But it turned out Prince had made another Instagram painting of me, and this one was still available. The piece was a reproduction of a photo from my first appearance in Sports Illustrated. I was paid $150 for the shoot and a couple grand later, when the magazine came out, for the “usage” of my image. I hated most of the photos from that spread, because I didn’t look like myself: the makeup was too heavy, there were too many extensions in my hair, and the editors had kept telling me to smile in a fake way. But I did like a few of the images of me in body paint and had posted one of those pictures, which Prince then reused for this “painting.”
Prince’s comment on that post, included among several others at the bottom of the painting, alludes to an imagined day he has spent with me on the beach: “U told me the truth. U lost the []. No hurt. No upset. All energy bunny now that it’s sunny,” it reads. I liked the comment he left on this one far better than his comment on the black-and-white study, where he asks, “Were you built in a science lab by teenage boys?”
When I realized that my boyfriend and I had the opportunity to procure this one, it suddenly felt important to me that I own at least half of it; we decided to purchase it directly from the artist and split the cost down the middle. I liked the idea of getting into collecting art, and the Prince seemed like a smart investment. But mostly, I couldn’t imagine not having a claim on something that would hang in my home. And I knew my boyfriend felt like this was some kind of conquest; he’d worked hard to get it. I should be appreciative, I thought. Just split it with him. Besides, I was twenty-three; I hadn’t made enough money to comfortably spend $80,000 on art.
When the piece arrived, I was annoyed. I’d seen online that other subjects of the Instagram paintings were being given studies, the smaller drafts of the final works, as gifts. My boyfriend asked the studio, and some months later, a twenty-four-inch mounted black-and-white “study” arrived. It was a different shot than the large piece we had purchased, but I still felt victorious.
When our relationship ended, about a year and a half later, I assumed he wouldn’t want the canvas—a giant picture of me, now his ex—so we began to make arrangements to divide our belongings, including the artwork we had bought together. In exchange for two other pieces of art, I received ownership of the Prince.
A few weeks later, I realized—sitting up straight, half asleep in my bed with my jaw clenched in the middle of the night—that I hadn’t collected the black-and-white study the studio had given me. My ex said he “hadn’t thought about that” and told me he’d moved the piece into storage. We went back and forth via email until he told me I needed to pay him $10,000 for the study, a price he’d arrived at from his “knowledge of the market.”
“But it was a gift to me!” I wrote.
I reached out to Prince’s studio. Could they offer some clarity or assistance? Help me get my ex to back off this ridiculous ransom? Through my contacts, I was assured that they would reach out to him to confirm that the study had been a gift from Prince to me and me alone. He didn’t respond well to this assertion.
All these men, some of whom I knew intimately and others I’d never met, were debating who owned an image of me. I was considering my options when it occurred to me that my ex, whom I’d been with for three years, had countless naked pictures of me on his phone.
I thought about something that had happened a couple of years prior, when I was twenty-two. I’d been lying next to a pool under the white Los Angeles sun when a friend sent me a link to the bulletin board 4chan. Private photos of me—along with those of hundreds of other women hacked in an iCloud phishing scam—were expected to leak onto the internet. A post on 4chan listed actresses and models whose nudes would be published, and my name was on it. The pool’s surface sparkled in the sunlight, nearly blinding me as I squinted to scroll through the list of ten, twenty, fifty women’s names until I landed on mine. There it was, in plain text, the way I’d seen it listed before on class roll calls: so simple, like it meant nothing.
Later that week, the photos were released to the world. Pictures meant only for a person who loved me and with whom I’d felt safe—photos taken out of trust and intimacy—were now being manically shared and discussed on online forums and rated “hot” or “not.” Rebecca Solnit wrote about the message that comes with revenge porn: “You thought you were a mind, but you’re a body, you thought you could have a public life, but your private life is here to sabotage you, you thought you had power so let us destroy you.” I’d been destroyed. I’d lost ten pounds in five days, and a chunk of hair fell out a week later, leaving a perfectly round circle of white skin on the back of my head.