Band Sells Their Own Sex Tape For $5 After They Say Someone Stole and Released It
LatestA Los Angeles-based musical duo who are also in a romantic relationship are selling their own sex tape, after they say someone stole it and disseminated it (for obvious reasons, they didn’t specify where the video was released or how widely it has been seen). The couple are asking that nobody view the tape but, if you must, “we beg of you to download the video, Louis C.K.-style, directly from us.”
Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans are the frontpeople for YACHT, a Los Angeles-based band originally from Portland. In a Facebook post which we saw via Fader, they write that a private video of theirs became public “due to a series of technological missteps and one morally abject person”:
Claire and I — who have been romantic and artistic partners since 2006 — made a “sex tape.” It was intended for us only. We don’t feel the need to justify the reason we made it. Anyone reading this who has been in a long term partnership understands that preserving the relationship is an ever-changing and challenging thing. It’s especially difficult when the lines between career and romance are as merged as ours are. The financial pressures that we’ve been under, which de facto extend into our extracurricular lives, created a circumstance in which we felt like we needed a bit of an escape from the day-to-day. So we turned on a camera, became naked, and had sex. We assumed that we were the only people who would be privy to that video. I guess we were naive. Now you have the option to be privy to that video. For us, that’s a shame.
We feel like art is an act of generosity. The art we make for the public is for that expressed purpose. And now we’re in an awkward situation where the art that we made for us and us alone is being viewed by anyone who has the inclination to hit play — a true and humiliating blurring of the public and private.
The couple says they’ve initiated legal proceedings against the person who stole the video. In the meantime, they add, “our hope is that you fundamentally understand that choice and you choose not to view a private act that was inadvertently made public. We hope you understand that this is not a delicious scandal. This is an exploitation.”
In an update a couple hours later, Evans and Bechtolt added that with the help of a friend, they’ve chosen to post the video themselves, on a site where it’s available for purchase: