Remember when Ariana Grande went on the Zach Sang show and said to the people who had been hacking her and leaking her music, "I'll see you in jail? Literally?"

Remember when Ariana Grande went on the Zach Sang show and said to the people who had been hacking her and leaking her music, "I'll see you in jail? Literally?" Well, this week she finally filed a lawsuit against the people who have been hacking her and leaking her music. She's filed a lawsuit against John Doe's 1 through 100, which is kind of what you have to do if you know something's been done to you, but you don't exactly know who did it. Her lawyers say that this is to both figure out who has been doing the leaking and hacking and to then hold them accountable. Naming the John Doe's just to open the case will allow her and her team to go to the judge to ask for subpoenas. And I imagine they would want to go to the platforms where some of this behavior was taking place, like Google or Cash App, to get them to tell her which IP addresses were logged into the accounts where the behaviour took place. And then go to an internet service provider like Verizon or spectrum who could look at the house where that IP address came from. Legally she's suing for Three things. Invasion of privacy, violating California's computer hacking laws, and conversion, which is the civil version of theft. The People who got hacked, according to the complaint, were her photographers and her producers. In 2019, someone took the login credentials for a Dropbox account of A photographer who worked with her, which allowed the hackers to get unreleased photos of her. And then in 2020, a producer's phone was hacked, and what came off it were "still in production. Unreleased masters and demos and footage from recording session." Then there were two attacks in 2024, both phishing scams. So fake messages built to get someone to hand over access to unreleased images and audio. One of them went after a digital technician who was working for another one of her photographers. They set up a fake gmail account and a lookalike domain, so a domain that's just one or two letters off from what the official domain would have been. To pose as her photographer and get the technician to send the hacker her unreleased photos. In 2023 alone, the suit says that 45 unreleased songs were hacked, stolen and leaked by defendants. And it says that the material has been sold in batches to this present day, with money moving through payment services, including, but not limited to Paypal and Cash App. Fantasize might be the one (leaked track) that we're all most familiar with. Fantasize was produced by Max Martin, and it was never meant to be an Ariana Grande song, according to her. She said it was written for a TV show that never came out. It leaked in 2023, then it went viral on TikTok, as I'm sure we've all heard. And then also in 2023, someone uploaded the lead demo to Spotify under A fake artist name and a fake label, which were reportedly named "Adriana Venti" and "YUH records", respectively. And the cover art was lifted off of her makeup artist Instagram account. That leaked version of the song charted not everywhere, but in the Philippines, it hit No. 200 on Spotify's Daily Top Songs chart and had tens of thousands of streams before anyone realize they needed to take it down. She never put out fantasize, but she put out The Boy is Mine as a version of fantasize. The lawsuit is saying that all these leaks have caused her economic and reputational harm, that it's cost her team significant resources to continue investigating these leaks and figure out how to try to get them down, and that she's been forced to "rerecord materials and modify release dates for her upcoming projects and releases". Her lawyers are saying this has caused both harm to her creative process and her relationship with her fans. They're saying that it has been a "violation of her identity and her artistry" Her new album comes out on Friday, so we only have a couple more days for her to get through, hopefully with no leaks. I'm interested to see if she gets any names out of this lawsuit. It will have been for her, I'm sure, what feels like a long time coming.