I’m reading a report in The Sunday Times of Ireland about a swingers' site that published a profile of an Irish politician. The account has been taken down but the presence of the profile has raised concerns in some circles.
“Senator feared for her safety over fake profile on swingers website” By Hugh O’Connell in The Sunday Times, October 13, 2024
A Fianna Fail senator has revealed how anonymous letters about a fake profile of her on a swingers website prompted a garda investigation and left her fearing for her safety.
[Lorraine Clifford-Lee](Lorraine Clifford-Lee - Wikipedia), Fianna Fail’s Dail candidate in Dublin Fingal West, went to gardai in April last year after receiving two anonymous letters in Oireachtas envelopes from an individual working in Leinster House that alerted her to a profile using her picture and personal details on the Fab Swingers Ireland website. The matter was investigated by gardai, who were unable to establish who was behind the profile, with the website’s UK-based operators saying all user data linked to the profile had automatically been deleted in line with its legal obligations. The individual believed to have sent the letters denied setting up the brought in the case.
Clifford-Lee spoke to The Sunday Times about the ordeal to highlight the lack of accountability for websites where someone’s personal data is misused and to encourage women to seek help from authorities if they find themselves in a similar situation.
The married mother of two said the incident at one point left her “very frightened for my own physical safety” but insisted she would not discourage women from entering politics.
“I feel strongly it was an attempt to blackmail me, to destroy my reputation, destroy my marriage, and to this day I am fearful that Al-generated intimate photographs of me are circulating as a result of this profile,” she said.
The two-term senator’s ordeal began on April 20 last year when she collected post from her pigeonhole at Leinster House. Among the correspondence was a letter addressed to her with the Houses of the Oireachtas logo on the envelope. The anonymous handwritten letter stated: “Senator, you may already be aware that someone has set up a profile with your photo on the swinger site Fab Swingers Ireland. The profile name is Fun Dub. The profile was set up two days ago. I have reported the profile to the site admin. Yours.”
Clifford-Lee was immediately alarmed and visited the site to see if the profile existed, but was unable to access it without registering. She signed up using basic details, some of which were incorrect, and searched for “Fun Dub”, quickly finding the profile flagged in the letter. The image of her had been taken from her Instagram account. It was a version of a picture with Stephen Donnelly, the health minister, taken in the corridor of Leinster House with the minister cropped out. The username was “Fun Dubs” along with the name “Maeve”, who the profile said was aged 40 (Clifford-Lee was 41 at the time) and was based in Donabate, Dublin. The profile said “Maeve” was “a 40-year-old bisexual woman and I’m looking to meet men, women, couples”. Along with the one public photograph, the profile said there were two private photographs that could be accessed only by verified users of the website.
Clifford-Lee had no idea what these photos could be and said she “got the fright of my life” as she spotted that it listed her height as 5ft 2in. “Instantly then I knew it was somebody that had been in close quarters to me,” she said. She gathered herself, tried to contact her husband but couldn’t reach him, messaged a friend and then walked to nearby Pearse Street garda station to report the matter. A garda on duty took the details and that weekend a detective sergeant in the serious crime unit at Pearse Street was assigned to the case.
Over that same weekend Clifford-Lee monitored the profile and saw extra detail added about sexual preferences including what she said were “obscure outlandish things”. To her distress the location was also constantly changing to different parts of her constituency in north Co Dublin. She felt users of the site would have been alerted to it, viewing it as a “deliberate attempt to destroy my reputation among constituents”.
The following Tuesday when she returned to Leinster House there was another Oireachtas envelope addressed to her in the same handwriting in her pigeonhole. The enclosed note stated: “Hi, That Fun Dubs profile on fabswingers.com is still active, is still claiming to be you & to be based in Skerries. I have tried to draw them out + get more info.
My suspicion is that it’s fake identity fraud. However if it is you then have fun. If not & should you wish to discuss further then call me on 08* ******* but maybe text me 1st with the words Fun Dubs - so I knowto expect a call. Regards Vintage.”
Clifford-Lee felt it was better to also bring the second letter to the attention of the gardai. That day she met the detective sergeant and provided them with a statement, the anonymous letters and envelopes, and screenshots. The following day she contacted Seán Ó Fearghaíl, the ceann comhairle, asking for details of security arrangements for Oireachtas members. She met him later. “I went through everything, showed him copies of the letter and in fairness he immediately spotted the grave concern that I would have with this,” she said. Within a few days the profile had disappeared from the website, but Clifford-Lee was no clearer as to who was behind it or the letters.
She wondered if it might have been a colleague, someone in Leinster House, or someone “friendly” trying to do her harm. She was concerned that the next approach would not be via letter but in person on campus by someone who might want to harm her. She was, she recalled, “very frightened for my own physical safety”.
“I went into my shell, I became fearful and I lost trust in people. I was quite upset that somebody would target me in this way. I didn’t know how many people had seen this. I didn’t know who else in Leinster House was aware of it. How many people were in on it? Around the constituency I kind of curtailed my activities as a safety measure,” she said. The Sunday Times understands gardai identified and met the individual who sent the letters to Clifford-Lee. This person, who has worked in Leinster House for several years, maintained they had contacted the senator out of concern and denied having anything to do with setting up the profile. No charges were brought.
A spokeswoman for the Houses of the Oireachtas said: “We have a longstanding policy whereby we don’t comment on HR or security matters.”
Clifford-Lee said that gardai informed her they had been unable to obtain data from the operator of Fab Swingers Ireland to establish who was behind the profile - a situation she described as “really unsatisfactory” as she believes there is “no recourse to anyone that has been damaged or harassed or their reputations destroyed by a website”. “Until technology companies operating in this country co-operate with An Garda Siochana when illegal or potentially illegal activity is being investigated, none of us are safe,” she said.
In response to queries submitted through the Fab Swingers website, the legal department of Winchester Consultancy, registered in the UK, confirmed it “received a request from the police in Ireland” on April 27 last year - two days after Clifford-Lee gave a statement - and co-operated within legal limits.
The company told gardai it could not locate an account based on the information supplied and pointed out that in order to comply with data protection law, once an account was deleted all data associated with that account “including the user profile, account details, login and IP data is securely deleted upon by an automated software process”.
An Garda Siochana said that it did not comment on named individuals and on individual victims of crime without their permission.
Clifford-Lee said gardai took her complaint seriously. “One of the reasons I want to speak about this is because women, sometimes we suppress our innate sense of danger so as not to make a fuss,” she said.
“But when your gut tells you that there’s something wrong and there’s danger, you need to listen to it and have confidence that other people will listen to you; and the guards did listen to me, and they could see immediately that this was actually a very dangerous scenario, and they acted swiftly and appropriately.”