Behind the Silver Medal: Keyaa Banerji’s Struggle with Instant Fame and Online Identity
Keyaa Banerji deadlifted three times her bodyweight to win silver at the Junior World Powerlifting Championships. Within days, thousands of AI-generated images of her were circulating online, her old Instagram account was gone, and she was left figuring out how to compete on a stage that follows her home.
In the middle of August, in a hall in Sun City, South Africa, a 21-year-old from India walked up to a barbell loaded to 140 kilograms and pulled it off the floor. She weighed 45.7 kilograms. The number on the bar was more than three times her bodyweight, and when it locked out, it won India a silver medal in the deadlift at the IPF World Sub-Junior and Junior Classic Powerlifting Championships.
For a couple of weeks, that was the whole story. Then a clip of the lift found its way onto Indian social media, and it did what viral clips do except this one carried a person along with it. By the first week of September, Keyaa Banerji was trending, and so were the comments underneath her. Some were about the lift. A growing number were not.
In a few days, she found that her face and body were depicted in photos she did not even pose for, captioned by people whose stories she had never told. Her old Instagram account, which was private and had only a few hundred followers, had been shut down. She started a new one since, as she said, she did not wish to waste her time “reading different versions” of her own story.
This is not really a story about a medal. It is a story about what happened to a young athlete the moment she became visible, and how little of the internet's response had anything to do with the sport she had spent years training for.
Keyaa Banerji: The Young Powerlifter Behind the Silver Medal
Before all of the above mentioned, Banerji was just another rising star among those who compete in an uncelebrated sport in India. In powerlifting, she competes in the Junior Women's 47kg category "Junior" means 19 to 23-year-old lifters who belong to the level above Sub-Juniors who are teenagers. Thus, having become 21 this year, she is almost at the top end of that age range and has a proven competitive career that lasted for at least two years when her name was not known to anyone outside the sport.
In the 2025 National Sub-Junior and Junior Classic Powerlifting Championship, she got sixth place with the sum of 257.5kg for three powerlifting exercises. Then, in the 2026 Nationals, she took second place with a sum of 287.5kg (95kg for the squat exercise, 52.5kg for the bench press and 140kg for the deadlift).
That progression is what took her to South Africa.
There, competing against lifters from across the world, she recorded a 90kg squat, a 50kg bench press and a 140kg deadlift for a 280kg total, finishing fifth overall in her weight category while taking silver in the individual deadlift event, behind France's Ines Herbaux and just ahead of Ireland's Blathnaid O'Dwyer, who matched her 140kg lift but placed behind her on the day. Two other young Indian women, Madhura Kar and Asma Taherali Zabuawala, also medalled at the same championships, part of a quietly strong showing for Indian women's powerlifting that barely made news before Banerji's clip went viral.
None of this required an audience. In one of the Instagram Stories she later posted about her experience, Banerji described her relationship to the sport in plain terms: it exists in her life to let her challenge herself, not to be looked at. She said she had always kept a low profile online and rarely shared photographs of herself, even on the account she eventually lost.
When Keyaa Banerji’s Powerlifting Success Went Viral
The clip of her deadlift spread the way these things do in India reposted, captioned, set to music, picked up by pages that specialise in feel-good sport content. The praise was real. So was something else.
Alongside comments celebrating her strength, a parallel conversation opened up around her appearance, her surname and her presumed background remarks about "Bengali genes," comparisons to anime characters, and speculation about caste that had nothing to do with a 140kg deadlift. In one of her Stories, Banerji wrote about having to deal with "accounts impersonating me and disturbing conversations surrounding my ethnicity, ancestry and caste," alongside what she described as sexual harassment directed at her online.
This is an all too common theme for those who have followed a young woman's success story in India, where the respect for an accomplishment transforms rapidly into remarks about her physique or community, as if both were an integral part of the award. The unique aspect of Banerji's case was that it progressed from comments to something more calculated.
AI-Generated Images Turned Online Attention Into Harassment
The most disturbing part, in Banerji's own account, wasn't the comments. It was what people had built out of her face.
She said she had discovered what she described as thousands of AI-generated images using her face and body, "morphed and edited in very disturbing ways." She wrote that it had become "quite unnerving" waking up to find her feed and the feeds of people she knew full of fabricated pictures of her that she had never consented to and, in most cases, had never even seen before they were already circulating.
It's worth sitting with why this is a different category of harm from an offensive comment or a cruel joke. A comment is something someone says about you. A generative image is something someone makes of you a fabricated visual record that didn't exist until a stranger typed a request into a tool and decided what to do with her likeness. It doesn't require photo-editing skill or access to compromising material.
It only requires publicly available photographs, which for a young athlete who has just gone viral are suddenly everywhere. Realism is the point: the image is designed to be mistaken, at a glance, for something real.
Banerji has not said who made these images, and there is no public information establishing who was responsible or whether anyone has been identified. What is documented is her own account of the scale and speed of images appearing faster than she could track them, spreading through networks that included people she actually knew.
Why Keyaa Banerji’s Instagram Account Disappeared
Here the story runs into a genuine gap between what Banerji has said and what can be independently confirmed, and it's worth being precise about that gap rather than smoothing over it.
What Banerji has said, in her own Stories, is that her old Instagram account private, roughly 300 followers, an account on which she says she rarely posted photographs at all was suspended by Instagram in the middle of all this. She wrote that the situation "only got more stressful" once that happened, and that she then built a new account because she felt she had "no choice" if she wanted any say in how her achievement and identity were being represented online.
She was explicit that she hadn't wanted to make the new account public, and equally explicit that she had no interest in using it for content creation or profit she said her only goal was to make sure people knew "which one's mine" so that the platform wouldn't, in her words, "take my voice away again."
What is not established, at least in public reporting, is why Instagram suspended the account in the first place.
Meta has not issued a public statement about her case specifically. It isn't clear whether the suspension was triggered by mass reporting of her account by hostile users, by an automated moderation error, or by something else entirely. All three are common enough on Instagram that any of them is plausible, and none of them has been confirmed here.
It also isn't clear from available reporting whether Banerji filed a formal complaint with Instagram, with India's cybercrime authorities, or with the police before or after the suspension. Powerlifting India and the IPF have not issued public statements on her situation either.
That uncertainty doesn't make the loss less real. For an athlete in a niche sport, a social media account is often the only channel connecting training-hall results to public recognition, sponsorship interest and a fanbase that might actually watch the sport grow. Losing even a small, private one while simultaneously being flooded with fabricated versions of yourself is a particular kind of disorientation: the accurate record of who you are disappears at the exact moment the inaccurate one is multiplying.
AI Deepfakes and the Growing Risk to Women Athletes
Banerji's case sits inside a pattern that has been building in India for a few years now, and it helps to look at where else it has shown up.
In November 2023, a deepfake video superimposing actor Rashmika Mandanna's face onto another woman's body went viral on social media. Unlike Banerji's case, this one had a clear legal trail: the Delhi Commission for Women filed a complaint, the Delhi Police's cyber unit registered an FIR under sections of the Indian Penal Code covering forgery and sections of the IT Act covering identity theft and the non-consensual circulation of private images, and Meta was asked to hand over account details.
Months later, police arrested a young engineering graduate from Andhra Pradesh not for creating the video, but for reposting it to grow a fan page's follower count. The case showed both that the legal machinery exists to respond to this kind of harm, and how much has to go right a formal complaint, platform cooperation, and sustained police work for it to actually move.
Indian women's sport has run into its own version of the problem, minus the malice.As soon as the Indian women's cricket team secured the ICC World Cup title in 2025, all kinds of brands were eager to produce "moment marketing" content, like the AI-generated image that portrayed the captain, Harmanpreet Kaur, lying in bed with the cup.
The image was fake and loving, not threatening but legal scholars in WIPO Magazine took this particular example to demonstrate how the women in Indian sports faced a gaping legal hole: there is no legislation that prevents any company from creating a fake image of an athlete and circulating it without her permission.
The same piece noted a February 2026 Delhi High Court order, in a case brought by actor Kajol, that AI-generated deepfakes can violate not just a person's commercial rights over their image but their constitutional right to live with dignity, a legal argument that is only beginning to be tested.
And then there is the evidence that this isn't really about individual bad actors at all, but about a structural feature of what happens when young people compete in public. World Athletics has invested four years in its AI-powered monitoring system in large athletics competitions, and in the Paris 2024 Olympic Games alone, it detected 809 instances of abusive posts against athletes, where racists and sexualized abuse constituted almost half of the total cases.
At the same time, an analysis done by the International Olympic Committee for all sports during the Paris 2024 Olympics showed that although men got a higher number of abusives in general, abusives against women were mainly sexual and gender-based, without having anything to do with their performance in the field.
Why it lands harder on women
None of this is unique to Banerji, and none of it is really about powerlifting. It's about what happens when a young woman's visibility online outpaces her ability to control what's done with it.
Deepfake pornography, in particular, is not an evenly distributed problem. A widely cited industry analysis found that 96 to 98 percent of deepfake videos online are non-consensual sexual content, and that 99 percent of the people depicted in them are women, a finding UN Women has cited directly in explaining why it treats this as a gender-based harm rather than a generic technology risk. In one recent case, a UK journalist named Daisy Dixon discovered sexualised AI-generated images of herself created using a major platform's own built-in image tool, a reminder that this isn't confined to obscure corners of the internet; it can happen on infrastructure millions of people already use.
The WIPO researchers writing about Indian sportswomen drew a useful distinction here. Male athletes, they note, mostly deal with commercial infringement of their image, someone using their face to sell something without paying for it. Female athletes disproportionately deal with something else:
AI tools used to alter their actual appearance, sexualise them without consent, or place them in fabricated situations designed to embarrass or humiliate. It's the difference between having your image stolen and having your identity rewritten.
What Indian Law Says About AI Deepfakes and Online Harassment
India does not lack legal tools for this exact problem; what it lacks is a settled, fast, reliable path from a young woman finding disturbing images of herself to those images actually being removed and their creators identified.
The existing law offers several routes in. Depending on the case, complaints have used Section 66C of the IT Act (identity theft), Section 66E (capturing or circulating a private image without consent), Sections 67 and 67A (publishing obscene or sexually explicit material), and provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita covering forgery, stalking, criminal intimidation and outraging a woman's modesty.
Several recent Indian cases, a Hyderabad woman whose morphed images were traced to accounts in multiple countries, a Kerala actor whose photos were shared to a 15,000-member Facebook group under a fake profile in her name have been registered and investigated using exactly this toolkit.
What changed more recently is that India now has, for the first time, a specific regulatory definition of the problem.The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology made an amendment to the IT Rules in October 2025, which defined "synthetically generated information" and also mandated the labeling of such content by the platform providing artificial intelligence-based content generation tool and to mark metadata about the origin of the information, wherever possible.
The rules came into effect in mid-November 2025 and became more stringent in early 2026 with reduced time frame for removal of flagged contents. This is surely an important step, but there is no denying to the fact that these rules have certain limitations. Automated tools only manage to detect synthetic contents in 65% to 70% cases, definitions for many critical aspects are vague and enforcement against foreign platforms is difficult.
The urgency behind these rules isn't abstract. Only months before Banerji's case, X's Grok AI tool became the centre of an uproar in India after users found it could be prompted to generate undressed or sexualised versions of real women's photographs, drawing calls from doctors, commentators and ordinary users to have it banned in the country. The pattern is consistent: the tools to do this keep getting easier to access, and the rules keep arriving slightly behind them.
For anyone who finds themselves on the receiving end of this before the law fully catches up, two practical resources already exist: India's National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal at cybercrime.gov.in, where anyone can file a complaint, and StopNCII.org, a free international tool that lets a person "hash" an intimate or manipulated image on their own device without ever uploading the image itself so that partner platforms including Meta, TikTok and Reddit can automatically detect and block matching uploads.
Deleting something the internet has already seen
Even where a platform does act by removing an image, suspending an account that posted it that isn't really the end of the problem, and Banerji's own account of her feed and her friends' feeds being simultaneously flooded gestures at why.
Once an image has been generated and shared even a handful of times, it has almost certainly already been downloaded, screenshotted, saved to someone's camera roll, or reposted to a private group chat that no platform can see into. Deleting the original post doesn't reach any of those copies.
This is precisely the gap that hashing tools like StopNCII.org are built to address they let a person block future re-uploads of a specific piece of content across cooperating platforms but they can't retroactively erase what's already been saved outside those platforms' reach, and they depend on victims knowing the tool exists in the first place, which most don't.
The honest answer to "can this be made to go away" is usually no, not completely. What's achievable is containment: fewer places it can resurface, fewer people who stumble onto it by accident, a search result that doesn't lead there anymore. That is a meaningfully worse outcome than the images never having existed, and it's the reality that Banerji, like most people in this position, has had to build her response around.
Beyond the Deepfake: A Girl Who Likes to Deadlift
What's easy to lose, in all of this, is that Banerji didn't disappear. She didn't quit the sport, and she didn't go silent online either. She built a new account, made it public against her own instincts, and used it to say clearly what had happened to her and what she wanted instead.
In her own words, she said she'd rather take "shaky steps" toward standing up for herself than stay quiet while other people's fabricated versions of her kept circulating unanswered. She asked people to redirect anyone looking for her real account to the new one, so that fewer people would end up looking at the fake images instead.
And she was specific about what she actually wanted from all of it not more followers, not more attention, but, in her words, "a space where I can exist as a girl who likes to deadlift" rather than an image that had been pulled apart and reassembled by strangers until it stopped feeling like her at all.
That's the part of the story that happened in the real world, the same place the training happened, and the competition, and the 140 kilograms she actually lifted off the floor in South Africa.
Everything else the images, the impersonation, the account that vanished and had to be rebuilt happened somewhere else, in a version of the internet that had decided it knew her better than she knew herself. It didn't. She's a 21-year-old who trains, competes, and is still, by her own account, only getting stronger. The rest was never really about her at all.
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