‘What’s the worst that can happen?” That is what Georgia Harrison asked herself one Sunday morning in August 2020 when Stephen Bear, who lived opposite, invited her over for a cup of tea. They knew each other through the reality television and influencer circuits. She had been on The Only Way Is Essex (Towie) and Love Island; he had done Shipwrecked, Ex on the Beach, then won Celebrity Big Brother. They had hooked up before and he hadn’t treated her well.
“We’d been in lockdown and I was definitely quite lonely, feeling quite rubbish about myself,” says Harrison, 28. “I knew that going to Bear’s was a bad idea – there were two voices in my head. In the end, I thought: what’s the worst that could happen? Well, now we know.”
What happened was this: the morning cup of tea stretched into a long lunch washed down by tequila, followed by drunken sex in Bear’s back garden. The sex was different from how it had been in the past – more performative, with Bear carefully positioning Harrison in various locations. “It was more dramatic and lasted longer,” says Harrison. “I just thought he was having a good day.” Afterwards, to Harrison’s horror, Bear mentioned casually that it might have been caught on his CCTV system. When he showed her the footage and she began to cry (“I’ll die if anyone sees it,” she said), he promised to delete the video. Instead, three months later, Bear posted the footage on his verified Only Fans account. Within days, it was all over the internet, including the website Pornhub. “Georgia Harrison sex tape” had become a top search on Google.
Harrison found out when a fan in the US sent her a screenshot asking: “Have you seen this?” Her reaction was to gag. But she picked herself up and went to the police. Bear was arrested, charged and convicted. In March 2023, he was sentenced to 21 months in prison for voyeurism and sharing private sexual photographs and films with intent to cause distress. Now, she has written a memoir about it, Taking Back My Power.
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It is hard to overstate the impact of this case. Most victims of intimate image abuse never report the crime. They are teenagers too terrified of their parents’ reactions, professionals who fear for their careers, parents who don’t want their children or partner to know, or anyone else who can’t face walking into a police station armed with a link to Pornhub. Of those who do come forward, only about 4% will ever see a charge; a prison sentence is rarer still.
Bear’s case – on the news, in headlines, all over social media – sent a message of hope to victims of this sort of abuse and a warning shot to potential perpetrators. There was a 56% rise in calls to the government’s “revenge porn” helpline in the month he was sentenced. Harrison didn’t stop there, though. She lobbied parliament to demand better laws around “revenge porn” and helped to secure amendments to the online safety bill that make the crime easier to prosecute. She is still campaigning for platforms that carry the footage of her and Bear to be held criminally accountable.
It is certainly not the life or career she had in mind when she left school at 16, the only child of a single mother, already intent on reality TV stardom. “I grew up in Essex and a lot of my friends were on Towie, so that’s what I wanted to reach for,” she says. “It was the idea of literally getting paid for doing photoshoots, partying and having some fun in all these mad countries and bars.” At 19, she did get on Towie; a few years later, she was on Love Island. She built a career as an influencer and was able to buy a flat in Essex at 21. Was it all she had hoped for? “Actually, it was even better,” she says.
Although she and Bear were neighbours, Harrison didn’t get to know him until October 2018, when they were cast in The Challenge, an MTV reality show. By then, the former roofer had built a TV reputation as a bit of a player, a “lovable rogue”. They got together during filming, but when the show finished, Bear went back to womanising. Shortly afterwards, they starred in the sequel and got together again. This time, though, Harrison says, he locked her out of their hotel room to sleep with someone else.
The next time Harrison saw Bear was in August 2020, when he invited her over for that cup of tea and secretly filmed them having sex. Afterwards, she felt certain he had planned it. “We’d been in every angle that his CCTV covered,” she says. “He’d made sure we were never outside the lines.” Even so, she didn’t see what lay ahead. “I was really upset and he seemed to understand. I never for a second thought he’d be stupid enough to send it to people. I hoped he had some form of respect for me, but I also thought he wouldn’t want to ruin his entire career or end up in prison. I just didn’t think he was capable of what he was capable of.”
In the days after, Harrison messaged Bear asking him to promise he wouldn’t do anything with the video. He assured her that he had deleted it. It was December when she received the screenshot from a fan in the US. “That’s when I knew it was global,” she says. “One of my first thoughts was: it’s time to tell my family. My mum knew already, but I needed to have the conversations with my dad, my uncle – the male figures, I guess – so they knew it was coming.” In fact, her uncle knew already; he had been sent the video by someone who didn’t realise Harrison was his niece. “They were all horrified, but supportive,” she says. “I was an adult having sex – they told me I’d done nothing to be ashamed of.”
She knew that, but shame still hit in waves. “It went so horrifically viral; my postman’s probably seen it,” she says. “It’s that feeling that I’d let myself down, let my family down, that I should have seen it coming and how could I have been so stupid?” Her influencer work went into freefall. Any post on any product would be flooded with comments about the video (“Congrats hon, you’re a porn star now!”). “There were so many other influencers – same amount of followers, been on Love Island, same calibre – who didn’t have a sex scandal. Why put me next to their brand?” She rented out her flat – for income and because she was terrified of seeing Bear – and moved in with her mum.
“I don’t think I’ve admitted to myself how bad my anxiety was until now,” she says. “I wouldn’t be able to go to the gym on my own, or I’d get in and feel everyone was looking at me and have to leave. I barely left the house and when I did it was really hard not to panic. It got to the point where I only wanted to be around my closest friends.”
Harrison reported Bear, who was arrested in January 2021 and charged four months later. There was an 18-month wait for the trial. Harrison’s life was on hold. She knew she had a strong case – she had been filmed without her knowledge and had sent multiple messages to Bear begging him not to share it – but she dreaded a “not guilty” verdict. The Bear she knew, the Bear who had won Celebrity Big Brother, was a charmer. He could win hearts, talk you round.
“If he was found not guilty, I think I would have had to shave my head and move to Bolivia or something,” she says. “The career I love would have been over – that’s definite. But aside from that, my faith in the universe would have been so shattered. It would have drained all the hope and faith and love and life out of me. To see someone act in such an awful, evil, manipulative way and then walk away … I felt it might just ruin me – and it seemed possible. Bear could play things so brilliantly. I don’t know why he decided not to.”
Bear’s behaviour before and during the trial probably sealed his sentence. He uploaded X-rated videos of him and his girlfriend to the internet, captioning one: “At least she knows I’m filming her.” In another video posted just before the trial, the couple cavorted in orange prison jumpsuits. He ran a Twitter poll on what colour of suit he should wear to court – and turned up in a rented Rolls-Royce, dressed in pink and a huge fur coat, carrying a cane topped with a gold snake’s head. In court, he interrupted the judge and waved away the barrister. He pleaded not guilty, but his defence was nonsensical. At times, he claimed that Harrison wasn’t the woman in the video, or that she didn’t mind it being filmed, or that there was no proof that he had uploaded the images – it might have been his assistant, it could have been a hacker.
Had he pleaded guilty and expressed remorse, he would almost certainly have been handed a community sentence. Harrison still can’t understand it. “The Bear I first met was funny and cheeky, but also really charming – he could be kind,” she says. “That person in court seemed possessed. I feel like every show he went on, he was praised for being ‘the villain’ – and the worse he was, the more attention he got. At some point, the lines blurred. That role took over.” A reality TV monster? “That’s how it seemed.”
Giving evidence was excruciating for Harrison. She sat in the witness box as the jury (nine men, three women) looked through pages and pages of video stills, having to confirm that each one featured her. “I could tell the jury was absolutely cringing,” she says. “I was in a private garden in a private moment that I thought was between me and one other person. To know people have seen it is hard. To see people seeing it while they can see you is harder.
“As someone in the public eye, used to public speaking, it was still hard to get my words out. You don’t know where to look, who to talk to. You feel you’ve done something wrong when you haven’t. I dread to think what it’s like for a vulnerable young woman who isn’t used to addressing a room. I think it would be near enough impossible.” She hopes her case might make it a little easier. “Women come up to me all the time, crying, saying they’ve been through this horrible situation and never spoken to anyone about it before. They message me on a daily basis. Intimate-image abuse happens so much more than people think.”
After the trial, Harrison continued campaigning, initially to make cases easier to prosecute. At present, the sharing of intimate images without consent is not illegal – unless done “with intent to cause distress”, however hard that is to prove. In June, the government announced amendments to the online safety bill that will remove this requirement if the law is passed. This will mean that sharing intimate images without consent, whatever the motive, would become a criminal act.
But Harrison wants more.
“If you go to court for this and get a criminal conviction, that content should become illegal and any platforms that still show it and fail to take it down should become criminally accountable,” she says. “It’s crazy. If someone gets caught with drugs, those drugs are seized and disposed of. Why should this footage stay up there? A change like that isn’t hard to make and it would make a huge difference. Far more victims would come forward, because they’d know it will be possible to make all that footage disappear at the end.”
The video of Harrison and Bear is still out there. “I worry that one day I’ll have kids and it will be accessible to them,” she says. “I just hope that by that time, society may have got on top of this and it will be too risky and expensive for platforms to carry it.” She expects that finding a partner she trusts will take time. “As I get to the point where I am trying to have relationships, I’ve realised that I do have trust issues, but that’s not a bad thing. I’ve been burned so badly. I won’t accept anything that might be a red flag or makes me feel vulnerable. If someone really cares about me, they’ll just have to help me get past that.”
Meanwhile, she is busy again. There is a TV show coming up that she can’t talk about yet. The brands are back. Harrison has written Taking Back My Power. She would like to present daytime TV: “You literally get paid to have a natter!” She is also happy to be known for the court case. “I’ll never, ever lose the stigma of being all over those porn platforms,” she says. “But if I’m known as the person who stood up and fought back – I’d be proud of that.”
Taking Back My Power by Georgia Harrison (Dialogue, £18.99) is published on 26 October. To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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