The abuse that Leslie Jones has faced online in recent months is horrific. After dealing with a period of near-constant racist and sexist harassment on Twitter last month, the Ghostbusters actor and SNL star briefly left the site, calling the messages “evil.”
On Wednesday, according to reports, that evil was back. Hackers allegedly took over Jones’ personal website, posted nude photos of her, pictures of her driver’s license and passport, and inserted a photo of the slain gorilla Harambe, according to the New York Times.
TMZ, which first reported the hack, wrote that Jones’ team took down the site after it was compromised.
The isn’t the first time hackers have used explicit photos to victimize women celebrities. In 2014, as the Washington Post summarized, “hackers dumped the stolen, private photos of celebrities—the vast majority of them women—onto the Internet, an incident eventually known as ‘Celebgate.’ ”(Celebgate is the nicer name; it was also known as “the Fappening.”) The Post notes:
A Pennsylvania man pleaded guilty earlier this year to a felony violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for his part in the attacks. According to the plea agreement, Ryan Collins used a simple email phishing scheme in order to access more than a hundred iCloud and gmail accounts.
The sheer vitriol of the attacks against Jones, however, as a woman and a person of color, is unparalleled. As happened when she was bombarded with hateful Twitter messages in July, there has been an outpouring of tweets in support of Jones. But Jones’ own account has stayed quiet. Her last tweet was Tuesday evening:
