Overview
- A Tomlin settlement read in the High Court on Friday recorded that Elha-Mai Weston admitted wrongful conduct, apologised to Sasha-Jay Davies and agreed to pay £10,000 with undertakings not to contact her or repeat the impersonation.
- The impersonation began when Davies was 16 and lasted nearly four years across platforms including TikTok, Instagram, Tinder, Snapchat, Facebook, Hinge and SoundCloud.
- Weston created dozens of fake profiles under names such as 'Sophie' and 'Sophie Kadare' that used Davies’s photos and later AI-generated images to build more than 100,000 followers and to carry on personal relationships with other users.
- Davies reported the abuse to platforms and police with little success and most accounts were deleted only after her appearance on BBC This Morning and an open-source intelligence probe by her lawyers identified Weston.
- Sasha’s legal team says the civil order is enforceable by contempt proceedings if breached and that they will now ask police to pursue a criminal investigation while the case highlights gaps in UK law around catfishing and AI-enabled image abuse.