Photo via Broadly YouTube screengrab
Rose McGowan is the latest Hollywood celebrity to join a growing list of stars—including Amanda Seyfried, Katie Cassidy, and Emma Watson—who've had their personal photos stolen and leaked online in the last week. But McGowan, whose private photos and sex tape were released without her consent, says she's coming after the perpetrators.The actress turned director told Gossip Cop that she's planning to contact the Department of Justice to look into the matter. She also tweeted out a message early Sunday morning to those who violated her privacy. Accompanying a red-tinged photo of her face partially hidden by a chained mask, she wrote: "Hey little hacker boys, Mama is coming and she hits hard."The hacking has been dubbed The Fappening Part Two. In 2014, more than 600 victims, including celebrities Rihanna, Selena Gomez, Jennifer Lawrence, and Vanessa Hudgens, were identified in a phishing scheme that allowed the perpetrator, Ryan Collins, to download photos and videos from their iCloud accounts. Collins was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison on hacking charges. Another man was also punished in the scandal: Edward Majerczyk of Chicago received only nine months.
In 2015, McGowan sat down for an interview with Broadly. Since her return to the movie business after taking time off following a car accident, she's made it her mission to call out sexism in Hollywood. "There are gnarly and gross things about Hollywood that I've experienced that rise to the level of criminality," she said. "Like, stuff that would curl your hair."McGowan did not respond to Broadly's request for comment on this story.
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According to a report from the Data & Society Research Institute, one in 25 Americans have either been threatened with or actually had been a victim of "revenge porn," or the sharing of private photos of an individual without that individual's consent. "Even though I think we might want to think we're a society that's beyond shaming women and men for their bodies and for sexual activities," researcher Amanda Lenhart previously told Broadly, "we still are a society where that's humiliating to people. We need to acknowledge … that people who have these images shared are legitimately, specifically, personally, professionally, and financially harmed by this experience."The country's problem with people sharing explicit images without consent are deeply rooted in the way society views female sexuality, Mary Anne Franks, the vice president and legislative and tech policy director of Cyber Civil Rights Institute, told Broadly recently. She believes using a person's expression of their sexuality as a form of punishment and exploitation needs to be unacceptable, and that "until those underlying social attitudes change, we cannot defeat nonconsensual pornography."Read more: 'Our Society's Deep Sexual Dysfunction': Why It's So Hard to Stop Revenge Porn