On January 17, @murder_ink_bmore, a Baltimore-based Instagram account with 240,000 followers, posted what it said was a voice recording of Eric Eiswert, principal of Pikesville High School outside Baltimore, denigrating Black students and faculty as well as Jews.
“I seriously don’t understand why I have to constantly put up with these dumbasses here every day,” said the voice that sounded like Eiswert. The speaker went on, singling out three Black Pikesville High employees as low performing, including one named DJ. The speaker promised to “drag his Black ass out of here one way or another!”
Nestled in rolling green suburbs, Pikesville High has around 900 students—most of them Black in a town that is mainly white. Fifty-three-year-old Eiswert, a former social studies teacher who is white, joined as principal in 2021. The school, which belongs to the Baltimore County Public Schools district, boasts a $40 million renovated math center and a high 95% graduation rate. Still, while 80% of Pikesville’s white students were proficient in 10th grade English last year, that figure was 40% for Black students. The recording seemed to capture Eiswert venting his frustration with the situation in startlingly racial terms, and it went viral in a matter of hours, spreading from Instagram to TikTok and X.
At 5 p.m., the recording found an even wider audience when DeRay McKesson, a Pikesville High alum and an early supporter of Black Lives Matter, shared it with his 900,000 followers on X. Eiswert had previously been his social studies teacher. “I am in no way surprised by his comments in this recording,” McKesson wrote, linking to the audio. “He should be fired immediately and his Maryland teaching and administrator licenses should be permanently revoked.”
Death threats against Eiswert and his family quickly began to pour in, and by that evening, Maryland State Attorney Scott Shellenberger told me, police were dispatched to safeguard them. Like the investigators, school parents and others I’ve spoken with since the tape leaked, Shellenberger said he had never seen anything like it. “We had police deployed out to his house to make sure nobody carried out those threats,” Shellenberger told me. “They were going to hurt him.” Eiswert insisted his voice on the tape had been manipulated, but the school put him on leave while the investigation unfolded.
Over the next few months, the authorities would learn that the audio wasn’t genuine—Eiswert hadn’t said those hateful things—and in time they would learn who had framed him. Their investigation would show both how easy it is for someone today to use artificial intelligence tools to mimic someone else’s voice, and the swift damage a viral fake can wrought: Technology that once seemed like a “Black Mirror” plot device is now part of everyday life.
That reality isn’t lost on Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski, who oversaw the investigation. As he put it to me: “It’s clear that we are entering a new, deeply concerning frontier.”
As president of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County, Cindy Sexton has navigated the usual seas of public education: labor disputes, curriculum overhauls, school-shooting safety measures. But when she clicked play on the @murder_ink_bmore Instagram post in her office the morning of January 17, the veteran educator with short graying hair felt shocked and wholly unprepared. “Oh, my gosh, is it real?” she recalled thinking at the time. “If it’s not real, it’s awful. What are the next steps going to be?”
The school system, like others, was struggling for answers. At the beginning, it was unclear whether the audio was real. If the tape was authentic, it had been secretly recorded and released in the name of justice. With most people on campus packing a video- and audio-recording device in their pockets, any of them might have snipped the audio and leaked it to expose Eiswert.
Students and parents have been using covert recordings at school to hold faculty accountable for bad behavior, including a mom in Australia who exposed an abusive teacher by sewing a mini recording device into her five-year-old’s scrunchie. Despite the technology’s potential for exposing bad players, teachers and communities have been rallying recently against its abuse in covertly policing educators.
Last year at a Westwood Regional School District Board of Education meeting in New Jersey, conservative activist James O’Keefe made waves by offering families free cameras to secretly tape “corruption, lies and abuse” at their schools. The school board responded by banning covert recordings on campus.
In Pikesville, the purported tape seemed like another attempt to expose wrongdoing by an educator. Baltimore County Public Schools Superintendent Myriam Rogers signaled her concern over the recording, which she called “deeply disturbing,” shortly after the alleged leak. The demands for Eiswert’s removal grew, and so did the threats. Anonymous commenters on social media threatened to “put his ass in the locker” and resolved that the “world would be a better place if you were on the other side of the dirt.”
At Pikesville High, students and faculty felt unsafe. Teachers feared the school was riddled with hidden recording devices. One was so afraid to talk on her phone that she hid in her car in the school parking lot to make a personal call rather than risk being recorded inside.
They weren’t the only ones who were afraid. Billy Burke, executive director of the Council of Administrative and Supervisory Employees, heads the Baltimore union that represents Eiswert. He told the school board that the principal and his family were living in terror despite the police protection. It was wrong for Eiswert, an innocent man, and his family to live like that, Burke insisted. While the investigation continued, Eiswert was put on indefinite leave.
Olszewski, the Baltimore County executive, who is a former civics teacher in the Baltimore city school system, felt horrified as he listened to the tape. “I was shocked,” he told me. “It was important to condemn these words and make clear that the recording needed to be investigated so that we could determine whether it was real.” If it wasn’t, he went on, “we would do everything possible to hold whomever created it accountable.”
Within days of the tape’s release, the Baltimore County investigators sent up a cross-country flare and contacted a team of cybersleuths at the National Center for Media Forensics at the University of Colorado Denver. Since its launch at the university in 2008 in partnership with the Department of Justice, the group has become the nation’s go-to detective agency for rooting out deepfakes.
Cole Whitecotton, a lead investigator on the Eiswert case, has been with the center for more than a decade. He worked on the team that verified footage at the time of the Bin Laden raid in 2011. An inquisitive coder with a goatee and glasses, he told me the threat of deepfakes hit a tipping point in 2018. That’s when videos began popping up on Reddit of actor Nicolas Cage appearing in “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones”—films in which he never featured. They’d been made with one of the first deepfake programs, FaceApp, which let any user play desktop Frankenstein, swapping anyone’s face to someone else’s body. “That was the first one the world saw how easy it is to fake and to trick the human eye, the human ear—the human perception of things,” he told me.
While deepfake images and videos have been around for years, they’ve been going increasingly mainstream with the spread of generative AI. In January, AI-generated nudes of Taylor Swift got tens of millions of views on X. They set off a public war between Swifties trying to get the images removed and a bemused Elon Musk, who responded at one point to the whole thing by posting “lol.” The White House cited the Swift fakes and said the increasing spread of AI-generated images was “alarming.”
AI voice clones, however, pose a newer challenge. For Whitecotton and his forensic investigators, the battles against them are a matter of math. The audio on the Pikesville tape, like any other piece of digital media, is compressed so it’s smaller and easier to stream online. But no matter how convincing a fake song or video may be, there are often enough fingerprints in the code for an expert to detect its manipulation. As Whitecotton tells me, “It’s easy to fake out the human eyes or ears, but it’s impossible to trick the mathematics.”
As the detectives listened closely to the tape, they began to notice something unusual: the cleanness of the sound. When someone is recording on a microphone, whether it’s on a cellphone or freestanding, the microphone vibrates and spits out tiny electrical impulses, which leave small but discernible tones on the tape.
On the Pikesville tape, the audio would go suspiciously silent, with none of those electrical impulses at all. The investigators noted the lack of background noise, the strange silent gaps and other clues. On the recording, Eiswert never seemed to pause and breathe. The team concluded the tape was a clear digital fabrication, though they couldn’t figure out which AI program the author had used. Dr. Hany Farid, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, also confirmed that the tape seemed to have been doctored (when contacted, he declined to comment on the case).
After two months of investigation and questions still mounting over the veracity of the tape, Eiswert finally weighed in publicly. In a written statement to the Baltimore Banner on March 26, he continued to assert his innocence and deny that the recording was him.
At 8 p.m. on January 17, the evening the Pikesville tape leaked on Instagram, detective Riche from the Baltimore County Threat Management Team knocked on the door of the accused principal’s gray suburban home. Riche specialized in workplace violence. He had come with police officers who would stay to protect Eiswert and his family in light of the death threats.
Eiswert swore to the detective he’d never had the conversation on the tape at all. And the person he appeared to be speaking to in the tape, Pikesville High’s vice principal, Karen Smith, told Riche the same thing.
To continue his investigation, Riche spoke with a couple Pikesville High School teachers who had both received the Pikesville tape over email from an unknown sender, who went by the name TJ Foust, the night before it leaked. The sender attached an MP3 file to the email, which had the subject line “Pikesville Principal—Disturbing Recording.”
Shaena Ravenell, a 28-year-old English teacher at Pikesville High, was among the recipients of the email and one of the people the Eiswert-like voice disparaged on the tape. A former lacrosse player at nearby Chowan University, Ravenell is Black with blond hair and appears on Instagram showing her school pride, dressed in a purple Pikesville High Panthers sweatshirt and pink puffy Uggs. She told Riche she had been so shocked by the audio that she sent it to the local branch of the NAACP. She also forwarded it to a popular student she knew could quickly spread it around the school and online.
Detective Riche also paid a visit to Dazhon “DJ” Darien, the school’s new athletic director, who had received the email with the Pikesville tape and was another Black employee disparaged in the recording.
A 31-year-old with a midlength beard, Darien had joined the school last summer just before the school year began. A father of two and a die-hard Baltimore Ravens fan, Darien considered himself, as he once wrote in a letter to parents, a supportive but demanding educator. “While I believe in a relaxed nurturing environment for learning,” as he put it, “I am very no-nonsense when it comes to classroom behavior and respect.”
As Riche listened to Darien discuss his experience at Pikesville High, he noted in the police report that the coach seemed “conflicted” over how much he should cooperate.
Darien admitted to having had conflicts with Eiswert in the past. Riche learned just how serious those problems had been. Shortly after coming to the school, Darien had skirted protocol by trying to fire another coach on his team without first consulting any other school officials. In response, Eiswert had tasked administrators with keeping a closer eye on Darien—just in case.
Eiswert’s suspicions intensified last fall. He discovered that Darien had paid the junior varsity basketball coach, who was also his roommate, $1,916 to help as assistant coach on the girls’ soccer team. When neither the players nor other coaches said they’d seen the new assistant coach on the field, Eiswert confronted Darien.
But Darien merely called the payment to his roommate “a mistake.” The investigation into the unauthorized payment was still underway when the Eiswert audio file leaked.
After subpoenaing the records of the email address that had sent the MP3, Riche saw that it had come from an internet protocol connected to Darien’s grandmother, whom he had lived with in California: The Gmail had been created on a T-Mobile phone registered in Darien’s name.
The athletic director had done a poor job of covering his trail. A search of Darien’s activity on the school computer network revealed that between December 18 and January 15, the day before the tape was released, he had been searching the internet for AI tools.
Software that lets you clone your voice, or someone else’s, is becoming widely accessible from companies such as Murf AI, WellSaid Labs and Eleven Labs, which recently raised $80 million in a Series B round of funding at a valuation of $1.1 billion. After paying $11 to sign up on Eleven Labs, I added samples of my voice pulled from the internet. After a few minutes of futzing around, I could type any phrase and hear my robot self read it back. The results were middling but improved with effort. All someone like Darien would need is the time and the motivation to make a convincing audio clone.
By April 25, police had all they needed to arrest Darien on charges of stalking, theft, disruption of school operations, and retaliation against a witness (tied to Eiswert’s investigation of Darien’s financial improprieties at the school). But when they went to arrest him at his Catonsville, Md., home, Darien was gone. So was his gun.
While police raced to arrest Darien for the deepfake, other schools grappled with the fallout from similar stunts. Last February, the small community of Carmel, N.Y., was reeling over a series of alarming TikTok videos. One showed George Fischer Middle School principal John Piscitella very much as himself—a white man, gray vest, blue button-up shirt, red tie—but seemingly on a racist tear, spewing the n-word.
“I hope these n—s get shot because they just don’t learn,” Piscitella appears to say in the video. “I am bringing my machine gun to school.”
As in Baltimore, officials in Carmel hadn’t dealt with anything like this before—and solving the virtual crime took real legwork. “People hide behind the veil of a keyboard,” Captain Michael Grossi of the Putnam County Sheriff’s Office told me. “And then when artificially recreating other people’s voices who might not truly be involved, it takes a lot of time and manpower to run down leads, do interviews and try to figure out who’s telling the truth.”
The investigators soon discovered that a group of local high schoolers had faked the videos. The Carmel Central School District informed parents of the incident in a tone that suggested this was a prank gone awry. The kids had put out “fake, inappropriate videos created using artificial intelligence and impersonating different members of the District administration and the Putnam County Sheriff’s Department,” and would be “dealt with in accordance with the District’s Code of Conduct.”
“These kids had no idea where it was going to go,” Grossi said. “Parents need to educate their children as to how serious this can be.”
At the same time, a large swath of the public lacks the critical thinking to discern the real from the fake. A Stanford University study of 8,000 middle school students back in the pre-AI days of 2016 found that over 80% believed an advertisement labeled as sponsored content was a news story. Less than 20% of high schoolers questioned information received over social media. Given these challenges, educators are racing to add a fourth R to grade school programs: reading, writing, arithmetic—and reality.
“Media literacy is really an essential life skill and survival skill,” said Erin McNeil, CEO and founder of Media Literacy Now, an 11-year-old nonprofit advocacy group. But “it wasn’t even on the public policy agenda when we got started.”
The media literacy movement is spreading. In October, California became the fourth state—along with Delaware, New Jersey and Texas—to enact media literacy instruction requirements for all students in kindergarten through 12th grade beginning this year.
“People today are just being inundated by misinformation and disinformation on social media platforms, on the internet,” said California Assemblymember Marc Berman, who authored the bill. “My hope is that the younger generation teaches the older generations, because I can’t force the parents and grandparents to go back to school.”
On April 25, three months after the AI saga in Pikesville began, the hunt for the Eiswert faker finally came to a dramatic end. Detective Riche and his team arrested Dazhon “DJ” Darien after he was caught at Baltimore/Washington International Airport trying to board a plane to Houston with a gun. He should have been at school but was trying to flee. With enough evidence from the AI recordings, police charged him with stalking, theft, disruption of school operations and retaliation against a witness.
Students have been sharing their own troubling stories of Darien’s behavior. On a hot day in July when I visited campus during summer school, they were finding shade under the trees on the front lawn. Brady Brown, a senior student at Pikesville High in the football program, told me that Darien had been “pushing all off-season for the players to collect as much donations as we could for new jersey sets and football equipment,” he said. “Some people brought in over $1,000.”
Despite their fundraising, the goods never materialized. “We didn’t see any of the jerseys that we were promised,” Brady told me. “No new equipment, or even an explanation for where the money went. I ripped up a check meant for the program after realizing our money was not being properly used.”
With deepfake crimes so new, the laws haven’t yet completely caught up. As a result, Darien faces light consequences for his alleged actions, should he be convicted. Charged with disrupting school activities, he could receive just six months in jail and up to a $2,500 fine. According to the Baltimore County State’s Attorney Office, a trial date is pending.
Meanwhile, many of the original social media posts calling for Eiswert’s termination—including the viral one from DeRay McKesson—remain online. (McKesson didn’t reply to requests for comment).
Lawmakers are exploring how to better address both the creation and the distribution of deepfakes now that this has happened. Over 40 states have pushed some kind of legislation to address challenges from AI porn to disinformation. No matter how the laws evolve, surviving life in the post-reality age will require one thing most of all: critical thinking.
“You need to really think about everything you hear and see,” Shellenberger said, “and make sure you’re convinced that it’s really from the person and really meant to be said the way it was said.”
Sexton, the head of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County, shares his concerns. “It’s kind of like closing the barn door after the horse has gone out,” she said. “The legislation will not be perfect because it’s an evolving situation. The AI will evolve quicker than we are able to deal with some of these things.”
Eiswert may have been among the first to suffer the consequences, but he likely won’t be the last. “What’s to stop it from happening to me or to the next teacher?” Sexton wondered aloud. “That’s the big concern: It could happen to any of us at any time, and what protection do any of us have?”
Eiswert, who declined to comment due to the pending case against Darien, is starting to rebuild his life. This July, he began a new job as principal of Sparrows Point Middle School in nearby Edgemere, Md. Soon after, Pikesville High held a welcome ceremony for their new principal, April Franklin.
As Whitecotton and his team of fake detectives move on to other cases, he hopes they use the Eiswert story as a lesson. “As people become more and more aware of it and educated and have a better understanding of what’s even possible,” Whitecotton said, “then the less scary all of that stuff becomes.”