Topless deepfake video roils Indiana office, lawmaker's wife targeted, per sources
Indiana lieutenant governor denies existence of deepfake video, accuses fired staff of fabricating story, but adds that viewing porn in office is fireable offense
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Top staff for Indiana’s lieutenant governor played a video showing a state lawmaker’s wife seemingly topless, apparently using an AI program to alter the woman’s real performance at a state talent show hosted on April 9, according to multiple people familiar with the incident.
Gregg Puls, the deputy chief of staff and chief ethics officer to Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith, and Devin Norrick, a lawyer on contract with the office, watched the deepfake video of the lawmaker’s wife in the lieutenant governor’s statehouse office on April 10 and laughed, according to the people familiar with the incident.
The incident was reported at the time to Beckwith’s chief of staff, Sherry Ellis, and other state officials, including ethics officials, but it is unclear if an official complaint was ever filed with the Indiana Ethics Commission or inspector general, according to the people familiar with the incident.
“I want these people brought to justice,” said the woman who was targeted in the video, whose name is being withheld by 24sight News.
The lawmaker and his wife are consulting their attorneys and considering civil and criminal legal action, according to a person familiar with their discussions.
Beckwith, in an interview with 24sight News Saturday, said that he spoke with Puls and Puls told him there was no deepfake video and said, “this is absolutely nonsense.”
Beckwith said that Puls and Norrick are good people and he was certain they would never look at pornography in their statehouse office. But he also said that if anyone had viewed pornography, or did in the future, they would be fired.
“If this did happen, or if it happened in the future, that’s a fireable offense, people doing that in any state office,” Beckwith said. “We’re not going to put up with that in my office.”
Confronted about the video at the time, Puls and Norrick brushed aside the concerns of how the woman would feel, saying that Beckwith had seen the video and laughed at it as well, one person familiar with the incident told 24sight News.
But Beckwith said he never saw the video and doubted its existence. Beckwith also said his chief of staff, Ellis, never told him of any reports of a deepfake video and he was certain she would have told him if it happened.
Puls and Norrick did not return calls for comment from 24sight News Saturday. Two emails sent to Beckwith’s communications director for comment also went unanswered.
A second person familiar with the video described concerns raised among women on Beckwith’s staff about repeated comments made in the lieutenant governor’s office by Puls about the breasts of other staffers and the lawmaker’s wife and urged one of Beckwith’s staffers to file a formal complaint. The second person familiar with the events inside the lieutenant governor’s office characterized it as sexual harassment.
Indiana’s State Personnel Department, in a 2022 memo, outlined what counts as sexual harassment, including lewd comments about staffers’ bodies.
Despite running for and now holding what has traditionally been seen as a relatively modest elected office in state government, Beckwith, has made national news over the last few years.
As a member of a local Indiana library board in 2022, he pushed the relocation of books from a suburban Indianapolis library’s young adults section to the adults section, a policy dragnet which swept up the popular “The Fault In Our Stars” by Indianapolis author John Green and other popular young adult books.
Recently he caught national attention for posting a video to social media regarding the abolished 3/5 Compromise in response to a state measure curbing what could be taught in Indiana schools regarding race and gender.
Beckwith told 24sight News he was also certain that that Puls and Norrick did not view the deepfake video in the office because he believed a recently-fired staffer, Erin Sheridan, was spreading false claims about the video and Puls and Norrick’s conduct.
“The fact that this is just coming out now, it’s pretty easy to see what’s going on,” he said. “This is just Erin being upset.”
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