What It's Like To Be A Victim Of Revenge Porn

Kara Jefts is a brown-haired woman in her mid-30s. She works as an archivist and art historian at a Chicago university. She could be your sister, your daughter, your friend. For years, a heavy burden has been hanging over her life, a secret she has been trying to hide for the past six years.

“Soon after Jefts ended her long-distance relationship with a boyfriend who lived in Italy, explicit screenshots from their Skype conversations began to appear online. They were emailed to her family and friends, posted on Facebook with violent threats against her, and even appeared on websites devoted to exposing people’s sexually transmitted diseases, with false allegations about her sexual history,” writes Time.com journalist Charlotte Alter.

The constant fear of somebody seeing her images hung over Jefts' life like a dark cloud, and the feeling of humiliation followed her wherever she went. “It’s kind of like having an incurable disease,” Jefts tells Time.com.

Kara Jefts is a victim of revenge porn, and she's just one among many. The problem is widespread. Ten million Americans had their sexually explicit images distributed online without their consent, according to a study published by the Data & Society Research Institute. In Australia, a survey carried out by RMIT University and Monash University found that one in five had been a victim of an image-based abuse.

Time.com tells a poignant human story of the horrific experience of being a victim of revenge porn with a lot of emotion and depth to it. It shows how much an image shared online can affect somebody's life, and offers some insight into various factors that make revenge porn so hard to stop.