The group of men who willfully hacked Jennifer Lawrence’s phone in 2014, and subsequently leaked private photos of her to the public, have all officially been reprimanded for their involvement.
According to The Guardian, George Garofano — one of the men involved in the hacking — has been sentenced to eight months in prison following a guilty plea he made this past April. The group of men are also believed to have successfully hacked into the iCloud accounts of dozens of celebrities, such as Lucy Hale, Kirsten Dunst, Rihanna, and Kate Upton, by using a phishing scheme.
In early 2017, another man involved in the hacking, Edward Majerczyk, was sentenced to nine months in prison after pleading guilty to “unauthorized access to a protected computer to obtain information.” Majerczyk’s arrest came a few months after another culprit, Ryan Collins, accepted a plea deal on the charge of felony hacking, agreeing to a year and a half behind bars. It’s important to note that Majerczyk and Collins, unlike Garofano, were not implicated in directly leaking the private photos to the public, but rather for organizing the phishing efforts.
J.Law has spoken multiple times about her psychological state upon those photos being released, calling the invasion of privacy a “𝑠e𝑥 crime.” “When the hacking thing happened, it was so unbelievably violating that you can’t even put it into words,” she expressed last year. “I think that I’m still actually processing it. When I first found out it was happening, my security reached out to me. It was happening minute-to-minute — it was almost like a ransom situation, where they were releasing new ones every hour or so. There’s not one person in the world that is not capable of seeing these intimate photos of me. You can just be at a barbecue and somebody can just pull them up on their phone. That was a really impossible thing to process.”
Jennifer noted, though, that she wasn’t interested in “suing everybody,” because, instead, wanted an opportunity to “heal” and move on. Hopefully Garofano’s sentencing will give her a little bit more closure in that regard.
