restore the public’s trust, but your behavior did the opposite and brought harm to the dignity and integrity of the judiciary.”

While Peffer acknowledged the problems with the book in an interview with the Sun Sentinel in July and promised to stop referring to it in her campaign, she still won the election with 52.5% of the vote.

But according to the JQC, she should never have cited the book in the first place. She admitted she never spoke to the author of the tell-all, never spoke to any of the judges involved in the accusations, and never tried to authenticate the recording before sharing it.

“Rather than promote public confidence in the judiciary, your actions eroded public confidence by perpetuating a false perception of illegal, unethical, or immoral conduct by Justices of the Florida Supreme Court, a Chief Judge, and others working within the judicial branch,” the JQC wrote.

Peffer has 20 days to file a written response to the charges.

We’re seeing more AI-generated deepfakes than ever these days. Earlier this week, Oscar-winning actress Jamie Lee Curtis successfully leveraged her 6.1 million Instagram followers to urge Mark Zuckerberg to pull a deepfake AI-generated advertisement involving her. And a Canadian pharmacist is accused of being a key figure behind a popular deepfake porn site. Amazingly, sharing non-consensual deepfake porn is NOT illegal in Canada. The US has state laws, but no Federal law, though the Take It Down Act (which criminalizes non-consensual deepfake porn) has been passed by Congress and is expected to be signed by President Trump.

Hat tip to Emma Kelly for sharing the Florida judicial watchdog story and Sheila Grela for making me aware of it!

So, what do you think? Have you had any personal experience with deepfakes? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using Microsoft Designer, using the term “a robot watchdog wearing judge’s clothing”.

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