Presumed Guilt: Why We Can’t Afford to Blame Victims of Celebrity Leaks

Jesus warns that the measure we use to make judgments will be applied to our own lives. Tim Challies had the chance to gather his thoughts, type this post, add a clear disclaimer regarding his own behavior, and willingly press the “Publish” button. The women he wrote about didn’t have that luxury.

While some responded to the recent celebrity “leaks” (sex crimes, in fact) by blaming the victims for taking such photos in the first place, Challies wants to avoid that. He writes in an attempt to encourage compassion for the women involved, and pledges to sidestep questions of digital age foolishness and sexual immorality.

One moment these women had a semblance of control over their self-presentation to the world, and the next, the world had access to their most intimate photos. But then, after appropriately bemoaning the invasion of privacy and the sickening violations that these women are enduring, Challies still implicates them in their own suffering, albeit in a more spiritualized manner: “The very fact that these women took these photographs in the first place is proof that they are victims of the world, the flesh, and the devil.”

This is an assertion that the photos themselves are sinful and that the women who took them hurt themselves before the thefts occurred. However, one would think that there are more legitimate reasons to have a private copy of a nude photo. A playful photo taken of the spouse you adore? A weight loss before-and-after series to show your best friend? A picture snapped of a mirror’s reflection to get a better look at the unidentified rash on your lower back as you decide whether to get it checked out or not? Surely many photos like these exist on hard drives, and they aren’t cause for mourning.

Challies assumes that the celebrities’ photos are of the naughty variety. Challies says he did not view any of the leaked photos, so he relies on his powers of assumption to deduce the following about the victims:

• They “were all willing participants in these photo shoots.”
• They “believe they are nothing more than their beauty, their sexiness, or their sexual desirability.”
• They are “victims of the lust that drove them to inappropriate sexual relationships outside of marriage.”

That is quite the mountain of assumptions, making Challies’ disclaimer (“In case it needs to be said, I did not look for or look at any of those photos in preparing this article.”) absolutely necessary. There aren’t many logical paths that can lead to his assumptions. Here’s one path Challies may have taken: They are female celebrities, therefore they are unmarried women, gleefully fornicating and deriving satisfaction from being the recipients of a lustful gaze. Here’s another: Without looking at the images themselves, Challies has read up on them, found the list of women involved, dug to discover their marital status, and read descriptions making clear that the images were sexually explicit.

One moment these women had a semblance of control over their self-presentation to the world, and the next, the world had access to their most intimate photos. They didn’t have the opportunity to explain that these were sacred moments with their husbands, regretful mementos from past foolish relationships they thought were gone for good, or whatever justification the Christian gaze would require to exonerate them. Challies’ measure of judgment is one of assuming the worst in others.

It may sometimes be true that, when it comes to sin, “a person can be a willing participant and victim at the same time and in the same act,” but that possibility doesn’t invite presumption on our part. If evangelicals want to be seen as friends to the sinner, or channels of grace in our sexually insane age, we can’t afford to be this careless. It is better to say nothing about victims of sexual crime than to pronounce judgment on them. Better yet would be to affirm their dignity, mourn with them, and avoid pointing out what they should have done differently.

There is plenty of information out there on sexual victimhood, and one of its main aspects is that victims are prone to blame themselves for the horrors visited upon them. We have to be careful not to model the callous justification of voyeurism, something Challies earnestly desires to avoid. As he describes concerning pornography, the temptation to shift some or all of the agency of voyeurism onto the photographed subject is common, easing the conscience of the one desecrating the image of God before them.

Let’s imagine and affirm the best of female victims moving forward, famous or not. It would be far more edifying for us to spend our mental efforts trying to get to the bottom of what causes millions of men to prey on and objectify women, as our own Alan Noble has done, than to wonder about the private, hypothetical sins of those objectified.