Emma Watson and Amanda Seyfried Take Legal Action Over Leaked Photos
Another reminder that the celebrity lifestyle isn’t all about private jets and parties at Taylor Swift’s place: On Wednesday, actresses Emma Watson and Amanda Seyfried faced the leak of unauthorized photos of themselves.
Watson’s rep confirmed that photos of the 26-year-old Beauty and the Beast star in underwear and bathing suits were published online without her permission.
“Photos from a clothes fitting Emma had with a stylist a couple of years ago have been stolen,” the rep told Gossip Cop. “They are not nude photographs. Lawyers have been instructed, and we are not commenting further.”
Meanwhile, an attorney for Seyfried, 31, issued a cease-and-desist letter to at least one website, Celeb Jihad, that published nude photos of the actress. Some of the photos featured Justin Long, whom she dated for two years beginning in 2013, in underwear.
“Several very private photographs of Ms. Seyfried, either in various states of nudity or in intimate moments with her former boyfriend, have been reproduced and posted,” the letter states. “These photographs are believed to have been leaked, i.e., wrongfully obtained by a third party or parties without Ms. Seyfried’s knowledge or consent.”
Essentially, the letter was a warning to take down the photos or face legal action.
Gizmodo noted that the latest leak of stolen celebrity photos comes exactly one year after Ryan Collins, a 36-year-old Pennsylvania man, was charged with hacking into more than 100 Apple and Google accounts. Photos of celebs, including Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton, were leaked in that scandal. Collins was sentenced to 18 months in prison in October. In January, Edward Majerczyk, of Chicago, was sentenced to nine months in prison after hacking into accounts that included those of dozens of celebrities.
Watson was threatened with the release of stolen photos in 2014 after she famously addressed the United Nations about the importance of gender equality. Within 12 hours of delivering her speech, she said, a website threatened to post photos of her in the nude — even though she knew she hadn’t taken any.
“If anything, it made me so much more determined,” she said in a March 2015 interview about the UN’s HeforShe campaign. “I was just raging. It made me so angry that I was just like, ‘This is why I have to be doing this!’ So if anything, it actually, if they were trying to put me off it, they did the opposite.”
Don’t expect either actress to stop speaking out now.
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