Marcel Winatschek

Our Homemade Video

I’d been awake for three days straight. Every time I’d jolt up at 2 AM, 4 AM, 6 AM, the first thing I’d do was reload the page. The video would still be there, thumbnail and all, sitting among thousands of others like it, completely unmoved by my desperation. I’d click the little flag in the corner again, fill out another form, send another email to an address that almost certainly didn’t have a real person behind it. Then I’d lie back down and stare at the ceiling, drinking cold coffee.

Fabienne had texted me on a Friday night while I was at a bar arguing about Zombieland. She wanted to know if I was fucking with her. Why was there a porn video of her on the internet. I didn’t know what she was talking about until she explained: some guy had uploaded a clip we’d made years ago, just for ourselves, something we’d done for fun one afternoon. Turns out he’d uploaded it to YouPorn over a year ago. Millions of views. I read the comment section like I was reading reviews of my own character. I want to come on her tits! Hottest pussy I’ve seen in forever! That kind of thing.

The problem wasn’t that I minded. I’ve never had an issue with the idea of someone seeing me naked, watching me fuck. The problem was that Fabienne minded, and she minded a lot, and now she thought I’d done it. That I’d uploaded our video to make a quick buck while she was asleep. Which is insane, obviously—who would be that stupid?—but I understood why she’d think it. The video was there. It had to come from somewhere. And I was the more obvious suspect. When you’re on the wrong side of an accusation like that, the only thing you can do is protest your innocence and hope the person you care about believes you. She didn’t seem to.

I spent three days trying to get it taken down. Saturday morning through Tuesday night, I was sending emails to every contact address the site had listed, filling out removal request forms, messaging people in Twitter DMs, begging for help. Nothing. The video stayed. I couldn’t sleep properly. Couldn’t concentrate. Every notification made my stomach flip. Somewhere in the back of my head was the specific terror that the police would show up, that there was something illegal about this that I didn’t understand, that I’d end up in a cell for something I didn’t even do.

The only real help came from someone named Katie—maybe an employee, maybe just a social media person—who messaged me back when I reached out on Twitter. She was sympathetic. Said she was on vacation but would delete it manually when she got back. So I waited. I reloaded the page constantly. I texted Fabienne updates like I was trying to prove something, though she barely responded. When Katie finally wrote back on Tuesday evening saying it was gone, I should have felt relieved. I didn’t. The video was off the site, sure, but I’d learned something I couldn’t unlearn: nothing disappears from the internet. Someone out there still has it. Someone will always have it. It just takes one person copying it down, one person sharing it, and it lives forever.

There’s this weird thing we do where we act shocked when someone’s intimate life becomes public. We judge women harshly for the same things we laugh at men for. We pretend sexuality is shameful while simultaneously being completely obsessed with it. We act like once something gets out, the person involved should feel destroyed, like they’re damaged goods. But Fabienne and I had been stupid and horny and curious. We made something that felt good at the time. We looked good doing it. The fact that some asshole found a way to steal it and monetize it says something about him, not us. But try telling society that.

I never heard from Fabienne again after I told her it was deleted. Maybe her lawyer told her not to respond. Maybe she just couldn’t stand talking to me anymore. Either way, I got it. The video was gone but the wreckage remained. She wouldn’t speak to me. There was this hanging dread that it might show up somewhere else. And there was something else too—this small, sad awareness that I’d lost her friendship over something neither of us did. The guy who uploaded it faced no consequences. No one knew who he was. He got away with it perfectly.

Everything ends up on the internet eventually. You try to stop it and it doesn’t matter. You think you’re being careful and you’re not. You trust the wrong person or you lose control of a device and suddenly your private life is public. The only thing you can actually control is how you feel about it after. And that’s the part I’m still working through.