Deepfake Sextortion in England, Wales and Northern Ireland: A Doctrinal and Regulatory Analysis

Existing law provides no settled account of how deepfake sextortion should be characterised and regulated in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, creating uncertainty for charging, adjudication and platform compliance at the point when the Online Safety Act 2023 allocates duties to regulated services under Ofcom oversight. This article responds by analysing and synthesising the Online Safety Act 2023 with the Sexual Offences Act 2003 and residual harassment and communications offences, using doctrinal analysis and normative evaluation to identify points of alignment and misfit. It establishes criteria for identifying synthetic sexual coercion, including the elements that mark threat-stage conduct, the role of fabrication in the wrong, and the conditions under which epistemic harms should be treated as legally relevant within ordinary doctrine. It rejects three propositions: that intimate-image abuse is primarily a publication-based wrong; that an authentic image is a precondition for liability; and that content-led platform duties adequately address coercion before dissemination. This analysis specifies how courts and prosecutors should classify conduct and select offences, how services should operationalise risk assessment and mitigation for threat-stage harms, and which targeted reforms to offence design, platform duties and victim-facing procedures are required to secure predictable protection and effective redress.