Hacked Hollywood: The prying game as hackers lay bare female stars’ photo secrets

The recent leak of nude photos of Hollywood actresses is the work of ‘grubbly little misogynists’ who placed a higher value on the images as they were in the public arena without the women’s consent, says Suzanne Harrington

HAVE you looked at the leaked internet images of Jennifer Lawrence? She is, as you know, one of a hundred or so famous women whose private online accounts were hacked, and whose private images — that is, nude photos — were illegally uploaded without their knowledge or consent. The other women include actors like Kirsten Dunst and Kate Upton. So have you had a peek?

If you have, is this perpetrating sexual abuse? Helen Lewis, writing in The New Statesman, calls it “terrorism against women.” She writes, “It is a function of successful terrorism that the media becomes unavoidably complicit in spreading the terror. There is no way to report the story without increasing its potency. We cannot stop looking.”