Pa. State Police corporal created thousands of deepfake porn images, including some of children, AG says

A Pennsylvania State Police corporal stationed at the Troop K barracks in Skippack used his department-issued computer to create deepfake pornography of multiple women, including coworkers and women he met while on duty, officials said Wednesday.

Investigators also found that Stephen Kamnik, 38, secretly recorded his coworkers and other women, authorities said, and filmed himself breaking into a female locker room at the barracks to rifle through his coworkers’ underwear.

And Kamnik also downloaded and viewed child pornography, state Attorney General Dave Sunday said.

“This defendant swore an oath to protect and serve the people of the Commonwealth and in doing so was entrusted with resources to uphold that oath,” Sunday said in a statement. “Instead, he used his power and the trust placed in him to prey on innocent and unsuspecting coworkers and create sexually abusive material, some involving depictions of children.”

Kamnik, of Havertown, has been charged with child pornography, unlawful use of a computer, unlawful duplication, and related crimes, court records show. He also faces charges for possessing a .22-caliber pistol that prosecutors say was reported stolen in 2012.

He remained in custody Wednesday with bail set at $500,000. Kamnik’s attorney, Fortunato Perri Jr., did not return a request for comment.

Kamnik, who has been a trooper since 2011, has been suspended without pay, according to Sunday.

The investigation into Kamnik began in November, when state police officials noticed that the computer assigned to him had been using an unusually high amount of internet bandwidth, according to the affidavit of probable cause for his arrest.

After accessing Kamnik’s computer, investigators found that he was using it to run a side business in which he hosted and sold website domains, the affidavit said. But investigators said further analysis revealed much more.

Evidence on the computer showed that Kamnik had been connecting an external hard drive to it, on which they later learned he had been storing thousands of images of pornography, according to court filings.

Of that cache, 3,000 were deepfakes that Kamnik created by digitally superimposing the photos of women he met on the job onto the bodies of naked women, the affidavit said.

Some of that deepfake pornography was based on images of a 12-year-old girl, according to investigators.

To create those images, Kamnik used photos from the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation’s driver’s license database, as well as mug shots and other images stored in a law enforcement database, according to court filings.

Other files found on the computer depicted videos that Kamnik surreptitiously recorded on his cell phone in which he filmed his female coworkers at the barracks, focusing on their genitals and buttocks, the affidavit said.

He also recorded videos of women he met while on duty, including women involved in domestic-violence investigations and assault cases. Kamnik sometimes made the women open their mouths and stick out their tongues, gestures that investigators said served no purpose other than to satisfy his sexual urges.

In one of these videos, Kamnik recorded himself with a male suspect detained at the barracks, the affidavit said. While speaking with the man, Kamnik accessed his phone illegally and recorded himself looking at multiple nude videos and photos of the man’s wife that had been stored on the phone.

He later secretly recorded the man’s wife when she came to the station, the affidavit said.

After seizing Kamnik’s personal phone as part of their investigation, detectives also found that he routinely searched for images of preteen girls, and had two images of a nude girl between the ages of 7 and 9 saved on the device.

He is scheduled to appear before a district judge for a preliminary hearing on May 5.