NZ Radio Station The Edge Slammed for Posting Jennifer Lawrence’s Nude Photos

New Zealand radio station The Edge angered its listeners after it published the hacked nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence on its Web site.

After the nude photos surfaced on the mediaboard site 4Chan, The Edge, just like a number of other sites, published the said images on its site.

Lawrence’s spokesperson immediately released a statement, saying that they have contacted the authorities and will prosecute anyone who posts the stolen photos.

Nevertheless, that didn’t stop the radio station from posting the images, and some Kiwis saw the posting as fuelling the Roastbuster rape culture of the country.

The Roastbuster scandal involves young men from Auckland who are accused of intoxicating underage girls to gang rape them. Apart from the heavy criticism of the police’s treatment of the victims and their handling of the case, the public were also outraged over how some radio commentators blamed the victims.

The Edge later took down the photos then just included a link to them on another site. The link was also deleted later.

Sexual Abuse Prevention Network coordinator Fiona McNamara condemned the sharing of the stolen photos on The Edge’s site, saying that it is clear that the network didn’t care about the women even when it deleted the images.

“That the Edge would link to the photos on another site after removing them from their own dismisses the real issue at hand here – consent. Their only concern is to keep themselves out of hot water,” she said.

The Daily Blog also said that despite receiving complaints about their posting of images, The Edge initially refused to act.

“When I spoke to representatives they said that they were within their rights and the photos would stay. It seemed at that time that all of the staff that I spoke to knew about the photos and were comfortable with them saying that ‘only one person has complained’ so it was OK to leave them online,” TDB’s Jessie Hume wrote, adding that the photos were only up for three hours at that time so perhaps the Media Works, the owner of The Edge, would only delete the photos after a public outrage.

“This is an example of the same kind of cultural values that saw the Roastbusters incident occur. Displaying her photos without her consent is an example of rape culture; again we see the normalisation and trivialisation of without-consent behaviour. The Edge just see this as every day ‘laddish’ behaviour, and only uptight people complain, without considering that permission has to be at the core.”

The Edge has since apologised for publishing the photos, but still absolves itself from complete fault, even blaming other Web sites for publishing the photos before them.

“We made a mistake yesterday by following what many other NZ and overseas Web sites had done and posting the photos of Jennifer Lawrence,” the statement reads. “We are reviewing our pre-vet systems to avoid any similar mistakes in the future.

“We unreservedly apologise for posting the photos and confirm they were removed from our site on Monday morning as soon as we became aware of the mistake we had made.”