An Adelaide woman was horrified to find photos she’d posted on Instagram with her friends at 19-years-old had been photoshopped into pornography ads.
Adelaide musician Alexia Damokas, known by her stage name Aleksiah, has detailed the traumatic experience four years later in her newly-released song ‘Pretty Picture’.
The traumatic experience
Ms Damokas, 23, said she’d had no idea the photoshopped pictures existed until an acquaintance found them on Twitter.
‘Someone literally just saved photos that were public online of me just being a normal 19-year-old and photoshopped them onto pornographic images and posted them on Twitter,’ she told Adelaide Now.
‘Someone I did karaoke with sent me a message saying, “Hey, we don’t know each other very well but I just found these on Twitter and thought I should tell you”.’
Creating fake pornographic material without consent is illegal with a Brisbane man sentenced to 12 months behind bars for photoshopping his teenage stepdaughter into pornographic photos in 2018.
What she did
With the help of her friends and family, Ms Damokas was able to report the Twitter account and the pictures were removed.
Unable to fully process her feelings at the time, she bottled them up and tried to downplay the incident.
‘When this first happened, I laughed it off and took it as a joke but, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realised how much of an invasion of my privacy and disrespect of my body this act was,’ she wrote in an emotional Instagram post.
It was only when the images reappeared years later that Ms Damokas was able to work through her emotions and understand the toll the edited photos took on her.
READ ALSO: Adam22’s porn star wife Lena the Plug teases sex scene with MULTIPLE men
‘I was angry, I was really confused, I was extremely embarrassed that people saw those photos of me because they weren’t me,’ she told Adelaide Now.
‘It was embarrassing that people would see that, especially when I don’t feel comfortable sharing images of my naked body online.’
Now, Ms Damokas sees the release of her new song as a chance for her to take charge of the story and the shame she once felt.
‘The song’s about reclaiming the pride and safety I felt I had lost and just realising how sad and pathetic that person was that made those photos,’ she said.
