My Body(37)

When the piece arrived, I was annoyed. I’d seen online that other subjects of the Instagram paintings were being given studies, the smaller drafts of the final works, as gifts. My boyfriend asked the studio, and some months later, a twenty-four-inch mounted black-and-white “study” arrived. It was a different shot than the large piece we had purchased, but I still felt victorious.

When our relationship ended, about a year and a half later, I assumed he wouldn’t want the canvas—a giant picture of me, now his ex—so we began to make arrangements to divide our belongings, including the artwork we had bought together. In exchange for two other pieces of art, I received ownership of the Prince.

A few weeks later, I realized—sitting up straight, half asleep in my bed with my jaw clenched in the middle of the night—that I hadn’t collected the black-and-white study the studio had given me. My ex said he “hadn’t thought about that” and told me he’d moved the piece into storage. We went back and forth via email until he told me I needed to pay him $10,000 for the study, a price he’d arrived at from his “knowledge of the market.”

“But it was a gift to me!” I wrote.

I reached out to Prince’s studio. Could they offer some clarity or assistance? Help me get my ex to back off this ridiculous ransom? Through my contacts, I was assured that they would reach out to him to confirm that the study had been a gift from Prince to me and me alone. He didn’t respond well to this assertion.

All these men, some of whom I knew intimately and others I’d never met, were debating who owned an image of me. I was considering my options when it occurred to me that my ex, whom I’d been with for three years, had countless naked pictures of me on his phone.

I thought about something that had happened a couple of years prior, when I was twenty-two. I’d been lying next to a pool under the white Los Angeles sun when a friend sent me a link to the bulletin board 4chan. Private photos of me—along with those of hundreds of other women hacked in an iCloud phishing scam—were expected to leak onto the internet. A post on 4chan listed actresses and models whose nudes would be published, and my name was on it. The pool’s surface sparkled in the sunlight, nearly blinding me as I squinted to scroll through the list of ten, twenty, fifty women’s names until I landed on mine. There it was, in plain text, the way I’d seen it listed before on class roll calls: so simple, like it meant nothing.

Later that week, the photos were released to the world. Pictures meant only for a person who loved me and with whom I’d felt safe—photos taken out of trust and intimacy—were now being manically shared and discussed on online forums and rated “hot” or “not.” Rebecca Solnit wrote about the message that comes with revenge porn: “You thought you were a mind, but you’re a body, you thought you could have a public life, but your private life is here to sabotage you, you thought you had power so let us destroy you.” I’d been destroyed. I’d lost ten pounds in five days, and a chunk of hair fell out a week later, leaving a perfectly round circle of white skin on the back of my head.

The next day, I wired my ex the money. I didn’t think I could survive going through what I’d been through again. I exchanged the safety of those hundreds of Emilys for one image—an image that had been taken from my platform and produced as another man’s valuable and important art.

I hung the giant Instagram painting, the image from the Sports Illustrated shoot, on a prominent wall in my new home in Los Angeles. When people visited, they’d rush toward it and yell, “Oh, you got one of these!”

My guests would cross their arms and study the painting, read Prince’s comment, and smile. The comment above his came from some unknown user; they’d often turn back to me to ask if I knew what it said. “Is it German?” they’d wonder aloud, squinting.

Eventually, after enough people asked, I decided to translate the comment myself.

“It’s about how saggy my tits look,” I told my husband, with whom I now share a home. He came over and put his arms around my back, whispering, “I think you’re perfect.” I felt myself stiffen. Even the love and appreciation of a man I trusted, I had learned, could mutate into possessiveness. I felt protective of my image. Of her. Of me.

The next time someone asked about the German comment, I lied and said I didn’t know.



* * *



In 2012, my agent told me I should buy a bus ticket from Penn Station to the Catskills, where a photographer named Jonathan Leder would pick me up and reimburse me for my fare. We’d shoot in Woodstock, for some arty magazine I’d never heard of called Darius, and I’d spend the night at his place, she said. This was something the industry calls an unpaid editorial, meaning it would be printed in the magazine and the “exposure” would be my reward.

I had been working with my agent full-time for about two years. She had known me since I was fourteen, when I landed my first modeling and acting jobs, but she began to take my career more seriously when I turned twenty. I began to take my career more seriously, too: I dropped out of UCLA to pursue modeling and was working quite regularly. I opened an IRA and paid off my first and only year at college with the money I’d made. I wasn’t doing anything fancy or important, mostly e-commerce jobs for places like Forever 21 and Nordstrom, but the money was better than what any of my friends were making as waitresses or in retail. I felt free: free of the asshole bosses my friends had to deal with, free of student-loan debt, and free to travel and eat out more and do whatever the hell I pleased. It seemed crazy to me that I had ever valued school over the financial security that modeling was beginning to provide.