A woman who experienced years of abuse after intimate images of her were published online without her consent is considering taking legal action against one of Germany’s biggest TV channels for reproducing the photographs during an entertainment show.
The pictures of Emma Holten, taken by an ex-boyfriend and hacked from her email and Facebook accounts six years ago, were reused by the station RTL in June on a show entitled The 10 Sauciest Internet Stories.
Holten said that having the photographs broadcast to such a large audience had been devastating for her after fighting for years for the rights of women to prevent images of their bodies being published without their consent.
“I had done an interview with the same channel a year earlier,” she said. “They knew how I felt about the pain and the humiliation and yet they didn’t listen or call [to let me know].”
In 2014, after enduring years of online harassment, Holten created a series of images of herself in collaboration with the photographer Cecilie Bødker. She published the pictures as a project entitled Consent, intended to “take ownership” back of her body.
The initiative started out as a project of personal empowerment but the pictures and story went viral, attracting millions of views and messages of support on social media and mainstream media platforms around the world.
“The [images in the] Consent project were mine to share,” she said. “They had highlighted the issues of consent and when people searched the web for my name, my images rather than the original ones were the first to come up.”
However the RTL television show used both sets of pictures, Holten claims, as part of a “saucy, sexy story for ratings”.
Holten said: “It was utterly titillating. They spent minutes on the [original] revenge porn images and 30 seconds on my Consent project. That says it all about what they wanted from the images.”
She said her humiliation was compounded by the fact that she only found out about the broadcast when she started receiving emails from Germans who had seen the broadcast. One sent a screenshot of what had been shown.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I felt violated all over again. It was like they had put it up there and hoped that I wouldn’t find out,” she said.
After various attempts to contact the channel via email, Twitter and Facebook, she was eventually contacted by an RTL spokesperson who claimed the use of the photographs was down to a “problem of language, a miscommunication”.
An RTL spokesman admitted to the Guardian that the broadcaster had made two serious errors of judgment in showing the original stolen photographs and in failing to let Holten know that they planned on doing so.
In a statement, Germany’s biggest free-to-air broadcaster said: “We featured Emma Holten live in one of our TV magazines back in February 2015. Already at that time she had gone public with her story, sharing her experience with both the audience and us.
“We presented her as a strong independent woman who knows how to defend herself. The failure to inform her in advance about revisiting her story in Die 10 [The 10] was clearly an oversight on our part, as was the visuals used in the report, including so-called revenge pics.”
The spokesman said the company had apologised to Holten in an email.
