Bella Thorne says the public response to her 2019 nude-photo blackmail ordeal caused a second wave of harm after she had already been threatened with the release of private images.
During an August 5th appearance on Call Her Daddy, the former Disney Channel star revisited her decision to publish the photographs herself before the person threatening her could distribute them.
Thorne said she hoped to remove his control over the situation. Some people accused her of fabricating the ordeal because she wanted attention or wanted the photographs to be seen.
“That really, really broke me,” she told host Alex Cooper.
Thorne Published the Images Before the Blackmailer Could
Thorne said the ordeal began with unsolicited messages from someone who eventually sent her a private photograph she had never made public. The person continued sending material and threatening her while she was promoting her poetry collection, The Life of a Wannabe Mogul.
Thorne ultimately published the photographs and screenshots of the messages on Twitter on June 15th, 2019. “I just did an honest Twitter post,” she recalled. “You’re not going to keep taking this from me. So here it is.”
In her original statement, Thorne wrote that the person had taken something she intended for one other person to see. She said publishing the images herself allowed her to decide when and how they became public.
Thorne expected attention to remain on the person who had accessed her private material and threatened to release it. Instead, she said critics accused her of staging the situation because she wanted people to see her body. “That to me really broke me,” Thorne said. “That really, really broke me.” She recalled recording an Instagram Story while feeling angry, exposed and emotionally overwhelmed by the reaction.
Thorne Says Her Screenshots Helped Investigators
Thorne said the FBI later contacted her because agents believed the messages could be connected to a person already under investigation. Agents visited her home and collected the available records. “So now I have a house full of FBI,” she recalled.
Thorne said she provided investigators with everything she had and worked with them for approximately a year and a half. She believes the screenshots helped agents identify the person through his writing style and established pattern of behavior.
“If I had not posted those screenshots, they wouldn’t have caught him,” she said, before acknowledging that investigators might have identified him later without that direct evidence. The FBI has not released a detailed public account explaining how each piece of evidence was used.
Joseph James O’Connor Received a Five-Year Prison Sentence
Joseph James O’Connor was sentenced in June 2023 to five years in federal prison after pleading guilty to multiple cybercrime offenses. A Justice Department statement said O’Connor and his associates took control of an unnamed public figure’s Snapchat account through a SIM-swap attack in June 2019.
They obtained private images and threatened to release them unless the victim complied with their demands, prosecutors said. The Justice Department did not identify that person as Thorne in its announcement. However, she publicly thanked the FBI following O’Connor’s 2021 arrest, and reports linked the Snapchat offense to her case.
O’Connor’s other crimes included computer intrusions, online extortion, cyberstalking, cryptocurrency theft and participating in the 2020 hack of prominent Twitter accounts. His sentence also included three years of supervised release.