Everything Selena’s Christian Fanbase Saw Last Night

Someone hacked Selena Gomez’s Instagram overnight and posted nude photos of Justin Bieber, and the chain of events that followed is one of the most perfectly structured comedy sketches in recent celebrity history.

Selena’s team went into full crisis mode within minutes—account deactivated, password reset, Kirsten Stubbs from Interscope Records on Twitter asking fans to please be patient while they secured everything. The photos were scrubbed and replaced with wholesome pictures of Selena herself. Normal service resumed. Except nothing about the preceding forty-five minutes had been normal.

Consider the layers. The label and management going into code red over a single photograph of a man’s genitals. Selena’s younger, often devoutly Christian followers—the ones who quote Scripture in the comments and light candles for her—opening their phones to something no parental filter could have anticipated. And then Bieber himself, reportedly quite well-endowed, whose most private asset had just become the most-viewed thing on one of the biggest Instagram accounts on earth. You’ve had worse mornings.

And then there’s Selena, wherever she was when she found out. She and Justin have been circling each other for years. The intimate geography isn’t exactly unknown to her. The hacker didn’t expose anything she didn’t already know—he just shared it with sixty million strangers at once.