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Gabrielle Union responds to the nude photo hacking that affected her and dozens of other Hollywood actresses in a powerful new essay for Cosmopolitan. The star opens up about her painful experience and takes women’s groups to task for failing to speak out on behalf of the hacking victims. It’s a must-read.
The star says she “felt paralyzed” when her name was first linked to the list of hacking victims, a day after her wedding to Dwyane Wade, even before the photos surfaced. As photos of famous women like Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton began to circulate amid rumors her own pics would be leaked, Union explains, “It felt like The Hunger Games: You’re waiting to be attacked.”
“Friends are assuring you that this will pass and people will move on to the next thing,” says Union. “But in this case, the next thing means the next victim — the next woman to have her naked body exposed to strangers against her will. And the crowd in the arena is going wild. People are critiquing and judging, cheering for more. They’re shouting, ‘Next! Next!’”
While she and Wade honeymooned, Union was gripped by terror over her nude images hitting the Internet. She explains, “It was always in the back of my mind: Will today be the day my life gets ruined? I thought about my family and everyone the scandal would affect — my mom, who teaches classes about Catholicism to kids, and the three boys I had become a stepmother to when I married Dwyane. My husband, meanwhile, would always have to wonder who had seen intimate photos of me that only he was supposed to see.”
When her pictures did surface, Union was traumatized by the fact that even erasing the images years earlier had not saved her from the invasion. “All of them had been shot and deleted years ago,” she writes of the stolen pics. “Yet there they were, online for the world to see. I felt extreme anxiety, a complete loss of control. I suddenly understood that deleting things means nothing. You think it’s gone? It’s not.”
Union and her team raced to get the pictures pulled down from dozens of websites, but it was an uphill battle. She writes, “I thought, this is a targeted attack, a hate crime against women.” Union was enraged by how indifferent many people seemed to be to the very serious nature of the hacking. She explains, “I didn’t like the public perception of this scandal — that we were just a bunch of narcissistic, sexually deviant celebrities who got what we deserved for being dumb. No one deserves to have a private moment stolen, whether it’s a photo, text, or email. Everyone has intimate parts of their life they don’t want the public to see.”
In her essay, Union explains:
Some people say the publicity surrounding the photos helps our careers. We don’t need this kind of press. Jennifer Lawrence is the face of two billion-dollar franchises. It’s not a career boost — it’s a new form of sexual abuse. Other people think that they are entitled to know everything about us because we are celebrities, in the public eye. No. If I show my husband my naked body, it doesn’t mean everyone gets to see it. And people sometimes argue: But you wear skimpy bikinis — what’s the difference? The difference is that you are the one who chooses whether to show your body. When billions of people on the Internet can see you naked without your consent, it’s a crime.
And the actress does not reserve her anger for the hackers and the consumers of these stolen images. She also is upset with the lack of support from allies:
Where are all the women’s groups, the feminists, demanding justice in this case? The silence is deafening. Any time you lose control over your body, it’s a violation and a crime. In addition, some of the stolen photos reportedly depict women when they were underage — that’s child pornography. I hope people think about all these things when they consider clicking on these private images.
What’s life like now for Union, in the wake of her hacking? She writes, “I am adjusting to my new reality. Everything feels tainted. On Instagram, people tell me they’ve seen me naked. Walking into my favorite pizza place, I wonder who has seen the photos and what they are thinking. It’s part of daily life now.”
But she also recognizes that it’s an opportunity for social growth and education. “Here’s the way I choose to look at it: Bad things happen to people every day,” writes Union. “It’s what we do with them that counts. If someone betrays your trust, such as a former boyfriend who posts photos of you online, you might feel like you’re alone on an island. You’re not. Talk to people who care for you. Just keep going.” What do you think about what Union has to say?
