Bella Thorne tearfully responded to Whoopi Goldberg's criticism of her nude photos on Tuesday.
On Saturday, Thorne shared photos of her naked body after a hacker allegedly threatened to release the photos. Along with the pictures, she wrote a message about taking the power back.
"For the last 24 hours, I have been threatened with my own nudes," Thorne wrote. "I feel gross, I feel watched, I feel someone has taken something from me that I only wanted one special person to see."
After Thorne released the pictures, she became a hot topic on The View. Goldberg, one of the show's hosts, was not overly sympathetic to Thorne's plight and seemingly blamed Thorne for taking naked photos in the first place.
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"If you’re famous, I don’t care how old you are. You don’t take nude pictures of yourself," said Goldberg, before adding: "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. You don’t get to do that."
Thorne took to her Instagram story to respond to Goldberg's comments. In a video, an emotional Thorne expressed her disappointment in Goldberg's stance.
"I’m not going to lie, I feel pretty disgusting knowing everybody has seen my shit, and that interview made me feel pretty bad about myself. I hope you’re happy, I really do. I hope you’re so fucking happy because I can only imagine all the kids who have their shit released and then they commit suicide," Thorne said, while crying.
"You’re so crazy for thinking such terrible things in such an awful situation. You know I don’t really want to go on The View anymore because I don’t really want to be beaten down by a bunch of older women for my body and my sexuality," she added, seemingly suggesting that perhaps the women don't understand some of the particular pitfalls of growing up in the digital age. "I don’t really feel like that. So I’m going to cancel my interview because I don’t really want you guys talking about your views to young girls, because I would not want my daughter to learn that."
In a follow-up she asked Goldberg if she went out "drinking and dancing" if she deserved to be "raped" because those two things "are really fucking similar."
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She also shared a post via the Notes app to her Instagram story, where she cited Jennifer Lawrence's 2014 nude photo leak.
Lawrence famously called out the real perpetrator — the hacker — after she was shamed for sharing naked photos.
"It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime," Lawrence told Vanity Fair of her own hack. "It is a sexual violation. It’s disgusting."
As Thorne makes clear, the only person who should be shamed for a private photo leak is the one who leaked the pictures without the subject's permission. That's the actual crime and young women like Thorne shouldn't feel like they are the ones doing something wrong when they are the ones who have been victimized.
Refinery29 has reached out to Goldberg and Thorne for comment.
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