“Hi, sorry to inform you but there’s personal videos of you online.”
An Instagram direct message from a stranger hadn’t initially worried Leigh Nicol.
At the time, she was a 23-year old semi-professional Scottish footballer, having been capped underage for Scotland and played her club football with Millwall Lionesses and Charlton Athletic. She hadn’t been in a relationship for a while, hadn’t taken videos. It must be a scam, surely.
Then the screenshots arrived. Intimate videos she’d made with a former partner when she was 18 were now online. “On Pornhub, on all these other random – I don’t even want to say the word – porn websites,” explains Nicol.
“I never actually took videos with anyone else in my life. It was maybe three or four iPhones on from then as well, so I didn’t even have that phone anymore.”
Her reaction was immediate.
“Instantly, like I’ve never experienced, my body was physically shaking, I was gagging but no sickness was coming up. I experienced my first ever panic attack, I literally thought I was having a heart attack. I couldn’t catch a breath, I didn’t sleep but I called 999, because I had no idea what to do.”
She laughs at this now, calling the emergency services, but an emergency is what it felt like.
“At that time, my body was online and I was having sex and the views were going up and up and up and it was getting put on more and more websites and I didn’t know what to do.”
The local police station would send someone out in the morning.
“I didn’t know who to call, who to talk to, I couldn’t tell my friends, tell my family. I just dealt with it. It was the longest night of my life.”
She remembers sitting up, looking at the wall, messaging and emailing anyone she thought could help, all through the night, worrying about the impact this was going to have on her job, her family, her friends, people’s perceptions of her.
“I didn’t even know if it was a criminal offence at the time. I was doing all that work on my own and I just couldn’t stop. That was between sending an email, having a panic attack, being sick, crying. It was a vicious circle that went on and on.”
It was the police who later told her about revenge porn.
“What do you mean porn? I’ve not created porn. That’s not my understanding of porn. And what do you mean revenge? Oh my goodness. Is there someone that I’ve known that has actually done this to me?”
The answer seems to have both haunted and comforted her, but no, there wasn’t (the person in the video with her “went through the exact same as me: same feelings, emotions, anger, upset, life turned upside down, same damage done.”)
It turned out to be an unknown source who hacked her email address and changed the password on her iCloud.
“Usually when these things happen, it’s an ex-partner or it’s an associate. This was a really unfortunate one where it was just a random person and I don’t know if they live next door to me or at the other end of the world.
“From then life stopped for me. I didn’t care about anything in the world.”
Football, which had up until that point been a source of joy and confidence, felt taken away from her.
“I wasn’t in love with football like I was as a little girl. I didn’t have the strength to put myself out there in the public eye and be subjected to any abuse. On a football pitch you annoy people on purpose to try and win a game of football or you might get some amount of abuse from fans. It doesn’t matter if we’ve got 50,000 fans or 50, it just takes one comment. I wasn’t prepared to do that.”
As a semi-pro athlete who’d been blessed with relatively few injuries, it was one of the first times Nicol had felt out of control of her body.
“I lost the most expensive thing in life – my privacy,” she says. “You go from your body being your body, if you want someone to see your private parts, that’s your choice to show them that. That was taken away from me. Everyone worldwide could have a look at it and judge.
“I don’t know how you ever even start to heal those scars because I’ll never get that back. All the work that I do is kind of trying to find a way to get on with it, it’s a bit like grief, I’ve lost something that I’ll never get back. There’s a process you go through, anger, denial, confusion, upset and you just find a new way to live your life.”
Victims of image-sharing crimes often suffer long-term trauma. That’s part of why Nicol is speaking up about it now.
“I never thought that it would get better but fortunately for me it did. Everyone’s journey is so different and some people never really get out of that dangerous stage of recovery, that survival mode and finding that courage and bravery, to try and find a new normal. I think I’ll always be in recovery from it.”
She’s in Ireland for a Rookie Camp talk given to rugby academy players.
“We talk to them about absolutely everything about online dangers; including making a video while having sex and making sure that they’re always being respectful, risk averse and they’re being authentic and showing their true self without having to act like a robot at the same time.
“They’re [teenagers] also and allowed to make mistakes. Unfortunately an elite sports person is treated as if they’re not allowed to. It’s actually important that we give them as much support as possible to try and limit those, while telling them, ‘if you do make mistakes, it’s gonna be okay. It is always gonna be okay. There’s always a way to manage it’.”
Football came back to her, or she to it, after lockdown. She’d started running, got fitter, remembered how good it felt, returned to Crystal Palace, just to train.
“I fell in love with football all over again. I felt free and like this was my escape from everything that I’ve been going through. It helped with the depression that I was feeling and anxiety that I was experiencing. I appreciated everything that was around me and I’ve never had that, like the sound of a football being kicked, the feeling of grass, the smell of fresh air.
“If I lost a ball, that was okay, because I’ve been through hell for the last year, year and a half of my life, losing a football? I can go and try to fix that. Life improved instantly when I got back to the game.”
For Nicol now, life is only getting better.
“Every single month that passes is another month and year furthering my recovery. I’m a completely better person now for the struggles that I went through and I’m really grateful for them now and I can’t believe that I’m saying that.”
A few months after it happened a mentor asked her what she was grateful for from the hacking? Had she learned anything? What was she forced to learn because of it happening?
“I was like, ‘nothing’. I was so offended, considering the pain that I was going through.”
Asked the same question 18 months later, her answer was different.
“I never thought I’d ever say this but I’m genuinely so grateful that it happened because I wouldn’t have become the person that I have, I wouldn’t have met the people that I now have in my life. I wouldn’t have recognised that the friends that I have around me are gold dust. I wouldn’t be doing this other career as well.”
Telling the story is part of her now, in a way that is both familiar and not familiar.
“You get to a point where I guess it’s a coping mechanism and you just find a way to get through it. There is always something that hurts every single time you do it. It could be a certain flashback or something that you haven’t spoken about before but it’s just natural now. It’s part of my day-to-day life. So you find the way.”
