Whitney Cummings Posts (Partially) Nude Photo Of Herself In Response To Blackmail Threat; Is That Revenge Porn?

Legal Issues

from the content-moderation-is-difficult dept

Revenge porn — or, more accurately, “non-consensual” posting of naked photos — is a real problem. Such postings are, rightly, seen as an invasion into people’s private lives, and are (quite frequently) supported by really awful online services, run by scammers and jackasses who keep ending up in prison or in other trouble with the law. Most of time this is because existing laws can, and do, handle these situations. Most mainstream internet platforms now have very clear rules against non-consensual nudity and act quite quickly to take it down.

However, there are continued efforts at passing laws to deal with this issue — even if the attempts to do so mostly appear to be unconstitutional. We’ve also pointed out that these laws potentially criminalize behavior most people don’t think of as “revenge porn,” which could represent a real issue.

And that brings us to the case of Whitney Cummings, a comedian/actress/producer, who is getting some attention this week after responding to a blackmail threat from someone, asking for money to not release a photo that apparently shows her exposed nipple (which she had accidentally, and very briefly, included in an Instagram story). Someone sent her a version of the photo and asked how much not to post it (in this screenshot the naughty bits are cropped, and even though she’s now released it, I’m not linking to the image because, be better than that).

In posting it, Cummings notes that “They all must think I?m way more famous than I am, but they also must think I?m way more easily intimidated than I am. If anyone is gonna make money or likes off my nipple, it?s gonna be me. So here it all is, you foolish dorks.” Lots of people are, rightly, coming out to support her — and are sending embarrassing pictures of themselves to her.

She does claim that others are threatening to blackmail her by saying that they’ve got access to her iCloud, but notes:

I’ll be honest, I stand by most of my nudes. Frankly I’m way more embarrassed by all the inspirational quotes I’ve screen grabbed.

And, later, she posted those embarrassing screen grabs.

One other interesting note: she points out that she won’t reveal who’s been trying to extort her, because:

I’m not posting the names of the people trying to extort me because some of them might be dumb kids. I wouldn’t want the stupid ideas I had when I was a teenager to follow me around forever or else every time someone Googled me, they’d see me shoplifting a NO FEAR t-shirt. .

This is a good example of confronting awfulness and turning it into something… better. I wouldn’t say it’s a “good” outcome, because it’s not at all clear that Cummings wanted this image out otherwise. And so I’m left to thinking about various attempts to create revenge porn laws. Would they ding this photo itself as revenge porn? Yes, Cummings herself eventually posted it, but only under the threat of having it leaked by some jackass if she didn’t pay up. One could easily argue that that situation is far from consensual. Some of the laws might say it doesn’t violate the law — since Cummings posting it herself is a sign of consent. But how would you square that with cases where these same kinds of idiots threaten to release photos or information on women if they don’t “send nudes.” In those cases, many young women do, in fact, send nude pictures, feeling it’s their only way out — but that’s (again) very, very, very far from “consensual.”

This is not to argue one way or the other on this — other than to note that there are tough calls on this, and attempts to create laws against “revenge porn” could lead to situations where Cummings’ own actions might be seen to violate those laws, even though it’s a case of her taking control over a shitty situation and flipping the script a bit.

Filed Under: blackmail, extortion, free speech, ownership, revenge porn, whitney cummings