By now, we’ve all heard of revenge porn, where someone will upload an explicit photo of someone else to the internet without their consent in a bid to get back of them (usually for dumping the uploader). Stories of its occurrence are, sadly, happening just about daily right now.
However, we totally weren’t expecting this twist, with news that an Italian woman is suing her ex-boyfriend for sending her parents a Christmas card including a photo of her involved in an orgy with four men. Ie: an example of good old snail mail revenge porn.
‘My entire family including children were gathered round opening Christmas presents when my mother opened the card with the private photo of me,’ Gloria Fannuci, 28, told an Italian court, claiming that her ex Luciano Cremonesi, 35, is the only one to have had a copy of the photo. ‘You can imagine what a shock it was. To say that it ruined Christmas was an understatement.’
OK, there’s a slight element of this story that might make you chuckle, in that there’s always something at Christmas to put your older relatives’ minds into a tailspin, and this one really outdoes them all. (Even spending the entire morning hungover and puking into the Quality Street tin.)
And it’d be easy to dismiss the whole sending-revenge-porn-via-actual-mail thing as ridiculous in its retro-ness, (especially considering there are now apps to stop it happening) but it actually makes Gloria’s humiliation much more horrible.
During the case, there’s certainly going to be a paper trail and perhaps CCTV evidence of whoever sent the photo going to El Postino to send the smutty letter. But we figure that it would have been a lot easier to prove Cremonesi was the culprit if he’d uploaded the image online. After all, most of the pricks uploading revenge porn are doing it under the banner of dedicated revenge porn sites on the Surface Web (that’s the bit where your ISP can be tracked, not the place where people go to do illegal things), where they can be located, tracked down and, well, someday, when legislation comes in, be punished.
Still, at least we’re talking about Gloria's case now, in the light of lots of victims of revenge porn coming clean and trying to bring their perpetrators to some form of justice. Pre-internet, the victims of any sort of revenge porn might have been that much more afraid to admit it had happened, or talk about it.
But then again, it goes to show just how fucked up revenge-porners are to do such gross things in plain sight.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.