Ariana Grande has filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles against a group of hackers whose identity she still does not know, whom she accuses of illegally accessing the accounts and devices of people around her to steal and leak unreleased songs, videos and photographs that have never been published.
According to the lawsuit, those responsible used phishing techniques to gain access to the accounts of photographers and producers who have worked with the singer. Afterwards, they allegedly sold that material for “significant sums of money.” The goal of the lawsuit is to uncover the identity of those responsible and hold them accountable for conduct that Grande’s legal team calls “invasive and reprehensible.”
The document maintains that leaks have accompanied Ariana’s career since her debut in 2011. Among the cases cited are the access in 2019 to a photographer’s Dropbox account, the hacking of a producer’s cell phone in 2020 to obtain demos, unreleased masters and videos of recording sessions, and the leak of up to 45 unreleased songs during 2023 alone.
The lawsuit also claims that in 2024 the attackers created a Gmail account and a domain that impersonated a photographer to get a technician to send them unpublished photographs from the ‘eternal sunshine’ era. With this judicial action, Grande intends to stop this type of practices “in her name and in that of other artists.”
The irony is that one of those leaks ended up inspiring one of his latest hits. The ‘Fantasize’ demo was the germ of ‘the boy is mine’. Now, with ‘petal’ just around the corner, the album appears to have dodged leaks, at least for now.
