Unfortunately, it seems to have become an all too common narrative someone violating another person and distributing nude photos of them without their consent. Taking someones personal and intimate photos from the private to the public sphere is not only reprehensible, but can even be illegal.
Here, people share their story of a time nude photos of them where distributed without their consent.
1. I was stupid and in my first real relationship in my early 20s. My boyfriend was really into sexting since we lived in different cities. Until that point, I had refused to send nudes, but I was scared that if I didn’t our relationship would end so I finally caved.
Five months later, I broke up with him. He was paranoid and thought I was cheating I wasn’t. Not even 1 week later, a bunch of my friends get sent the nude pictures of me that I had sent to him. I felt so violated and upset, but didn’t know what to do. Luckily it was only to a couple of my friends, but it still makes you feel helpless, worthless and vulnerable.
[deleted]
2. Here goes one of the worst experiences of my life.
In high school, freshman and sophomore year, I was a nerd, antisocial and had about 0 skill with women. I was in love with this girl. We texted and talked but I was never anything more than a friend to her but she knew I was in love with her.
Fast forward to a year of this going on. I get a text one Friday or Saturday night from her and she’s acting different. Like over the top forward and acting interested in me. I knew something was up, but she was the girl of my dreams at that point so I was ignorant and thought (hoped?) it was real. One thing led to another and she’s texting me to send her nudes. Which I obliged. This was when texting was just getting popular and before all the known repercussions of sending nudes. She responds acting impressed and turned on. She starts saying she has weird kinks or whatever (in more words or less) and she hoped I could help out. Which of course I oblige. This was the most attention I ever received from a girl.
What’d she want? She wanted me to send her pics of me in panties. I’m not proud of it, but I went to my mom’s dressing room, got a thong and sent her a pic of me in it. She asked for more so I sent more. Within a week everyone in my small friends group had seen them and most of my grade as well as others.
I was made fun of relentlessly.
The_AntiSpoon
3. When a friend of mine was young, she sent nudes to a guy she’d met over the internet. He kept asking her to do more and more things in photos and she started to get uncomfortable and said no.
After she said no, he posted the nudes he did have over 300 times on her myspace profile and wrote, “Look, a w–re!” She called me crying saying she didn’t know how to delete myspace comments so her and I worked together deleting them on our own computers. It took a while, and she didn’t see the comments until almost an hour after posting so it’s pretty possible her other myspace friends saw.
We reported him but there wasn’t really much else to do. We were also both young and didn’t realize how big of a deal it was that he was leaking photos of a naked young girl.
Kighla
4. My ex-boyfriend leaked naked pictures of me after I refused to sleep with him and told him I didn’t want to continue our relationship. I had sent a couple of pictures to him in the past because he repeatedly would ask me to and I just caved in so he would stop asking. Well, he sent out pictures to almost every guy I know, including my father. But as it turns out, they weren’t the pictures I sent him. I don’t have any memories of those pictures being taken, but they are definitely of me. Since I’m under age, I reported it to the police. So far nothing has happened in that sense, but I’ve been just a wreck. Constantly anxious, get depressed and just overall not in a good mental state. I’ve been going to therapy and trying to have the police keep me updated. It hit me hard, to be exposed when I can’t even remember being photographed.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a resolution yet, and I may never.
bubblegums
5. A couple of years ago I went to a friends house party, I got talking to a girl there and one thing led to another we proceeded to sleep together. However I must have passed out stark naked on her bed after doing the deed. So there I was unconscious on my back wearing nothing but my socks with a bright red erect penis.
Now normally in this situation it might just be an embarrassing story I’d have to tell.
But it doesn’t end there (story continued on the next page…).
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But the girl decides she should take a photo of me and proceeds to send it to one of her friends. The next morning while in a hungover state I do the walk of shame back to my friends where I am greeted by him shoving a picture of me into my face. It turns out that he posted it on my group chat with people I’m not overly close with and they had shown most of their friends.
As a result I’m a lot more open about myself as most situations can’t really embarrass me. The only thing that does annoy me is that if I had done this to the girl I would be hated by everyone however since it happened to a guy it is just a laugh.
qwertasda
6. My gf just had this happen to her a couple weeks ago. One of her friends gave her the heads up that he’d seen her pics online, so she reverse image searched the photos she had. Two of the ones she took years ago ended up on some ex-gf site and we had no idea who it could be.
Anyway, she just messaged the site and asked if they could be taken down. They emailed her back asking for a picture of her face with a piece of paper with the file names written as they appeared on the site. She did so and they went down. So no problem in the end, I guess…
Jesus_Hong
7. It was back in 2006, my freshman year of high school, on YIM (yahoo instant messenger). I thought I was in a private chat with my boyfriend but I guess another person on my friends list was able to access, recorded it and sent it around my school. Everybody made fun of me for having a bush, the school counsellor talked to me and it was mostly forgotten about within two weeks.
benzinow
8. While we were together, my (now ex-)boyfriend posted pictures of me on a swingers’ website. Apparently he was swapping them with other men for pictures of their wives/girlfriends too. When I found out I was very upset, because I did not even know he had these pictures. My face was showing in them and I would never have consented to them being put online for anyone to see. What’s worse is that many of the people he sent the pictures to were in the local area, so I could easily have been recognized. I made him take everything down, but I can’t do anything about copies held by other people. His excuse was “I didn’t think you’d mind”. We broke up shortly afterwards. I investigated taking legal action but apparently because they weren’t posted “with malicious intent”, I had nothing on him.
winonaK
9. A now ex-boyfriend had some underwear pictures of me. I had drawn on my body and he wanted to see, so I sent some pictures..
A few weeks later he is on a trip with his sports team and asked me for real nudes. I wouldn’t have to include my face, just a boob snap or maybe full body. It was in the middle of the night, I sent a picture, but suddenly had a very bad feeling about it, so I never sent it.
Next week, my best friend told me that he showed around nudes of me. Turned out he had some other nudes as well on his phone and claimed that there were me.
He said he was drunk and didn’t remember, I forgave him…
Some years after that, I met someone from his team and he told me that the ex was definitely not drunk, he wanted to show off.
SleepySlowpoke
10. When I was going to school I got a part time job as an art model. I got rushed in the door because I was at the time the only male that had applied. It paid better than almost any of the other campus jobs out there, unless you were 21 and could be a bartender (I wasn’t).
One of my first gigs was a painting class. I had to stand in a pose for three hours at a time during this class and just get painted naked. It was honestly much more dull than you would expect. Kind of just standing there in silence. After the first couple sessions, I didn’t even mind the whole being naked in front of a group of strangers bit.
One student had done a really impressive oil on canvas during this session. She was a bit of an overachiever and had made a giant canvas for this course even though it was an intro to painting. It came out really well and I really liked it personally, although I will admit I was a bit biased.
A couple days after that session had finished I was going up to the office to grab my schedule and got off the elevator and almost passed out from the shock (story continued on the next page…).
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The art department had hung her painting in the hallway. Of the largest building. Right in front of the elevator doors. There I was, almost life sized, a painting of my whole naked body just hanging there.
Obviously it was known that anything you posed for could get displayed, but this was my first painting session and one of my first ones ever. And now everyone in the art programs had seen it. For some reason that made me uncomfortable for a long time.
It certainly didn’t help that I had a lot of friends in the arts program at the time, so pretty much all of them had seen this interpretation of my dong. A few people recognized me for it. Certainly made for some awkward conversations.
TheG-What
11. Friend of mine got caught out by a fake page and sent her a snapchat of him fapping… She recorded it, uploaded it and demanded money. We all reported it and it was soon taken down. We mocked him over how stupid he was and his response was “I don’t care, my junk looked huge in the video.”
CorkKid
12. I was 19 and had recently run into an old fling of mine. We hooked up again and started hanging out. When I told him this was nothing more than sex he got pissed a took a video of us without my knowledge.
A few weeks pass and while I’m at work a buddy of mine stops in and tells me there is a sex tape of me being shown around the railroad (our biggest employer in this town). I didn’t bother to do anything about it. The damage had already been done. Few years later I found out the tape ended up at my friends house and he beat the shit out of the guy and broke the tape. I was upset at the time, but it really wasn’t a huge deal.
eternaladdictions
13. When I was 14, a guy in my high school convinced me to send him a nude picture. I wasn’t very popular, pretty lonely, nerdy, antisocial; honestly I was just flattered and excited that a guy was showing interest in me. So I sent him the picture, and he proceeded to send it around the school.
People would stop me in the hallway and say things like “I’ve seen you with your tits out!”, I was called a w–re a lot, I was ostracized and ridiculed… it made me really suicidal for a while.
It never occurred to me that I could tell an adult what had happened, it never occurred to me that a someone distributing naked pictures of a 14 year old was a crime. I just assumed it was my fault for being a “slut”. So I bottled it up for years, did my time in high school, started dressing goth/alternative because it made me feel a little more powerful and like less of a sexual object.
I finally graduated, and realized how detrimental the effects of having a nude photo of myself be shared around school had been to my self esteem and self worth.
I genuinely believe that this topic should be covered during early sex-ed classes. My life would have been so much easier if I had known I could talk to my mum or a teacher about the mistake I had made in sending the nude picture, and that the guy who distributed it had committed a far greater crime than my sending it to him in the first place.
DreyaNova
14. When I was 16, my boyfriend secretly taped us having sex and when we broke up he put it on a revenge porn site. I emailed the site with a copy of my ID showing that I was a minor and told them they had child porn on the site. They deleted it but I’m sure it had been saved/shared by the time they took it off of there.
kiky23
15. I was 19 and very curious about BDSM. I’d always known I liked it, but I was very embarrassed and ashamed. I was pretty vulnerable.
So, I found myself a Dom online. He wanted me to send him very specific nude pictures every day. He was very nice most of the time but our phone sex was very intense. I started having panic attacks during this time. He would get really jealous and accusatory since he knew I had experimented with other people before him. He wanted the login info for my kik, which I happily gave since no one I knew was added to it.
I told my Dom that I wasn’t comfortable with our sessions and would like to tone it down or change the way we do them. He gave me some bull about needing to accept him and myself as a whole. I loved him like teenage girls do, but I broken things off for the sake of my mental health.
In the next few days I lost access to my kik (story continued on the next page…).
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When I looked up the username, I saw that my new profile pic was a picture of me nude. I told him (ex Dom) to take them down but he insisted it wasn’t him. He said he would take care of it for me since he didn’t really want anyone else seeing me naked, but only if I continued to be his submissive.
The next week was terrifying. I would get strange threatening messages about how I was going to be stalked, etc. My Dom made me do horrible things or he said he wouldn’t help me fix things. I think deep down I knew it was him, though he left little bits of evidence that it might not have been. Enough to throw me off.
I was grounded for an unrelated reason so I lost contact with him. He responded by posting pictures of me on my Facebook.
naomi_is_watching
16. This just happened yesterday. One of my previous coworkers sent me a message on Facebook saying he had found pictures of me online nude along with screenshots of said photos and which one was his favorite. You can see my face, it has my name, although spelled wrong, and the high school I went to and year I graduated.
After looking at the photos I realized they were from when I was 16-17 (I am now 24 and in a professional career) so I decided I was going to take legal action as I found the email address that uploaded them. I’m not sure who the person is to be honest. So I sent the coworker a message stating that I was underage and he can get in trouble for distributing and etc., filed a police report and asked for their assistance of removing them and that I would want to press charges, emailed the website to have them removed, and am hoping for the best.
HuntinFishinLovin
17. When I was 19 or so I had sent a naked picture (boobs only) to a guy that I had dated in the past. We sexted back and fourth for days but things eventually fizzled out like all relationships do.
Fast forward a year or so later I got an Facebook message from someone I went to middle school with saying that my pictures were on a website where you can go to see naked locals and request to see girls in your town i.e revenge porn. Of course I was shocked and I learned all about that site. The site wouldn’t take it down even when I claimed I was underage… The guy who posted it never admitted to it and claimed it was his friend. I decided to just forget about it because I had no control. I moved out of state a few years later and got ANOTHER message from someone I knew saying that my naked pictures were on the state I lived in now’s thread of the website. Even my current boyfriend had seen the picture before we dated. Even my ex has had people DM him looking for more naked pictures. I check every now and then to see if anyone bumped the post and it looks like I’m old news now.
I felt so violated and used.
tacognomeoil
18. A friend of mine in college lose his phone during a party of some sort.
Someone found the phone and posted a video of him having sex with 2 dudes on his Facebook which was logged in on that phone. And the person actually return that phone in his mailbox several days later.
Thats how we know he goes both way, no one knew before that, even his girlfriend.
MrZeddd
19. I sent my girlfriend at the time some nudes. Fully spread-eagle type stuff with butthole, balls and my cock harder than calculus – all showing proudly.
Turned out that she showed all her friends and they got some copies printed and laminated and hung them on the wall in their apartment. So when I went around one night, there were pictures of my junk all over the place.
I tried to be cool about it to save face but I was pretty pissed about it.
ask_me_if_Im_lying
20. So my ex was a douche but I was young and married him at 18. We were together less than 2 years before we split. In that time I obliged him with nudes, but thankfully left my face out of the photos.
Fast forward some time later and I meet a guy. We are hitting it off really well and decide to move in together. We had the porn talk and found out what each other liked. One day I’m doing homework and he comes in and says, “Hey, is this you?” (story continued on the next page…)
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And proceeds to show me a nude of myself online. I’m mortified, and fully expect this to result in an argument. What I did not expect is his complete understanding and faith that I actually did not post those and they were from a few years prior with my ex. He not only remained calm about the ordeal, but didn’t bring it back up later.
We have been married almost 2 years now. This all happened about 5 years ago. Even though he enjoys teasing me about things that make me uncomfortable, he won’t bring this up and to my knowledge has not tried to find those photos again. All in all I’m pretty damn lucky with my experience.
ndividualistic
21. When I was in college I had my book bag with all my things including my laptop stolen out of my car one night. I was bummed but did not think much of it and changed my passwords. All except my Twitter for some reason I didn’t think of it. The individual who stole my laptop logged into my twitter and posted pictures of my ex and I all over my twitter. I had totally forgotten about these pictures. I later found out he was messaging another random girl pretending to be me and sending my nudes to her… now all my friends have pictures of me naked doing someone.
dcline1016
22. This was a really crazy and stressful part of my life. 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.
BringYourEhGame
23. Stupidly sent them to an ex, he sent them around and they ended up on a Tumblr.
At first I was a little annoyed but I’m not that bothered anymore. The worst bit about it is people using my photos on dating apps, I’ve had people message me on Facebook saying they were talking to me on Grindr and can they have my number (I don’t even have Grindr).
19Jay95
24. My current girlfriend had a boyfriend before me and when they broke up he sent around a risqu photo he had taken of her without her knowledge. When she and her parents confronted his parents about it, the only thing his mom said was “Well boys will be boys”.
A couple months into my girlfriend and I dating, he decided to bring up the nude photos again on Twitter and started texting me saying he was going to kick my butt. My girlfriend took it to the police and now she has a restraining order against him.
Maximusjohnson69
25. I was 17 and a senior at a private, religious high school when I sent a topless photo to my boyfriend, which turned out predictably awful when we broke up a month later. A freshman that I didn’t know came up to me between classes and informed me that someone had my photo up on a computer screen in a classroom, and everyone was taking pictures of it with their phones.
This had happened to a friend of mine a few years prior, and once the school found out about it, they expelled her. Their view was that if the student came forward and let them know what was going on, they could attempt to control the situation, and the student could stay enrolled.
After finding out about my recent fame, I felt I had no choice but to go to the administration and let them know what was going on (story continued on the next page…).
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They took away my cell phone (probably illegal), wouldn’t let me talk to my dad (maybe illegal?), and called the police on me. The police came down to the school and informed me that I was distributing child pornography, because I was technically sending naked images of a minor. I was crying and throwing up for hours, going back and forth between the bathroom and the in-school suspension room. They searched my phone (and found nothing), and still wouldn’t let me talk to my dad. When I named the person responsible (because screw him), they brought him in, but quickly dismissed him, because I was the one who “started it all”.
I ended up with 2 weeks of suspension a month before graduation. That meant that I missed a bunch of assignments, which my teachers were obviously not sympathetic to. I barely passed my classes, and got to spend the last few weeks of high school with people whispering and laughing at me in the halls. Some of my more religious “friends” even got together to write me a letter, saying that they couldn’t be friends with me any more because God told them not to be friends with sluts. I was a virgin at the time.
And my ex? No punishment. He was on a sports team and had a scholarship to college, and they “didn’t want to hurt his future”. In their minds, I was the one who originally took and sent the photo, so I brought it on myself.
The police dropped the charges, my parents were still furious, and I crawled into a hole until I left for college.
meryljeanne
26. My son (16 at the time) was dating this girl for a month or so when her ex posted a topless shot on an Instagram “exposed” page. (She was 15 at the time).
The whole thing spread like wildfire through their school. The girl is really sweet and I guess a little naive at times. She was completely devastated, not just because of the picture but because she was certain my son was going to break up with her over it.
To my kid’s credit he stuck by her and helped shield her from the social fallout that took place. He took it all in stride and threw crap back on those who talked crap to him about it.
Eventually police got involved. The guy who posted the pics ended up getting little punishment other than being forced to transfer schools.
My son and his gf were together another year and a half, and are still friends.
ralanprod
27. So this is actually a little different as a man, but about a year ago while in college I had a girl start talking to me on snapchat from out of state. She was cute so I took the opportunity and traded with her and I thought we just had a good time. Well someone I didn’t know started messaging me weeks later and it turned out had the pictures I had sent to her. It turns out that a closeted guy from my hometown had recruited this girl to get nudes from me and several other guys. I talked to him and basically said I wasn’t interested and he was persistent about hooking up with me but I didn’t want anything to do with him and didn’t care about his blackmail. So these pictures got spread through the gay community in my town even to a couple good friends but honestly it didn’t bother me too much. I just moved on.
GeneralWeebeloZapp
28. Just stood there waiting for my social life to fall apart…
Yung2112
29. My stupid ex-boyfriend (broken up with for almost a year at this point) put some pictures of me online along with my email address. He pretended to be me posting the photos and asked guys to contact me.
It worked out worse for him then for me. I was contacted by a grand total of 3 guys, all of whom were pretty respectful. The first guy said “Yea, I figured that’s what happened” when I told him the pictures weren’t posted by me. Another guy seemed actually upset by this. Like it hadn’t occurred to him that revenge porn exists.
So I got my ex’s number from a mutual friend. First I had my room mate call him and just say he was in big trouble (I was still pretty shaken at that point). Then my boyfriend (now my husband) called and said something similar. My boyfriend also reminded him that I was underage in those pictures. (I don’t actually know what the age is for posing nude, but I was 17 in at least some of them. We didn’t actually intend on trying to turn him in, just reminded him of how stupid he was being.)
Also, I figured the best thing to do was just to tell everyone what he’d done. I messaged everyone I could think of, told them about it, and asked them to send him a text or an email or something saying what they thought about what he did.
The ex called back crying like a baby and insisting it wasn’t him. Now, to be clear: it was him. There was no doubt about this. Not only did he use a mix of pictures that only he ever had (he tried to claim computer hacking), he wrote personal things that indicated it was him. Like he used to make fun of me a lot for being vegetarian and it was a pretty big point of contention between us, so on the thread with the pictures he wrote something like “I loooooove steak and meatballs and jerky and anything with meat! Mmmmmmmmm meat!”
So he’s crying on the phone and insisting he doesn’t know what happened, and I just told him to stop it. I said “I know it was you for many reasons, you’re making it worse, just admit it because you will never get me to believe it wasn’t you.” So he admitted it and I just asked him “What the hell is wrong with you? What kind of person shares naked pictures of someone that were given to them in confidence? Why are you still so angry with me when all I did was break up with you when our relationship with clearly not a good one? I didn’t cheat on you, I didn’t abuse you, I just didn’t want to date you anymore and that’s my choice to make. It’s really disgusting and you need to go look in the mirror and decide if this is who you want to be.” He said he was sorry and we hung up.
He’d already lost some friends after we broke up because he got really salty and tried telling a bunch of people that I was not right in the head. From what I heard from mutual friends, most people just said “No she’s not. We know her. What’s wrong with you?” I think he lost a few more when some of his remaining friends didn’t like the idea that he would post revenge porn.
Dr_HQ