Harvey Weinstein, hacked nudes – how Jennifer Lawrence became Hollywood's great survivor

Jennifer Lawrence in 2017, a year in which she appeared in only one film. Photo / AP

In 2014, Jennifer Lawrence was a record-breaker. The Hunger Games franchise had made her the highest-grossing action heroine of all time; she had just become the youngest actress ever, at the age of 24, to be nominated for three Academy Awards; and she was also one of a small, elite group to have fallen flat on her face while collecting an Oscar.

That particular hiccup, humiliating for a less charismatic star, only highlighted Lawrence's particular appeal: a prodigiously talented, luminously beautiful A-lister who also somehow managed to come across as a cheerfully goofy Kentucky girl, the kind you'd want to have a beer with.

She gave mesmerising turns as caustic, big-hearted teenagers in Winter's Bone and The Hunger Games and went on to play memorably troubled adulthood in Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, earning consistently brilliant reviews. "She is a bold and un-selfconscious actress… she spins it out of the air in the room" is how Meryl Streep put it. With the exception of a pair of five-and-a-half inch pink stilettos, nothing could bring Lawrence down.

Lawrence became well-known for her role in The Hunger Games films. Photo / Supplied, Murray Close

Nothing, that is, but a few intimate photographs. In 2014, a group of hackers posing as members of Apple's and Google's security teams conned hundreds of people, including a few high-profile female celebrities, into handing over passwords to their iCloud accounts, in a highly targeted form of cyber-attack known as "spear-phishing". Over the next two years, their private pictures were drip-fed to the internet. Some of those pictures were nudes. Some of those nudes were of Jennifer Lawrence.

Imagine the psychological impact of such an assault. As she told Vanity Fair, in a profile published just weeks after the leak began: "I can't even describe to anybody what it feels like to have my naked body shoot across the world like a newsflash against my will. It just makes me feel like a piece of meat that's being passed around for profit.

"When I have to make that phone call to my dad and tell him what's happened… I don't care how much money I get for The Hunger Games… I promise you, anybody given the choice of that kind of money or having to make a phone call to tell your dad that something like that has happened – it's not worth it."

For a while, Lawrence found escape in her work: between 2014 and 2018, she starred in 10 films, won a fourth Oscar nomination, and became the highest-paid actress in Hollywood. Then she disappeared. With the exception of the 2019 X-Men outing, Dark Phoenix, in which she had a supporting role, she hasn't made a film since 2018. Only this month does she return to the big screen, starring alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in Adam McKay's apocalyptic comedy, Don't Look Up.

The sheer power that is Leo + Jen. #DontLookUp pic.twitter.com/0nZfEXUVYT

— NetflixFilm (@NetflixFilm) December 6, 2021

For the victims of what has become known as the Celebgate hack, the ordeal began in the late summer of 2014. An anonymous user on the gleefully offensive internet forum 4Chan posted a list of mostly female actors and public figures, including Lawrence, Avril Lavigne, Kim Kardashian, Rihanna, Ariana Grande, Kirsten Dunst, Emily Ratajkowski, Aubrey Plaza and Winona Ryder, claiming to have explicit photos or videos of them all. Over the next few days, images began to surface on 4Chan and Reddit, sold for Bitcoin or simply uploaded for free.

Celebrity gossip blogger Perez Hilton initially uploaded some of the images to his site and then swiftly removed them with an apology. "I acted in haste just to get the post up and didn't really think things through. I'm sorry," he tweeted.

Two more batches of photo dumps followed, in mid- and late- September. Apple admitted that iCloud was the source of the leak, but denied that it was a result of system failures: "After more than 40 hours of investigation, we have discovered that certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that has become all too common on the internet.

"None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple's systems including iCloud or Find my iPhone."

Nevertheless, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal shortly after, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the company planned to take additional steps to protect the future privacy and security of iCloud users.

How did the women themselves respond? Some, like Grande, denied the authenticity of the images. But a swift response from Lawrence's publicist appeared to confirm that the pictures of her, at least, were real: "This is a flagrant violation of privacy. The authorities have been contacted and will prosecute anyone who posts the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence." Model Kate Upton and British actress Jessica Brown-Findlay were also among those who confirmed the authenticity of their pictures.

In the 2014 Vanity Fair interview, Lawrence described feeling the urge to explain herself or to justify the pictures, "but every single thing that I tried to write made me cry or get angry".

"I started to write an apology, but I don't have anything to say I'm sorry for.

"I was in a loving, healthy, great relationship for four years. It was a long distance, and either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he's going to look at you."

She took aim at the tabloid press for the flippant way she felt they had reported the hack: "It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime. It is a sexual violation. It's disgusting."

She was even more scathing of internet users who have looked at the photos. "Anybody who looked at those pictures, you're perpetuating a sexual offence. You should cower with shame. Even people who I know and love say, 'Oh, yeah, I looked at the pictures.' I don't want to get mad, but at the same time I'm thinking, 'I didn't tell you that you could look at my naked body.'"

Around this time, Lawrence's career began to hit some speed bumps. Rumours of a directorial debut (the vaguely named Project Delirium, based on a New Yorker article about a Cold War chemical weapons arms race between America and the USSR) and a screen-writing partnership with Amy Schumer ("Amy and I are creatively made for each other… It's been the most fun experience of my life" she said in 2015), surfaced – and then sank again.

The films she was making also proved divisive. The 2016 space romcom Passengers made $300m at the box office but was panned by the critics for its "fantastically creepy" plot, which involves Chris Pratt's romantic lead forcibly awakening Jennifer Lawrence's character from a medically induced coma 90 years earlier than she planned. The Telegraph described it as "a creepy ode to manipulation" and rumours of a franchise faded away.

Mother!, a psychological horror directed by Lawrence's then boyfriend Darren Aronofsky, which came out the following year, did win critical plaudits but flopped at the box office. It was also hugely physically taxing to make – at one point, Lawrence's character rips out her own heart. During filming, she started hyperventilating, which in turn caused her to dislocate a rib. As she was receiving oxygen, Aronofsky told her to do the scene again. They broke up shortly after the film was released.

In her next project, Red Sparrow, she found herself defending nudity scenes, in light of the hack. "The insecurity and fear of being judged for getting nude, what I went through, should that dictate decisions I make for the rest of my life?" she said at the premiere.

Jennifer Lawrence, in Red Sparrow. Photo / Supplied

Meanwhile, an FBI investigation linked the cyber-attacks to an IP address in Chicago. In October 2014, law enforcement officials searched a Chicago property and seized computers, mobile phones and storage drives. Over the next four years, five men were prosecuted for the leak. Each received a custodial prison sentence of between eight and 34 months. But for victims like Lawrence, accountability is not the same as closure.

"I feel like I got gang-banged by the f------ planet," she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. "It was impossible to process."

To make matters worse, her name was suddenly dragged into the Harvey Weinstein trial. In a 2018 motion to dismiss racketeering charges brought against him by six women, Weinstein's lawyers argued, quoting Lawrence out of context, that Weinstein "had only ever been nice to me". In a separate lawsuit, an unnamed actor claimed that as Weinstein sexually assaulted her, he said, "I slept with Jennifer Lawrence and look where she is – she has just won an Oscar." (Lawrence denies having sex with Weinstein or that her words about him constitute any kind of rebuttal to the crimes he committed.)

"I didn't have a life. I thought I should go get one," Lawrence told Vanity Fair last month, in her first major interview since 2018. She has tried a few different things: activism (she is on the board of the anti-political corruption campaign RepresentUs); glamorous friendships (she was photographed on nights out and dinner dates with Adele, Schumer and Emma Stone); dating. She began going out with art gallery director Cooke Maroney, leaving at home the bodyguard she'd had since she was 22 because "how mortifying would that have been?" The couple married at the beginning of 2019 and are now expecting their first child.

By then, Lawrence was ready to get back to work. In 2019, she was the first name to sign onto Don't Look Up, which at that point lacked a complete script. But for Lawrence, it was a no-brainer: she was such a McKay fan that she showed up at his production offices after her first Oscar nomination, as a 19-year-old with a binder of notes on Step Brothers.

When he began work on the script, she was his first call (DiCaprio came later). "I wanted to cut loose with a strong, funny truth-teller woman," McKay told Vanity Fair, "and that's Jen Lawrence. I mean, that character poured out of me. I would just picture Jen and you knew exactly what she would say."

Jennifer Lawrence is Kate Dibiasky ☄️ #DontLookUp pic.twitter.com/epLVJgxiGR

— NetflixFilm (@NetflixFilm) December 7, 2021

Next comes the debut work from Lawrence's production company, Excellent Cadaver, which is a still-untitled soldier project directed by Lila Neugebauer in which Lawrence plays an American soldier struggling to adjust to civilian life after sustaining a traumatic brain injury.

Then she will appear in another McKay project, Bad Blood, in which she'll play disgraced tech entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes, who is currently standing trial in New York on charges of defrauding investors. None of these parts particularly scream glamour or sex appeal: rather, Lawrence seems to be drawn, for the moment at least, to woman struggling against the turn of the tide of public opinion. It's an interesting pivot.

In this month's profile, she spoke about how the nude hack continues to haunt her and always will. "Anybody can go look at my naked body without my consent, any time of the day. Somebody in France just published [the photos]." (In October, a French court ordered comedian Jean-Marie Bigard to pay Lawrence €20,000 [£17,100] for putting them online.)

"My trauma will exist forever," she added. She's just decided not to let it stop her.

• Don't Look Up is in cinemas now and will be on Netflix from December 24.