Why every woman can see herself in the story of a German celebrity couple’s split | Fatma Aydemir

Many will recognise their own experiences of digital abuse in Collien Fernandes’s allegations – the sense that technology offers perps both tools and cover, says Guardian Europe columnist Fatma Aydemir

Some stories that unfold in real life would read like the plot of a bad crime novel if you wrote them down. Too obvious, too contrived, almost lazy in their cruelty. For example, this one: a woman spends years trying to identify the person who has allegedly been violating her online, only to eventually conclude that it was her husband all along.

This is how the case of Germany’s once-favourite celebrity couple Collien Fernandes and Christian Ulmen now presents itself to the public. Fernandes, TV presenter, actor and author, has been a familiar face in mainstream entertainment for more than two decades. Ulmen, an actor, producer and former MTV presenter, is long associated with a certain kind of ironic, self-aware masculinity. The two married in 2011, had a daughter, and cultivated the image of a modern, witty supercouple, working together on series and advertisements, in which they playfully talked about their seemingly average marriage for comedic effect. Until that image fractured.

When the couple announced their separation last year, people publicly mourned the loss of the ideal celebrity couple. But the dark backdrop of this breakup was only revealed after a report in Der Spiegel.

Fernandes, in an interview with the newspaper, said she had filed a legal complaint against Ulmen in Spain, where the couple had moved to in 2023. Her allegations were shocking: Fernandes claimed that her husband had subjected her to domestic violence, created fake social media profiles in her name, used them to contact men and distributed sexualised images and videos designed to appear as if they depicted her.

Fernandes has been talking publicly about digital violence and her own experiences with it for years. She even made a TV documentary, which aired in 2024, in which she travels around the world to find the source of pornographic content attributed to her, not only circulating online, but also sent directly to people she was working with at the time, in her name. In her interview with Der Spiegel, Fernandes claims that her then-husband confessed to her that he was behind the abuse only after the release of her documentary. In an Instagram post, Fernandes stated: “It turned him on to humiliate me for years.” Ulmen denies the allegations.

But, according to Fernandes’ account, this is where her legal problems begin. Strictly speaking, what she describes is not a case of AI-generated deepfakes, on which the German government has promised to legislate, but of identity abuse. The result may look similar, but the legal categorisation is not. And that gap, she argues, leaves victims like her insufficiently protected. There are pornographic deepfakes of Fernandes online, but Ulmen’s lawyer declared in a statement that none of these were created or distributed by him. Ulmen had “never produced and/or distributed deepfake videos of Ms Fernandes or any other person”, the statement said.

Whether fabricated through AI or misattributed through lookalikes and impersonation, the effect is the same: the loss of control over one’s own image, the public sexualisation of a person without consent. “Virtual rape” is what Fernandes calls it.

It is a constellation that feels disturbingly contemporary. Intimate partner violence does not end at the front door any more; it mutates online. Technology has lowered the threshold for sexualised violence to an almost absurd degree. And it is not a glitch in the system that the overwhelming majority of those targeted are women; it is the system reproducing an old hierarchy through new means.

Moreover, the fact that Fernandes chose to file the complaint in Spain is not incidental. It exposes a gap in legal protection across Europe. While Germany still struggles to adequately classify and prosecute forms of digital sexualised abuse that do not fit neatly into existing categories, Spain has in recent years strengthened its legal framework around digital and gender-based violence. The decision to seek justice there is, in itself, an indictment of how unevenly protection is distributed.

In recent years, celebrity cases such as Johnny Depp v Amber Heard have shown how polarising the social media debate on sexualised violence can become. Followers take sides, timelines are dissected, and credibility is debated in real time. Since Collien Fernandes made her allegations public, demonstrations have been held in many German cities to protest against gender-based violence and to express solidarity with her. Security concerns for her, including death threats, were such that Fernandes had to wear a bulletproof vest to speak at the demo in Hamburg.

At the same time, millions of women will recognise something of their own experience in Fernandes’ allegations. Maybe not the specific details, but the structure: the humiliation, the loss of control, the feeling that the digital world offers perpetrators both tools and cover. For every high-profile case, there are countless others that never surface. Stories that end not in legal action, but in withdrawal, fear and silence.

Meanwhile, the political response in Germany has followed a depressingly familiar script. The chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has seized on the debate around gender-based violence to once again frame it as a problem primarily associated with migrant men, even though this case clearly contradicts that notion. Christian Ulmen is a white German man, Collien Fernandes is the daughter of an Indian immigrant and a German-Hungarian mother.

Nevertheless, Merz takes his chance to redirect attention away from the structural and deeply rooted nature of gender-based violence, recasting it instead as something external, and conveniently other. That this comes from a politician who voted against criminalising marital rape in 1997, when Germany finally recognised it as a crime, is more than just a historical footnote.

It must be hoped that Fernandes’ statements and legal actions can shift the terms of the public conversation. Not because visibility guarantees justice, but because it enforces an acknowledgment of harm that is still minimised. Digital violence is frequently treated as less “real” than its physical counterpart, as if the absence of touch diminished its impact on reputations and psychological safety.

It would be a mistake to frame this solely as a celebrity scandal. What is being negotiated here is something far broader: how societies define violence in the digital age, and whether legal systems are capable of keeping pace with the technology that reshapes it.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth is this: the tools that make such abuse possible are no longer exceptional. They are ordinary. And as long as we don’t recognise this, reality will continue to feel like a bad crime plot.

• Fatma Aydemir is a Berlin-based author, novelist, playwright and a Guardian Europe columnist