In July 2023, Shalene Hayman got an email from the agent for her then-15-year-old daughter Kaylin, an actor in Ventura who’d starred in a Disney Channel show a few years earlier. It wasn’t about an audition. FBI agents from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, wanted to talk to Kaylin.
Shalene and Kaylin Hayman arranged a Zoom call with the FBI agents. That was when Kaylin learned why they wanted to talk to her: She’d been the victim of a crime that was, to her, literally unimaginable. A man in Pittsburgh with a history of sex crimes against children had been found with sexually explicit images of a girl that looked like Kaylin. The girl didn’t actually exist, but she looked like Kaylin because she had Kaylin’s face, edited onto someone else’s body.
“It was absolutely the last thing I would think,” Kaylin said. “I didn’t even think that was a possibility. … It didn’t really hit me until later. I had my fair share of breakdowns, wondering why someone would do this and how sick someone could be.”
Creating photorealistic images that look like they depict child sexual abuse is possible, and it’s become much more common in the last year or two, as artificial intelligence software has grown capable of advanced photo and video editing.
It’s illegal under federal law — James Smelko, the man who had explicit images with the faces of Kaylin and other child actors, is now serving 14 years and seven months in federal prison — but when Kaylin was targeted, it wasn’t illegal in California, or any other state.
It is now, thanks in part to Kaylin.
On Sept. 29, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 1831 into law, making California the 16th state to ban computer-generated or AI-generated images of child sexual abuse, according to information provided by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which tracks legislation on the issue. The first such laws were passed last year by Texas and Louisiana, and the other 14 have come this year.
Kaylin visited Sacramento three times to testify in Senate and Assembly hearings on the bill, accompanied by Ventura County District Attorney Erik Nasarenko.
Assembly Bill 1831 was written by Assemblymember Marc Berman, a Democrat from Menlo Park, in consultation with Nasarenko and other prosecutors. It passed unanimously in both the Senate and Assembly, with support from Microsoft and other companies in the AI space, and goes into effect Jan. 1.
“Kaylin has just been a fantastic survivor and advocate for other survivors of this type of content,” Berman said. “She’s a remarkable spokesperson, incredibly poised. … These are traumatizing experiences even for adults, let alone for teenagers, and her involvement made it that much easier for me to make the case for this bill.”
‘I was not afraid to tell my story’
Though Kaylin has lived in Ventura her entire life, her case was not what alerted Nasarenko to the dangers of AI and the need for a new state law. Nasarenko had never heard of Kaylin Hayman last December, when his office got a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children about a potential case of child sexual abuse material out of Ventura County.
The center is a clearinghouse for such reports; it passes tips along to local law enforcement if it can determine from an IP address or other evidence where the material was created or accessed.
When investigators in Nasarenko’s office looked into the tip, they determined the video was created using AI. They had to stop there, since current law in California only covers material made using an actual child.
Nasarenko said that was the first of eight tips his office has received in the past 10 months regarding AI-generated child pornography. Once AB 1831 takes effect in January, investigators will look at those cases again and pursue them if the suspects still appear to be in possession of the material, he said.
AI child pornography is serious and should be illegal for a number of reasons, Nasarenko said. First, the presence of such material can normalize child abuse, and it can be part of the grooming process for abusers, who will show such material to children to convince them that it’s normal.
Second, AI engines are often trained on images of real child abuse to learn to create their own versions of the content. And finally, in cases like Kaylin’s where a real child’s face is used, there is a clearly identifiable victim.
It’s also important that it be illegal under state law, Nasarenko said. Some cases are contained entirely within state borders, and even if there is a federal crime involved, the U.S. Department of Justice is picky about who it prosecutes, leaving most cases to state and local authorities.
“In this case, the law lagged behind the technology, and we just finally caught up,” Nasarenko said. “Ideally, this would have been in effect a year or two ago, so when those eight cases came to the Ventura County DA’s office we could actually assess them and make a call whether we could charge them and prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Once he started seeing these cases and realized they couldn’t be prosecuted, Nasarenko went to the California District Attorneys Association, which is run by former Ventura County District Attorney Greg Totten. The association helped prepare the legislation and recruited Berman to write it.
After Berman introduced the bill in January, Nasarenko’s office issued a news release and posted about it on social media. Shalene Hayman saw the post and contacted the District Attorney’s Office, offering her daughter’s help.
“At first blush, we said, ‘You’re a minor, are you sure you want to do this?'” Nasarenko said.
“They couldn’t believe it was real,” Kaylin said. “They kept telling us, ‘We can’t believe you’re OK with this. Usually, we wouldn’t do this because you’re only 16 years old.’ But I had my parents with me, and I was not afraid to tell my story. … I just said, ‘Tell me when and where and I’ll be there.'”
‘A magical time’
Kaylin began acting when she was 5 years old. “She was always super entertaining when she was little, super outgoing,” Shalene Hayman said. “Her kindergarten teacher was like, ‘Wow, she should be on TV,’ and I was like, ‘What? No, we don’t do that. That’s not what we do.'”
The teacher introduced them to a commercial agent, and Kaylin started landing print and television gigs. As she grew up, she became “a huge musical theater kid.” At 10, she was on the verge of giving up TV acting when she auditioned for a Disney comedy called “Just Roll With It.”
She got the part and was one of the show’s stars for the two years it aired, from 2019 to 2021.
“It was such a magical time,” she said. “I loved it so much.”
Her co-stars went to school on set and lived nearby, but Kaylin and her mom commuted every day from Ventura, and Kaylin attended Ventura Missionary School. She did most of her schoolwork online — “pre-COVID COVID, in a way” she said — and went to school on campus one week per month.
“We drove to L.A. every day and back so she could sleep in her bed with her animals and her family,” Shalene Hayman said. “She got to come home and be a kid and go to school with her friends.”
‘It really could be anybody’
One part of starring on a show on Disney or any other major platform is promotion. Kaylin and her co-stars had to have public-facing social media accounts and were encouraged to post things like on-set selfies and messages to fans.
That appears to be how her face wound up on the material in Smelko’s possession when police searched his home in 2021. He had images depicting about 40 children, Shalene Hayman said, and many of them were actors on children’s shows.
The images of Kaylin came from her social media posts. Her acting career made her more visible than most children, but what happened to her could happen to anyone whose photos are online.
“That’s one of the terrifying things about this,” said Yiota Souras, chief legal officer for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “It really could be anybody.”
Souras said she thinks every state will have a law like this one eventually. In addition to the 16 states that already ban AI-generated images of child sexual abuse, there were about 25 state bills that “didn’t make it across the finish line in this session,” she said.
The new California law targets only content that appears to depict an actual child — in other words, AI-generated sexually explicit material that looks like a drawing or a cartoon is still legal, even if the character appears underage.
The law bans the material regardless of whether it depicts a real person’s face, like what happened to Kaylin, or it uses AI to generate a photorealistic image that doesn’t depict anyone specific. But it treats those two situations differently.
If the image is of an actual child, then any depiction of nudity or sexual activity is illegal. If the image is a generic AI creation who appears under 18, the material is illegal only if it meets the legal definition of obscenity, which includes a finding that it has no serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. For example, an entirely AI-generated movie of Romeo and Juliet that had a sex scene with underage characters would not be illegal, unless its AI characters had the faces of real children.
The new law carries a prison sentence of up to three years per offense, the same as the existing penalties for non-AI child pornography.
‘The scariest thing I’ve ever done’
Kaylin was one of three victims who traveled to Pittsburgh last year to testify in Smelko’s criminal trial.
“It never crossed my mind to say no,” she said.
Kaylin said she was nervous, but not scared. She kept her eyes away from Smelko and on the prosecuting attorney and the jurors and told her story.
Testifying before lawmakers in Sacramento was harder.
“That was the scariest thing I’ve ever done,” Kaylin said. “I only had two minutes to speak. The room was full, and I just thought, I cannot mess this up.”
In her testimony to the Assembly Public Safety Committee on April 9, Kaylin said the day she got that call from the FBI, “the living shield protecting my innocence broke.” Since then, she said, she has experienced anxiety, anger and thoughts that “every man has malicious intent against me.”
“I felt violated and disgusted to think about the fact that grown men had seen me in such a horrendous manner,” she told the committee. “While speaking about this topic is daunting, I know deep down I need to share my voice. … It truly gives the feeling of being alone, but to all other victims out there, I am living proof you are not alone.”
Current actor, future lawyer
Kaylin recently turned 17. She’s a senior at St. Bonaventure High School, where she’s on the cheer team and student government.
Since “Just Roll With It” ended its run, she has focused mostly on musical theater, though she still appears in commercials now and then. She said she’s decided to take a break from screen acting until she’s 18.
Her experience over the past year has given her another ambition.
“I do want to be an actress, but I’m looking into colleges that have great law schools, because I want to be a lawyer and I want to specialize in child advocacy, protecting children,” she said.
Her first choice is the University of San Diego, where the law school hosts the Children’s Advocacy Institute, a co-sponsor of Assembly Bill 1831.
Kaylin said she now feels her ordeal was a blessing, a way to use her talents and determination to help other victims.
“I feel like this was a very unfortunate situation, but I’m glad it happened to me and not somebody else,” she said.
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation’s Fund to Support Local Journalism.
