Indian powerlifter Keyaa Banerji grabbed headlines with her sensational performance at the 2026 IPF World Sub-Junior & Junior Classic Powerlifting Championships. The 21-year-old lifted 140kg, more than three times her body weight, to win a silver medal in the deadlift event for India. While social media was filled with praise for Banerji, she revealed a darker side to her newfound fame, saying that her achievement also led to online sexual harassment, impersonation, and AI-generated images made using her face and body. She revealed her experience through her Instagram stories.
“I recently won a deadlift silver medal at IPF Jr Worlds for India and while I appreciate the support and recognition, as an Indian female athlete I’ve also had to deal with sexual harassment online, accounts impersonating me, disturbing conversations surrounding my ethnicity, ancestry and caste, and the Worst – thousands of AI generated images of me with pictures of my body and face morphed and edited in very disturbing ways – it’s quite unnerving to be waking up everyday to my feed (and the feeds of every single person I know) flooded with these fake AI pictures,” Keyaa Banerji wrote on Instagram.
Banerji went on to say that she has always been a private person and not someone who shared a lot of pictures on social media. As a result, seeing herself being “everywhere” has proved to be a very difficult experience.
“I’ve always been a private person, and if you’ve known me in any capacity / followed my old account, you’d know I never posted pictures on it either! It only got more stressful when Instagram suspended my old account (a private account with 300 followers), hence, I’ve made this new one. I didn’t want to make it public, but I’m left with no choice if I want to have a say in a narrative about my own sport and accomplishments and stand up for myself without getting my account suspended again!”
“The purpose of my sport in my life is just to challenge myself in a fun way and I’m grateful to be competing at the level that I am. I never wanted to see myself everywhere like this, in-fact I really despised all these AI posters popping up without my consent,” she wrote on the Instagram story.