What the Internet Doesn’t Give Back
Lena Meyer-Landrut won Eurovision for Germany in 2010 at nineteen, and from that point on she was public property in a way the phrase doesn’t quite capture. Not just famous—dissected. The Instagram comments calling her a slut and a bag of bones while she posted selfies, her album Only Love, L landing outside the top spot like a small referendum on whether she still deserved to be here, and underneath all of it the older wound: private intimate photos and videos, taken without her consent and circulated years earlier, that never went away because the internet doesn’t let anything go away.
In May 2019 the situation deteriorated further. A hacker surfaced on a forum that specializes in leaked celebrity material, claiming to possess sixteen gigabytes of private content—messages, photos, videos—and offering what he framed as proof before naming his price: tens of thousands of euros. The proof images ended up on a German imageboard, and the imageboard did what imageboards do. What fertile hips,
one commenter wrote, which was among the more restrained contributions. Others questioned the dimensions of her chest. One announced he’d fuck her—hard. There’s a specific cowardice in typing that under a stolen photo of someone, and it lives in the most densely populated corner of the internet.
I’m not linking any of it, not showing any of it, for reasons that are both ethical and boringly legal. What I keep coming back to is something less lurid: the person Lena visibly became after the first leak, years before this new one. She went from quick-witted and present—the kind of pop star who’d riff in interviews and seem genuinely there—to something more armored, her music turned inward, the accessibility replaced by careful distance. That’s not a character flaw. That’s a rational response to having your private self turned into a comment thread. The hacker was probably exactly what she could only hope he was—a mercenary grifter looking for a quick payout rather than someone with a genuine sixteen gigabytes of her life. But you don’t get to un-know that the images are out there, that the comments exist, that the forum has a category for you now. The internet didn’t just take her photos. It took an earlier version of her that isn’t coming back.