Three years after her phone was hijacked with photos meant for then-boyfriend Nicholas Hoult, the actress says: "It was so unbelievably violating."

It has been three years since Jennifer Lawrence's iPhone was hijacked and nude photos (meant for then-boyfriend Nicholas Hoult) were dispersed across the internet. But the 27-year-old star of mother! said on THR's Awards Chatter podcast (available at the link below, via iTunes or THR.com/TheRace) that she's "still processing" the pain and embarrassment the hack caused her.


"When I first found [out] it was happening, my security reached out to me," she said of the 2014 nightmare. "It was happening minute-to-minute, almost like a ransom situation, where they were releasing new [photos] every hour. It was so unbelievably violating. I feel like I got gangbanged by the fucking planet — like, there's not one person in the world that is not capable of seeing these intimate photos of me."


The worldwide dissemination of the images continues to haunt her. "You can just be at a barbecue, and somebody can just pull them up on their phone. That's really an impossible thing to process."


What was not impossible for Lawrence was coming to a decision on whether or not she wanted to file a lawsuit. She wanted to heal rather than spend time in court. "A lot of women were affected, and a lot of them reached out to me about suing — and none of that was gonna really bring me peace, none of that was gonna bring my nude body back to me and Nic, the person that they were intended for," she added. "It wasn't gonna bring any of that back. So I wasn't interested in suing everybody; I was just interested in healing."


The hacker, Ryan Collins, pleaded guilty and is currently behind bars serving an 18-month sentence.