Earlier this week, former Disney-star-turned-porn-director Bella Thorne announced that she would be working with the pornography-sharing site, Pornhub, to keep it free of “revenge porn”. This is the story behind that announcement.
Bella Thorne starts crying.
One of her dogs, Ma, an Australian Shepherd, scampers around her ankles to show her concern.
We’ve talked about slut-shaming, depression, bullying on social media, and how she has become one of the most deepfaked actresses, appearing now in thousands of faked pornographic videos.
“Just talking about the world in this way makes me so sad,” she says, “It makes me hate it.”
But none of this is what triggers her tears.
We’re sitting on the deck of her rented waterfront home in Sudbury, Ontario. It’s a quiet, maple-leaf-strewn town on the cusp of autumn, and Thorne has been here for three months filming Girl, with Mickey Rourke, in which she plays a young woman who has returned to her sleepy home
town to kill her abusive father.
It’s been a year in which the 22-year-old has bared her soul to the world.
She released her first book, The Life Of A Wannabe Mogul: Mental Disarray – a series of darkly personal poems that centre around despair, isolation and sexual assault.
She touches on the raw grief of losing her father in a motorbike accident at the age of nine and her career as a child model, growing up under a dazzling spotlight, and then being propelled into a Disney Channel sitcom (Shake It Up, where Zendaya was her co-star). And she contemplates her
need for romantic attention and her much-written-about pansexual lifestyle.
“Was it because I was molested my whole life? / exposed to sex at such a young age that feels the most natural to offer the world?”
The anthology, in which she consciously leaves words misspelt, stayed on the Amazon best-seller list for weeks after publication.
Bella Thorne is among the BBC’s most inspiring and influential women of 2019 – giving us their vision of a female-led future.
It was during the emotionally draining press tour for the book, in June of this year, that Bella received a slew of text messages from a number she didn’t recognise.
“I’m getting out of an interview and I’m already crying, talking about the book, and I look at my phone and then I just see a few nudes of me,” she recalls.
Staring at the intimate photos that she had once sent a former lover, Bella was stunned. She called her manager and agent seeking advice.
Then her phone pinged again.
More topless photos. This time of some of her famous friends.
It was early in the morning and she was in bed.
In her book Bella had detailed the sexual abuse she had endured as a child – omitting the identity of her perpetrator – and explained how her fear of not being believed stopped her from reporting the crime. Looking at the topless pictures, a familiar feeling of violation washed over her.
“Here it is again,” she thought. “Someone else that has my life right in their hands and is able to make these decisions for me. Here it is again. Someone again forcing my hand to do something I don’t want to do when it involves sexual stuff.”
So she made a decision. Using her social media platforms – seven million followers on Twitter, 22 million on Instagram and nine million on Facebook – she released the topless pictures herself, along with screenshots of the threatening text message from the hacker, and her own message.
“I’m putting this out because it’s MY DECISION NOW U DON’T GET TO TAKE YET ANOTHER THING FROM ME.”
It was a polarising choice.
Whoopi Goldberg, who appears on American chat show The View, reprimanded Thorne, not for for releasing the pictures but taking them in the first place.
“If you’re famous, I don’t care how old you are. You don’t take nude pictures of yourself,” Goldberg said, during a panel discussion on her programme, “Once you take that picture, it goes into the cloud and it’s available to any hacker who wants it, and if you don’t know that in 2019 that this is an issue, I’m sorry.”
