Before the internet, a stolen private photo might end up in a tabloid. After the mid-1990s, a private video could be seen by millions within days. Some celebrities fought back in court, some turned the attention into an empire, and in one case the fallout bankrupted an entire media company.
Many of these tapes were stolen or leaked without consent, which is a crime in more and more countries. This list is about what happened next: the lawsuits, the careers and the consequences.
10. Tulisa Contostavlos
For British singer Tulisa Contostavlos, then a judge on The X Factor, the timing in March 2012 could hardly have been worse. A short video with her former boyfriend, rapper Justin Edwards, appeared online just as her TV career took off.
Instead of staying silent, she went straight to court in London, won an injunction against further distribution and recorded an emotional video message in which she blamed her ex for selling the footage. It was one of the first times a British celebrity publicly framed a leak as a betrayal rather than a scandal.
9. Chyna
Joanie Laurer became a global star in the late 1990s as the WWE wrestler Chyna. After leaving the company, she and her then fiancé, fellow wrestler Sean Waltman (X-Pac), released a homemade video in 2004 through distributor Red Light District.
Titled 1 Night in China, a pun on Paris Hilton’s tape from the same year, it sold well. In the years before her death in 2016, she signed with Vivid for several adult films, a move many wrestling fans saw as a sign of how badly the business had treated one of its biggest female stars.
8. Colin Farrell
In 2005, Irish actor Colin Farrell learned that his former girlfriend, Playboy model Nicole Narain, wanted to release a private video they had made years earlier. He sued immediately, arguing it had been made for their eyes only.
A judge temporarily blocked the sale, but clips still spread online. In 2006 the two settled out of court. Farrell’s career barely suffered, which says a lot about how differently the public judged men and women in these situations.
7. Keeley Hazell
In the mid-2000s, Keeley Hazell was one of Britain’s most photographed glamour models. In 2007, a private video with a former boyfriend suddenly appeared online.
Hazell refused to profit from it and made clear she saw the leak as a serious invasion of her privacy. She moved on to acting and later appeared in films like Like Crazy and About Time.
6. Mathieu Valbuena and Karim Benzema
In 2015, a private video turned into the biggest criminal scandal in modern French football. Blackmailers got hold of an intimate recording of France midfielder Mathieu Valbuena and demanded money to keep it from going public before Euro 2016, which France was hosting.
Star striker Karim Benzema urged his teammate to negotiate with an intermediary he knew. Police were already listening in, and Benzema was charged with complicity. Both players were dropped from the national team, which meant Benzema missed France’s 2018 World Cup win. In 2021 a court in Versailles gave the future Ballon d’Or winner a one-year suspended sentence and a €75,000 fine.
5. Hulk Hogan
No celebrity sex tape had bigger consequences for journalism. In 2012, gossip site Gawker published a short clip of wrestling legend Hulk Hogan, real name Terry Bollea, with the then wife of his best friend, a radio host.
Hogan sued for invasion of privacy, with the lawsuit quietly funded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who had his own grudge against Gawker. In March 2016 a Florida jury awarded Hogan $140 million. Gawker Media could not pay, filed for bankruptcy and shut down the site. Media lawyers still cite the case as a warning about the limits of “newsworthiness”. Hogan died in 2025.
4. Drake
The Drake leak of February 2024 showed how fast things move in the social media era. A short phone video, reportedly filmed on his private jet, appeared on X without warning, and within hours the rapper’s name was trending worldwide.
Instead of lawyers, Drake responded with a joke. Asked about it by streamer Adin Ross, he laughed it off, a sign of how much attitudes around male celebrities had shifted compared to the tabloid era.
3. Kim Kardashian
In 2006, most people knew Kim Kardashian, if at all, as Paris Hilton’s stylist and the daughter of O.J. Simpson’s lawyer Robert Kardashian. That changed in 2007, when Vivid announced it had a tape she had made with singer Ray J.
Kardashian sued, then settled for a reported $5 million. Months later, Keeping Up with the Kardashians premiered on E!, the start of a business empire that made her a billionaire by 2021. Few stories show more clearly how a leak could be turned into a launchpad.
2. Paris Hilton
Weeks before The Simple Life premiered in December 2003, footage appeared online that Paris Hilton had made with her then boyfriend Rick Salomon when she was 20. The timing gave the show a huge audience from day one.
Salomon released the full video on DVD in 2004 as 1 Night in Paris. After a lawsuit, Hilton reportedly received $400,000, and she has said she never wanted the tape to come out. In her 2020 documentary This Is Paris and her memoir, she described how the leak and the jokes that followed it haunted her for years.
1. Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee
The modern celebrity sex tape started with a dispute over a renovation bill. In 1995, Baywatch star Pamela Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee fired an electrician working on their Malibu home. He took revenge by stealing their safe, which turned out to contain a private tape from their honeymoon.
Mainstream distributors would not touch it, so it was sold online by an internet entrepreneur from 1997, at a time when most people had barely heard of the web. The couple sued repeatedly but could not stop millions of copies from circulating, and they never made money from it. Anderson has said she has never watched it. The story was dramatized in the 2022 series Pam & Tommy, made without her involvement.
