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Ariana Grande is suing the hackers who she claims have been stealing and selling her unreleased music, photos and footage for years.
The singer filed a lawsuit in California state court on Monday, obtained by CBC News, alleging a yearslong hacking campaign against close collaborators and others with access to her unreleased material, “resulting in the unlawful and egregious theft, dissemination, and exploitation of unreleased content belonging to Ms. Grande.”
The suit claims a group of unnamed John Does gained access to online accounts and devices of photographers, producers and other people Grande has worked with. They then downloaded unreleased music, recording session footage, music video materials, photos and other private materials and then sold it “on the dark web for significant sums of money.”
Grande’s suit claims that “in 2023 alone, 45 unreleased songs belonging to Ms. Grande were hacked, stolen, and leaked,” and that since her 2011 debut, “hundreds of similar leaks have taken place.”
The complaint outlines multiple alleged breaches spanning years.
In 2019, the login details for a photographer’s Dropbox account were allegedly stolen. The next year, one of Grande’s producers’ phones was allegedly hacked, which led to the leak of her unreleased masters, demos and footage.
The most recent claim allegedly took place in 2024, when a phishing campaign targeted a digital technician working for a photographer Grande collaborated with. The singer claims the hackers made a Gmail account and internet domain to impersonate the photographer and convince the technician to send private materials to the hackers.
Calling out ‘crooks’
This isn’t the first time Grande has called out hackers for leaking her unreleased content.
In an interview on The Zach Sang Show in 2024, she brought up a song called Fantasize, which she wrote and produced with Swedish producer Max Martin for a TV show. It went viral after the leaked track was posted online against her will.
“Before I left for Wicked, the few studio sessions that I did — which are all over TikTok, thank you so much. I’ll see you in jail, literally — those were all written for a TV show, for something that was not for me,” she said. “So Fantasize comes out — ‘comes out,’ crazy, was stolen … Thieves, pirates, crooks! Illegal!”
CBC News reached out to representatives for Grande, who declined to comment.
WATCH | Music video for Grande’s single hate that i made you love me:
‘A very difficult situation’
Jeremy Goldman, an L.A.-based intellectual property, media, entertainment and technology lawyer, told CBC News it was a “very difficult situation.”
He says they’re likely using the suit as a way to obtain subpoena power “to identify whatever information they can through internet service providers using forensic records, for example, for accounts that have been compromised, and then going to the service providers to try and follow the cookie crumbs and see if they can get to a person at the end of the trail.”
Goldman says while the the breadth and scope of the case might be special, this is a frequently used mechanism to go after unidentified people. He points to a similar lawsuit in 2023 by the singer Sia.
“It’s not a high likelihood of success here,” he said. “Not because of the legal merits but because of the nature of the internet and the nature of hackers makes it very difficult to pin this down and to get information.”
Grande is gearing up to release her eighth studio album, Petal, later this week. She’s currently on her Eternal Sunshine tour, stopping in Montreal for a three-night stint this week — the only Canadian dates on the tour.
