Over the summer, Gabrielle Union and Dwyane Wade tied the knot after five years together. Unfortunately the honeymoon didn’t last very long once nude images of the actress leaked online, among a number of high profile women, whose privacy were violated at the hand of iCloud hackers.
Now the actress is officially addressing the matter in an essay published on Cosmopolitan‘s website. She writes….
My honeymoon was plagued by thoughts of when I would get hit. 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.
The hit came three weeks later. I was on the final night of a beach retreat with Dwyane and the kids in Turks and Caicos. We had just given the boys a big lecture on how to protect themselves online, telling them to be careful what they post and what they say. Friends contacted me with the news: A photo of me had surfaced online. I clicked on the link and felt a flicker of relief: The picture was not very revealing — my body was covered. It was a flirtatious shot I had sent to Dwyane three years ago. I had zapped it to him and then told him to delete it right away, as he has a habit of losing phones. He deleted it, and so did I.
I knew there would be more to come. I wondered how a photo that was shot and deleted three years ago could be found. Sure enough, later that night, more pictures started popping up, one after another. All of them had been shot and deleted years ago. 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. What is the point of even including a delete function on a phone if it doesn’t really delete? I had deleted the photos from my phone, but apparently they had remained on some server somewhere, unbeknownst to me, where hackers could find them.
I called my reps and attorneys, pleading, “Get the photos taken down.” They said it takes time — the shots were spreading fast, to some 50 sites within the first few hours. Nude pictures of other celebrities were appearing in this second wave too, including Rihanna and a new round of Jennifer Lawrence shots. I thought, this is a targeted attack, a hate crime against women. Photos of my friend Meagan Good showed up as well, and that really hurt — she’s like my little sister. We had become close while filming Deliver Us From Eva. She’s married to a pastor. I wanted to protect her from the inevitable character assassination. She was the target of a crime and did not deserve to be attacked.
I felt an urgent need to speak out — I didn’t see silence as an option, and my inner circle supported me. I started working on a statement the night my photos surfaced. I’ve been a longtime advocate for women and girls, and a few years ago, President Obama named me to the National Advisory Committee on Violence Against Women. 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.
Head over to Mediaoutrage.com to read more of what Gabrielle Union had to say and share your thoughts.
