In 2014, nude images of hundreds of celebrities, mostly women, were uploaded to 4chan via Apple’s iCloud service and quickly spread elsewhere. One of the higher profile victims of the hack, which was dubbed “The Fappening” by the more twisted parts of the internet, was Jennifer Lawrence. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter‘s Awards Chatter podcast, the mother! star compared the leak to “getting gang banged by the planet.”
Lawrence said the “unbelievably violating” hack was “like a ransom situation where they were releasing new ones every hour or so. And, I don’t know, I feel like I got gang-banged by the f*cking planet — like, there’s not one person in the world that is not capable of seeing these intimate photos of me. 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.” Lawrence was contacted by other women whose photos were leaked about suing Apple, but “none of that was gonna really bring me peace, none of that was gonna bring my nude body back to me and [Lawrence’s former boyfriend Nicholas Hoult], the person that they were intended for. It wasn’t gonna bring any of that back. So I wasn’t interested in suing everybody; I was just interested in healing.”
Her next film, the Russian spy thriller Red Sparrow, was a response of sorts to the hack. “[The film] was really sexual, which has always scared me. I’ve always been like, ‘Absolutely no way’ — especially after what happened — ‘no way am I ever gonna do anything sexual.’ So, for me, doing Red Sparrow, I felt like I was getting something back that had been taken from me.”
The hacker behind the leak, Ryan Collins, is serving an 18-month sentence in federal prison for a felony violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
(Via The Hollywood Reporter)