Prosecutors played Caleb Flynn’s AI-generated love song for his mistress at his wife’s murder trial. The former “American Idol” contestant and worship pastor is on trial in Miami County, Ohio for the murder of his wife, Ashley, and prosecutors played two AI versions of the song he had made for his mistress, Alleigha Botner, in court.
Flynn wrote the lyrics himself, then fed them through AI tools, including ElevenLabs, to generate the music and an AI voice to sing them. He’d made his devotion to Jesus part of his public identity.
Both versions carried the same lyrics in different keys and voices. The lines leaned on an anniversary and the couple’s age gap: “Now the third of every month hits me like rain. An anniversary carved into pain.”
Another ran, “Said love has a limit, said love’s not that clean. But age never mattered when it was you and me.” When the affair began, Flynn was about 40 and Botner was in her early 20s.
In texts read aloud, Flynn described exactly how he built it, loading the song on piano, recording it with his computer microphone, and layering an AI voice over the top. He offered to send Botner “the song I wrote for you with an AI voiceover.”
Investigators pulled the audio files and matching lyrics from the Notes app on his iPhone, and found that an AI music generator app had been deleted from the phone days before Ashley died.
Jurors bit their cheeks and covered their mouths, members of Ashley’s family cringed and shook their heads, and Flynn wiped his forehead with a napkin.
Botner testified that Flynn wrote the song “to show how much he cared about me,” then added that “right now, they mean nothing.” Prosecutors used the recordings, alongside more than 100,000 messages between the two, to argue the affair was Flynn’s motive for killing Ashley and staging it as an intruder.
