Sextorted
Sextorted
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You may already know this but once I was sextorted. That’s a strange word. More formally I was the victim of intimate image abuse. My own nude images were used to blackmail me out of €2000 worth of Bitcoin. I thought I was talking a real person online who I’d intended to date, but the reality is it was some scammer trying to take advantage of my vulnerability.
This ground has been covered. In short, I didn’t pay any money, the images were never sent anywhere. But at the time it happened I felt trapped. Like a small animal, I felt stuck in some elaborate mechanism. And all I could do was wait for whoever set the trap to make their next move. My world got so small. I couldn’t work, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. All I could focus on was the panic, the fear, how helpless I felt. There was nothing I could do to get those images back. I was stuck.
My biggest fear was the images leaking. I was scared other people would find out. It didn’t take me long to realize this was something I had control over. The only thing I had control over. So I did something, the only thing I could do – I told people. I posted online about what was going on, how I was being blackmailed, how I wasn’t paying the money. My biggest fear was people finding out so I told them. Took the sting out of it. Took back the control. Now if my images were actually leaked it didn’t matter. Because I’d already told people I’d sent them. I chose the embarrassment rather than letting it happen to me.
And that made a huge difference. If we choose something then we have control. We are active in our lives. Rather than waiting to become a victim I just owned it. Accepted what had happened. If I didn’t do that, I likely would have been stuck in the fear of people finding out for weeks, months. But a week later, with no sign of my images anywhere, I was over it. Unstuck. Because I’d decided to use what control I had in the situation. I feel there’s something to be said about that.