Back in April, Whitney Cummings accidentally posted a topless photo of herself to her Instagram stories. She deleted it, but not before some enterprising dinguses took screenshots and tried to use the photo to extort her.
So today, instead of letting them do that, Cummings just posted the photo herself.
“When a woman in the public eye is extorted, we have to spend time, money and energy dealing with it, hiring lawyers and security experts, and living with a pit in our stomach about when and how we will be humiliated,” she wrote. “Y’all can have my nipple, but not my time or money anymore.”
She also said she was being threatened by people who claimed to have access to her iCloud, but that probably won’t work, either. “I’ll be honest, I stand by most of my nudes,” she wrote. “Frankly I’m way more embarrassed by all the inspirational quotes I’ve screen grabbed.”
In June, Bella Thorne took a similarly proactive step after a hacker reportedly threatened to leak nude photos of her. “Fuck u and the power u think you have over me,” she posted along with the photo in question.
Cummings opted not to share the identities of the people attempting to get money from her “because some of them might be dumb kids.” Dumb kids or dumb adults, what they were doing was still illegal: More than 30 states and the District of Columbia have laws against nonconsensual disclosure of sexually explicit images and videos; at least 12 states have civil laws specifically against nonconsensual image sharing.