Jennifer Lawrence Explains Why She Didn’t Sue After 2014 Nude Leak

It would be easy to say that, given recent news, we live in a particularly difficult time to be a woman in Hollywood, but the truth is that it’s always been this bad or worse, we’re just finally in a climate where we can talk about it. In a way that men’s bodies are truly not, women’s bodies are objectified, commodified, tied intrinsically to the person’s worth, and viewed with a toxic sense of ownership and entitlement.

In 2014, Jennifer Lawrence had her privacy hideously violated when hackers obtained (and then released online) personal nudes they stole from her phone. In her first statement following the release, she expressed understandable anger and disbelief:

Just because I’m a public figure, just because I’m an actress, does not mean that I asked for this. It does not mean that it comes with the territory It’s my body, and it should be my choice, and the fact that it is not my choice is absolutely disgusting. I can’t believe that we even live in that kind of world.

In an interview on the Hollywood Reporter‘s Awards Chatter podcast this week, Lawrence spoke further about the experience and why she chose not to pursue legal action following the leak. Three years later, she says she’s still coming to terms with it:

I think that I’m still actually processing it. When I first found out it was happening, my security reached out to me. It was happening minute-to-minute — it was almost like a ransom situation where they were releasing new ones every hour or so.

I feel like I got gang-banged by the fucking planet — like, there’s not one person in the world that is not capable of seeing these intimate photos of me. You can just be at a barbecue and somebody can just pull them up on their phone. That was a really impossible thing to process.

I think, like, a year and a half ago, somebody said something to me about how I was ‘a good role model for girls,’ and I had to go into the bathroom and sob because I felt like an imposter — I felt like, ‘I can’t believe somebody still feels that way after what happened.’ It’s so many different things to process when you’ve been violated like that.

Lawrence told the podcast she chose not to sue because she didn’t believe it would help:

A lot of women were affected, and a lot of them reached out to me about suing Apple or suing [others] — and none of that was gonna really bring me peace, none of that was gonna bring my nude body back to me and [Nicholas Hoult], the person that they were intended for. It wasn’t gonna bring any of that back. So I wasn’t interested in suing everybody; I was just interested in healing.

You can and should listen to the entire episode right here.

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