Once again, a woman’s body is being used against her as blackmail—but this time, Bella Thorne is flipping the script. The 21-year-old actress shared a series of naked photos of herself on social media to take back her power after a blackmailer threatened to leak them to the public.
On Saturday, June 15, Thorne posted a series of topless photos of herself to Twitter, along with a screenshot of a note she wrote regarding the incident. “Fuck u and the power u think you have over me. I’m gonna write about this in my next book,” she captioned her tweet, along with three angry-face emojis.
“For the last 24 hours I have been threatened with my own nudes,” she wrote in the screenshotted note. “I feel gross, I feel watched, I feel someone has taken something from me that I only wanted one special person to see.”
According to her tweet, the unnamed perpetrator has threatened to leak nude photos of other celebrities as well. She didn’t give too many details on who exactly her alleged hacker might be, but she didn’t block out his number when she shared screenshots of the threatening texts he sent her.
“For too long I let a man take advantage of me over and over and I’m fucking sick of it. I’m putting this out because it’s my decision. Now you don’t get to take yet another thing from me. I can sleep better knowing I took my power back. You can’t control my life, you never will.”
This isn’t the first time a woman has had to deal with a hacker exposing private photos. In April, Buzzfeed reported on a story of a middle school teacher from Long Island, New York, who lost her job after a student obtained a topless selfie and distributed among students. According to the article, staff members shamed her for the incident, which prompted her to sue the school district for unlawful gender discrimination. In 2017, a woman lost her banking job after a body-positive nude photo of her and her husband went viral.
Revenge porn, which is defined as the distribution of sexually graphic images of individuals without their consent, is illegal in most states. Unfortunately, this probably isn’t the last time we’ll see someone use revenge porn as a means of blackmail— but Bella’s taking a step in the right direction to end this awful trend.
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