20 People Reveal What Happened After Their Nudes Got Leaked
"A couple of years ago, someone emailed a link to a gallery of my nudes to my parents. It was awkward."
Found on Ask Reddit
1.
This was a really crazy and stressful part of my life. Luckily the repercussions weren’t as bad as some others in this thread. I’ve learned from the experience which I appreciate.
I had no idea that my pictures were posted until a lawyer from California messaged me on Facebook informing me. Somebody had posted my nudes, with my Facebook and Twitter links underneath on one of those revenge websites. I still don’t know exactly who did it. The lawyer who contacted me was working on taking the website down as a class suit. It was a few months of stress, random people adding me on Facebook, and praying nobody I knew would see. Thankfully the website got shut down within 3 months or so. I was also only 16/17 in the pictures. Happened about 6-7 years ago. Shout out to that lawyer though, he was a big help and made me feel as comfortable as possible assuring he was going to have it shut down and not to pay any take-down fees.
2.
I accidentally uploaded a risqué pic of myself (in work uniform with dick hanging out) to my Snapchat story, instead of sending it privately. It was up for like an hour before I realized. I know people saw it but only one person has ever mentioned it. It doesnt seem like anything has changed.
3.
It hasn’t been a big deal so far but there’s also nothing I can do about it. It will be a different story if someone that knows me finds them.
— kkansa
4.
Had an ex threaten 16 year old me that he was gonna post some nudes of me. He was like 20 at the time. (Long story filled with daddy issues and low self esteem.) My next message back was “Oh that’s right you are in possession of child pornography, I hope the cops don’t find out about that.” Never heard another word from him.
5.
I found a short clip of me on a porn site, i had them remove it, they did it right away which i was very impressed and appreciative of. No idea if anyone i know has seen it. I spent a few hours checking amateur porn sites to see if it was uploaded anywhere else. Did that for a couple of weeks but it’s like looking for a beedle in a haystack so i gave up.
6.
None. My coworkers saw it. They moved on.
Edit – medical field -reactions: 70%meh 25% disgust 5%flirty -implications: HR and legal for damage control. -family: supportive -result: vid got removed from xtube, xvideos and pornhub that’s it so far
7.
I was at a party that got out of hand and there was a hidden camera there. There is video of me having sex but fortunately I’m pretty far back from the camera and there is another couple more in the foreground. I’m recognizable, especially for about 30 seconds, but only barely, I could plausibly deny it is me.
3 people have asked about it. With two I played dumb and said it wasn’t me. They may or may not have believed me, it doesn’t really matter. The other knows for sure because she recognizes the room décor and knows it has to be me. It’s a little awkward but there isn’t much I can do about it. She seems to be keeping quiet about it.
The guy from the couple in the foreground confronted the guy who hid the camera. Some punches were thrown.
8.
I’ve been modeling since I was eighteen. Nudes, fetish, pretty much anything that wasn’t explicit, I’ve shot it. I’m in a few books, a few galleries, a lactation clinic in Miami has my naked ass in full color print right in their waiting room.
Someone tried to “leak” a few hundred photos on my FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. I keep my personal life pretty separate from my professional one, so I’m guessing they assumed that compartmentalizing meant that my modeling was a secret.
It wasn’t. There were a few confused comments. My extended family had a few choices words for me, but other than that, nothing besides a few laughs.
9.
I worked for a meme site as the community manager for about two years. An ex sent some photos to one of the more active users on the site and they apparently got passed around offsite quite a lot. As a woman admining a site that was 70% male, this caused a few problems.
Most of it was the usual stuff, just sending me shitty messages and calling me a slut, “admin by injection” (implying I had slept my way into the job), and other insults implying that I couldn’t do my job. Those were manageable. The biggest, though, was this past December when a disgruntled user (who had a history of being creepily sexually aggressive to me and to other female users) started emailing me from a fake email. He was being super sexual and weird and said stuff about my personal life that he shouldn’t know. It ended with him threatening to post my nudes on the site. He was one of the more prolific posters of content on the site, very well known, and I had to ban his account and block his IP, and I filed a police report about his threat.
Then I spent the next month getting shitty messages from all of his cronies about what a bitch I am for banning his account and how “they’d never seen him behave like that” so I must be lying. Yeah, no shit you hadn’t seen that happen, he does it in private and only to women.
I quit my job shortly before this happened, actually, and was only still admining because I had been asked (and paid) to help my former employer transition the community because they were shutting the site down. So, after about a month it had kind of solved itself. But I think things would have been very different if I was still working there. You don’t fuck with my job.
Everyone on the internet is a dick.
10.
Ex-girlfriend sent intimate photos of me to my friends after we broke up. They ended up going around my town, some people sent them further on.
Woke up about 2 weeks after it all began to a message from a girl from my hometown, 9 hours away. She saw them, knew immediately it was me (birthmark on my chest), and got back in touch after 12 years of silence to see if I was okay.
How did my ex-girlfriend affect my life by spreading my nudes? She got me my current girlfriend.
— Domwompy
11.
I’m aware I’ve posted on gonewild, I was even a cam girl for a while. But one day an old high school friend was asking me about me doing porn. I thought he was referring to my cam girl thing. Nope, apparently, an ex boyfriend had posted videos of me on pornhub. They had my full name in the title, clear shots of my face, everything that can identify the girl in the video as me was there. I was devastated. This was someone I thought I could trust, allowed him to record what we did together and he posted these videos with my fucking name in the title. I saw the uploaded date, it was uploaded the same month I had gotten engaged. So I’m sitting on the couch, crying my eyes out when my then fiance comes through the door. I told him what happened, showed him the videos and told him if he wanted to cancel our engagement, that’s okay, I understand. He told me to stop being stupid and helped me get the videos removed (really easy to do, just claim you were underage!) We’ve been together for 4 years, married for 3 this year and we have a beautiful child together. So it didn’t effect my life at all. Fuck you, Ron. I hope you get flea bites on your dick.
12.
My nudes got leaked in highschool, i was 18. Nothing really happened. Some people said my penis was small, some said it was big. After about a week i stopped hearing about it.
*Little extra, I still hear about it 3 years later if I see someone at a party I went to highschool with. It normally sparks a little conversation too, because most people are surprised when they find out over 1000 people have seen you naked. I assume the feeling I get is the same as an amateur pornstar just starting their career.
13.
I was in my young, dumb teenager years in the height of digital cameras, and before cell phone cameras really displayed much more than a pixellated guess at an image. Was also gay in a town where there weren’t really any obvious gay guys to speak of, so internet (Yahoo Messenger in this case) was the only space I could really figure out to act on that, and I was desperately seeking some acceptance that a guy could ever want me, which meant of course that I ended up talking to a lot of older guys who preyed on a lot of younger guys looking for just that.
The good thing: I was “smart” enough to not show my face on my nudes.
The bad thing: The fact that my best friend left his student ID at my house and I didn’t realize it was clearly visible on the floor next to one of the photos I took.
The result: my friend spent some time wondering why he got random, creepy Myspace messages from old creepy perverts.
14.
My ex tried to blackmail me with my nudes, so I just posted them myself. Fuck you matt.
15.
I don’t know if this counts because it was pre-internet and they certainly weren’t leaked. I was a nude model for various magazines that focused on outdoor healthy naked lifestyles. I’d grown up thinking that bodies were perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of and worked my way through college posing. But one of the people in my dorm randomly stumbled upon a pictorial display in some obscure magazine and immediately informed everybody else.
The immediate reaction was shock and horror and one of my good male friends immediately offered to take me back home away from the scandal. I told him that I hadn’t done anything wrong, that I wasn’t leaving and that I refused to be ashamed.
Honestly, as soon as I took that attitude, and everybody saw me take it, it became acceptable. So much so that I ended up winning a college award for the most unexpected act that year. I wasn’t expecting anything like that but I was (not nastily) called “Angel of the Centrefold” for the rest of my time at college.
16.
Had pictures of my penis forwarded to 3 people. Potential job (I was at interview stage), ex-Girlfriend (before the psycho one) and an old friend.
I didn’t get the job. The woman who interviewed me basically spent the whole time questioning me about it (I’d apologised and explained my ex was nuts but it apparently wasn’t enough)
My ex-girlfriend thought it was funny, said she’d missed “him” and we hooked up one last time.
Old friend said “ewww, gross” and we reconnected briefly, got together, smoked some weed and watched movies. Only saw her a few times after that.
So not that badly. I mean, I’d prefer it hadn’t happened but it wasn’t life ruining.
17.
So I’ve got nudes of my self floating around multiple very populated discord servers.
I’ve got no one to blame but myself for this, but I’m someone who’s not ashamed of their body or shy of nudity so it really doesn’t bother me, if anything I find it quite funny.
The story behind them getting ‘leaked’ goes a little like this. I was raid leader for my guild in World of Warcraft, we were progressing on a very hard boss (Mythic Star Auger) and the dps check was super tight.
We just had a 15% wipe, not super close but it was our best. Me being the motivational guy that I am said “If we kill it this pull I’ll post a nude on discord” and low and behold we killed it.
So being a man of my word I decided to fluff the little fella up and take a nude in front of a mirror doing the ok hand pose.
Needless to say people found it hilarious but it then started to spread. I’m on some other discord servers completely independent of the one I originally posted it on and I still sometimes see it crop up. People don’t believe me when I tell them it’s me but I know the truth!
— Kokushi
18.
A couple of years ago, someone emailed a link to a gallery of my nudes to my parents.
It was awkward.
19.
Thankfully I didn’t have my face or hair in view of the camera. So my ex leaked mine, sent them to a bunch of my friends. Even if they did think it was me, there wasn’t any proof. They were mostly just mad at him for spreading my nudes around. Even had strangers stick up for me, so that was cool. I didn’t have my tattoos or anything back then, nothing really stands out on my body. For all they know, he could have just found a teen online with a similar body shape.
And yes. I did say teen. He leaked my illegal nudes.
20.
When I was 14, Aydin Coban—known for leaking the nudes of Amanda Todd—blackmailed me. I still don’t know how he got the photo, or how he found me, but he started off emailing me saying I had to give him a nude skype session to make him stop. I ignored him, obviously not giving him any extra fodder for his game.
About three months went by, and then he started showing up at a few of the message board sites I was part of. He would make an account and then post somewhere saying he was a videographer with some really interesting work. Since the sites were all about weird emo kid topics, no one paid any attention to him, so he disappeared.
Another three months went by, and then all hell broke loose. In the span of one week, he created a Facebook profile with the photo of me as the profile picture and added every friend he could find on my facebook, and then all of my mother’s friends as well. He found who my parents were and sent the photo to my dad’s business through their website’s Contact Us page, and he sent a letter to our house with the photo printed on it.
Shortly after this, I attempted suicide, but was (obviously) unsuccessful.
Before this, I hadn’t gotten my parents involved, but obviously they were now. I was really lucky in that I went to a very closeknit, small school, so the people who saw the Facebook profile before it was deleted reached out in concern or didn’t mention it, and I never got bullied because of it. We got Child Protective Services involved, and they started tracing the guy but found he was using a proxy service in Germany known for abusing freedom of speech.
Shortly around this time, I remember Amanda Todd’s story came out. She made a YouTube video about her life in black and white holding up note cards that told her story. Her video went viral when she committed suicide. I remember thinking it was weird how parallel our stories were—she and I were both half Asian, both around the same age, and both targeted in the same way. I ignored all the similarities though.
At this point, I had to decide how I wanted to proceed. At 14, I had to choose to either give up the search for this guy, or go public with my story to gain leverage against the proxy company. BBC wanted to do a short on it, with voice actors and hidden identities, but at this point I wanted nothing to do with any of it anymore.
Seven years passed, and I was at an internship one day when I got a call from my dad. He said Homeland Security had called, and it was legit because he asked for an extension and called the representative back using their online phone number (pro-tip to verify identity). I called them back and had the horrific delight of finding out they had caught him. Since he blackmailed me, he had abused nearly 100 other people all over the world, including Amanda Todd.
I was given his name, and instructed to meet with two local HLS reps at a restaurant. One of the weirdest lunch meetings I’ve ever been to. I learned my blackmailer’s name, and I had to decide whether or not to participate in his trial. Since he is Dutch, I decided with some legal council to hold off on participation. The Dutch court system is known to be lenient, and I know he knows where I live and where my family lives. On the slim chance he would not get jailed, or that he would get out quickly and seek revenge, I didn’t participate. I was also offered the possibility that every time my photo was found on someone’s computer or in their possession (as it counts as child pornography), I would be informed so I could write a letter to the trial explaining the impact that photo had on me, and then be entitled to compensation, which I declined. At this point, I am considering whether or not I will be participating in the extradition case against him in Canada, though it is unlikely.
In terms of effect, I have entirely lost trust in the world. I have generalized anxiety and assume that the worst will happen in every situation—every phone call is someone calling to tell me a loved one died, every meeting with my boss I assume I’m about to be fired. I have never had a serious romantic relationship because I am wholly committed to never being emotionally committed to anyone. Like I said earlier, I was damn lucky to be part of a community that didn’t bully me at all, or I don’t think I’d be here today. I think about Coban once every other day, and even in just a glancing thought my whole life can be momentarily interrupted by the consuming and intrusive memories of the sheer panic I experienced every time he tried to ruin my life.
Every day is a new set of challenges, and everything reminds me of him. I couldn’t even watch the news when Larry Nassar’s trial was happening because I risked bursting into tears in the middle of work. But for all of the hardships I’ve faced, I’m forever grateful that I’m still here.
