Jennifer Lawrence calls 2014 nude photo hack ‘so unbelievably violating’
Jennifer Lawrence, never one to mince words, says that her 2014 nude photo hack left her feeling “gangbanged by the f**king planet”.
She explained how the incident left her feeling exposed during an interview for The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, published on Monday.
“There’s not one person in the world that is not capable of seeing these intimate photos of me,” she told the podcast. “You can just be at a barbecue and somebody can just pull them up on their phone. That was a really impossible thing to process.”
The actress says she’s still processing the hack, describing the experience as “so unbelievably violating that you can’t even put it into words”. “When I first found out it was happening, my security reached out to me. It was happening minute-to-minute — it was almost like a ransom situation where they were releasing new ones every hour or so,” she recalled.
The leaked photos, which allowed hackers to steal and post nude and semi-nude images of several celebrities including those of Lawrence, happened due to a massive breach of Apple’s iCloud service. They wound up on the website 4Chan.
“This is a flagrant violation of privacy,” Lawrence’s reps Bryna Rifkin and Liz Mahoney said in a statement during the time of the leak. “The authorities have been contacted and will prosecute anyone who posts the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence.”
Other celebs targeted included Kate Upton, Victoria Justice, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ariana Grande and Kirsten Dunst. The FBI announced in 2016 that a Pennsylvania man, Ryan Collins, 36, one of the hackers responsible for the Lawrence’s leaked photos, signed a plea agreement to plead guilty to a felony violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
This year, a Chicago man, Edward Majerczyk, 29, was sentenced to nine months in prison for hacking the electronic accounts of 30 celebrities and stealing private information, including nude videos and photos. He was also ordered to pay US$5,700 (187,000 baht) in restitution for counselling services for one undisclosed celebrity victim whose photos were disseminated online.
However, neither Majerczyk nor Collins was charged with actually sharing or uploading the private photos of female celebrities online.