Ariana Grande kicked off the release week of her latest album, Petal, with a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles. The singer is targeting a group of yet-to-be-identified hackers, who across several digital attacks beginning in 2019, have targeted Grande and stolen unreleased music, photos, and videos from her.
The allegations
The hackers used a number of technique, including phishing scams using false identities, in order to commit, according to Grande’s attorneys in the suit, filed on Monday, “unlawful and egregious theft, dissemination, and exploitation of unreleased content.”
While the first breach occurred in 2019, in an attack that saw a hacker gaining access to the cloud storage of account of a photographer working with Grande, the biggest break-ins occurred in 2020 and 2023, when hackers gained entry to a producer’s mobile device, finding and subsequently leaking dozens of unreleased songs.
The suit also claims that the hackers earned “significant sums of money” selling the illicitly obtained material. The filing is an attempt by Grande and her attorneys to uncover the identities of the perpetrators through discovery.
The backstory
Celebrities have long been the target of digital invasions of privacy and leaks. In 2012, a Florida man was sentenced to 10 years in prison for a wiretapping scheme that involved access the email inboxes of stars like Scarlett Johansson and Mila Kunis.
Recently, Beyoncé doubled back to a leak piece of material when she officially shared “Morning Dew (Donk),” an unreleased demo that originally wound up online in 2021 and went viral (while still unofficial) in 2023. Years later, the song could now be a way back to the Grammys for the singer, as the world awaits her highly anticipated new album.
