Grimes has revealed that she hacked an Indie blog and blackmailed the owners for posting an unflattering photo of her.

The photo was posted on Indie blog Hipster Runoff in 2012, and quickly circulated around the internet.

“I was just at a party with my friends,” Grimes told Vanity Fair of the photo. “Someone took this photo, and it got leaked to this website called Hipster Runoff.”

Grimes added: “And then he [the blog owner], like, ran this story, and this was, like, I was trying to be like all integrity and, you know, like, start my career. And it was, like, Grimes gone wild or something. And it was just this, like, super wack, like, mean story. And it was, like, this meme that was going all over the internet.

“But my friend who worked for—I will not say which video game—had access to…. OK, well I don’t wanna get him in trouble, but, anyway, we were actually able to DDoS Hipster Runoff and basically blackmail them. We were like, like, we’re not gonna let you run your—put your site back up until you take the story down. And he did, in fact, take the story down. And it was like my coolest hacker moment. So, yeah, that’s the story of this photo.”

The site’s anonymous founder who operated under the pseudonym of Carles confirmed the blog’s outage at the time to Motherboard.

“My hosting company and support team say that there are signs of foul play on the server, and some of the last actions before it crashed are very suspicious.” He added, “My server disk has crashed and remote backups were sabotaged.”

Love Pop?

Get the latest Pop news, features, updates and giveaways straight to your inbox Learn more

Hipster Runoff was a popular blog in the late 2000s and early 2010s, that covered hipster culture, as well as celebrity news.

For more on this topic, follow the Pop Observer.

Get unlimited access to the coverage that shapes our culture.
to Rolling Stone magazine
to Rolling Stone magazine