A 21-year-old woman has been charged with 11 felonies stemming from the hacking of the email of Selena Gomez and one of the Back To You singer’s associates, according to a press release from the Los Angeles Police Department.
Los Angeles County prosecutors said Friday that 21-year-old Susan Antrach of Ridgefield Park, N.J., has been charged with five identity-theft counts, five fraud counts and one count of accessing and using data without permission.
Atrach faces a possible maximum sentence of nine years and eight months in state prison if convicted as charged. The prosecutor is recommending bail be set at US$250,000, according to the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.
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Prosecutors allege Antrach accessed the accounts of Gomez and the unnamed associate several times in 2015 and 2016. They also allege that she posted private media from the accounts online.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Atrach gained access to the accounts by resetting the passwords using the information questions, answers to which she gathered from information about Gomez available to the public from multiple online sources.
Antrach has not entered a plea.
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Gomez was the victim of a hacking in 2017 when several nude photos of her ex-boyfriend Justin Bieber were posted to her account.
The account was quickly deactivated and the photos were removed. Shortly after, Gomez’s account was up again with the NSFW images of Bieber deleted.
Kirsten Stubbs, the digital marketing director at Interscope Records, tweeted that Gomez’s record label was behind the temporary takedown of the singer’s Instagram account after it appeared to have been hacked.
“We deactivated with Instagram to ensure it’s secure before relaunching! Hang tight,” Stubbs tweeted in response to a fan of Gomez.
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The Bieber images were the same ones that were published after the Canadian pop star’s Bora Bora vacation in 2015.
Bieber told Access Hollywood at the time that the nude photos being leaked made him feel “super violated” and, “Like, I feel like I can’t step outside and feel like I can go outside naked.”
He said that, “You should feel comfortable in your own space … especially that far away.”
The censored images were originally posted in the New York Daily News, but eventually the uncensored images made the internet rounds.
—With files from the Associated Press
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