Threat of leaking her nude photos didn't stop this brave woman from taking on her bully

Nothing is safe - much less sacred - on the internet. Everyone is but prey.

In 2014, an incident rather crassly dubbed “The Fappening” shook the world: a hacker leaked nude photographs of several celebrities on the website 4chan. From 4chan boards, the photos spread to Reddit and then all at once to the whole world.

“The Fappening” - an iCloud hack - proved to be devastating to a lot of celebrities, from Jennifer Lawrence to Kate Upton. It was a big deal precisely because of the sheer volume of the hack and owing to the stigma and the fears that confront women in the face of leaked nudes ever since the culture of "leaks" came into existence.

From the Delhi MMS scandal, to subreddits like IndianBabes and IndianGirls, leaked nudes and revenge porn are a shockingly regular affair. Like every other act of sexual harassment, this too is an act of extreme bullying.

It is surprising that while as children, we are often taught to stand up to bullying, injustice and crime, the very same values are lost to us as we grow up and we make an effort to ignore injustice - ever so often turning a blind eye to crime and letting the bullies have their way to avoid shaming.

But not Taruna Aswani.

A 26-year-old physical therapist, Taruna has been living in USA's Maryland for the past five months. On October 22, Taruna shared a post on Facebook about what she was going through. An stranger going by the name "Kevin John" had hacked into her cloud storage and found some private photographs and videos of her - leveraging the two, he decided to blackmail her.

The pictures and a video, that Taruna had sent to her boyfriend at the time, were being used by Kevin to extort more compromising photographs of her. He threatened to release the photos and the video to all her contacts if she did not comply. "I have nude pictures and video that belongs to you that nobody else knows it exists beside the person you sent to and it looks good like I thought. All I am saying is you want me to keep quiet on this and don't let the world (social media, work place, family and friends) know then you have to excite me" wrote the blackmailer. He also warned her against reporting him to the police.

This classic bullying tactic, known to work a million times and more, would have succeeded had Taruna not decided to stand up to her online harasser. She wrote a brave Facebook post, with screenshots of the mails she received, making it amply clear to everyone that despite knowing the consequences, she was not going to let a hacker bully her:

Dear Friends and Family,

I am posting this and emailing you individually as my online identity has been compromised.

I have in the last 24 hours received 2 emails from someone that claims to know me that has hacked into my google cloud back up.

Taruna's post sets a standard for how one should react to such threats. With more than 2,600 shares for the post in just two days, it seems clear that she has all the support she needs to confront her harasser. That said, not everyone is and can be expected to be as courageous. Countless women are victims of extortion, who are forced to give in to their harassers - their fear of public shaming leads them to do unspeakable things. A poignant example is the episode called "Shut Up and Dance" from the latest season of the Netflix series Black Mirror, where a group of people are blackmailed into performing certain tasks.

The episode ends with the "troll" leaking their information anyway. And that is what happens in most cases, if not all the time. The right way to defeat bullies is - without doubt - by taking them head-on. The moment they realise that they have no power over you, that they can't scare you, they learn their lesson.

Taruna's post gives us courage to stand up to harassment of every kind and must be seen as the precedent everyone looks up to.

Also read - Bharatiya sanskar lets creeps make 'leaked MMS', but shames consenting adults