He first instructed her to brighten the lighting in her room, and to take photos of herself in her underwear. Panicked, she complied with his requests. Immediately, she recalled an episode from a few years earlier, when classmates passed around a photo of her in her underwear, which precipitated months of bullying and a bout of depression. Then he sent a link to her mother’s Facebook account and the names of other family members and school friends, threatening to forward the picture to them if she didn’t follow his instructions. The man who sent the text forwarded a nude photograph of her, the source of which she couldn’t figure out. “I was a complete mess, I didn’t trust anyone, I was in complete self-destruct mode.”
“I had a really unstable home life, and I didn’t have good support around me,” Rachel told me recently, while sitting on her bed in a fluffy white bathrobe. She had just returned home from a party and was in her bedroom. Rachel lived with her mother, stepfather, and siblings in a midsize town in the United Kingdom. One night in 2017, a fifteen-year-old girl named Rachel received a WhatsApp message from a number she didn’t recognize.
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