Warning: This article includes discussion of rape that some readers may find upsetting.
Bella Thorne has spoken candidly about why she chose to publish her own private images after a hacker tried to use them against her.
During an appearance on the Call Her Daddy podcast with Alex Cooper, the actor reflected on the 2019 blackmail ordeal and the emotional toll it took on her.
Thorne explained that it began when she received a text from someone she did not know. The sender then started sending her intimate photos of herself that had never been publicly shared, with more messages continuing to follow.
Authorities later identified British hacker Joseph O’Connor as the person behind the hack. O’Connor, who operated under the pseudonym “PlugwalkJoe,” threatened to release Thorne’s nude photographs unless she publicly thanked him on Twitter for returning her account. He was part of a broader criminal community specializing in hacking schemes, SIM-swapping attacks, and cryptocurrency fraud.
At the time, Thorne was promoting her book, The Life of a Wannabe Mogul: Mental Disarray, which deals with her personal experiences and struggles. She said she showed the messages to her manager.
“I don’t know what to do,” she told him. “My power was taken from me then, for so many years, and now he has this thing of me and he’s taking it again. It felt like being re raped,” Thorne said on the podcast.
“And also feeling like ‘everything will end for you,’ if he does this. Having someone else have that power and agency over your own body…”
Thorne, who was 21 at the time, said her manager responded by seeing her as a person first rather than simply a client, and backed her choice to post the photos herself.
She also said the hacker sent her nude images of people she knew, which she described as an attempt to demonstrate control.
Speaking about how she reached the decision to release the images, Thorne said she came to feel that if this man’s actions were going to cost her everything professionally, she would do it on her own terms.
“It’s the way I approach life. If you want to say, ‘she’s so sexual,’ okay, then I’ll be sexual. You want to do this to me, you want to take this from me? I’m going to take it instead,” agreeing with Cooper that it was her way of ‘taking control’.
She said she made what she described as an honest post on Twitter at the time, but later faced cruel accusations online from people who claimed she had staged the situation.
“The worst part of that was people saying, ‘You did this. You are faking it. You just want to show us your t*ts,” she recalled, while holding back tears.
“‘You want us so badly to see your private parts that that’s why you’re doing it. You want it.’ And that to me really broke me.”
Thorne went on to say that the FBI later contacted her, and that the man responsible was eventually caught after around a year and a half.
“They knew it was him from the writing,” the Shake It Up told Cooper. “So if I had not posted those screenshots, they wouldn’t have caught him. Or maybe they would have caught him later, but they wouldn’t have had that direct source.”
She also publicly thanked investigators after the arrest, writing:
“I want to thank the FBI for searching tirelessly for the person who made my life and others a living hell.”
O’Connor was arrested in southern Spain on charges connected to the hacking of more than 130 Twitter accounts, including those belonging to Kanye West, Joe Biden and Elon Musk.
In June 2023, a U.S. federal judge sentenced him to five years in prison for his part in a broad range of cybercrime offenses. More recently, in November 2025, authorities obtained a Civil Recovery Order requiring O’Connor to pay back cryptocurrency and digital assets valued at approximately £4.1 million that he had obtained through his criminal activities.