Jenna Ortega

Jenna Ortega (born 2002) became one of the most visible young actors in the world when Netflix’s Wednesday premiered in 2022, following roles in You, the Scream franchise, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Her fame arrived alongside something darker: a flood of AI-generated sexual imagery of her — including images depicting her as a child.

“That’s why I deleted it”

Speaking on The New York Times’ podcast The Interview in August 2024, Ortega said she had joined Twitter at 14 because young actors were expected to, and was quickly confronted with “dirty edited content” of herself as a child. The first direct message she ever opened, at age 12, was an unsolicited explicit photo. After Wednesday made her a global star, the deluge of “absurd images and photos” grew so bad that she deleted her account entirely. “It was disgusting, and it made me feel bad,” she said. “That’s why I deleted it, because I couldn’t say anything without seeing something like that.”

Her experience is not isolated: reporting in 2024 documented apps using AI to generate nonconsensual nude imagery of celebrities, with Ortega’s likeness among those exploited in ads that circulated on major platforms. Her testimony became one of the most-cited examples of AI’s harms falling disproportionately on young women.

Ortega’s objection is rooted in personal violation rather than industry economics — she has not campaigned on training data or job displacement, but on what it feels like to be turned into raw material for abuse.