By Frank Lucasale 
“I don’t know how it feels to be a 14-year-old boy receiving photos of a girl. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I don’t think he was being malicious showing them to his friends. He was a kid,” Beer said of the incident.
Madison Beer is using her past as a way to move forward.
In a new interview with Cosmopolitan, the 26-year-old singer opened up about one of the darkest chapters in her life — the time nude footage of her as a teen was leaked online.
And while she’s spoken about that life-defining moment in the past, Beer’s latest interview marked the first time she’s shared that she’s since spoken to the guy who shared the explicit content.
“The boy who the whole nude situation happened with, he reached out to me and was like, ‘I had no idea that I hurt you like this. I’m so sorry,'” Beer told the outlet.
She continued, “I don’t know how it feels to be a 14-year-old boy receiving photos of a girl. Maybe it’s wishful thinking, but I don’t think he was being malicious showing them to his friends. He was a kid.”
Back then, Beer says she felt double-betrayed — first by the ex who posted their explicit Snapchat messages, then by the trolls who slut-shamed her for it.
And while she said getting an apology was nice, the damage ran deep. But instead of letting those wounds define her, Beer’s decided to reclaim the narrative.
“I’ve had to sit people down and be like, ‘Hey, you owe me an apology for what you did to me when I was a kid.’ And a lot of the other people from that time in my life — I just have completely severed my relationships with,” she said. “I don’t care to make up with you or be cool with you.”
The “Make You Mine” singer also got real about her mental health struggles during that time, admitting that things got pretty dark.
“I tried to go the other way and kill myself, and don’t get me wrong, I still have those moments,” Beer admitted. “But I was like, ‘I need to first prove all these people wrong. And second, maybe I can help someone out there who sees themselves in me in any way.'”
Now, she’s focusing on healing, growth, and maybe helping others find their own strength in the chaos.
“Just because I’m okay with it now doesn’t mean I deserved to go through it,” she added. “I like to think that everything I went through and continue to go through is because I’m strong enough to survive and tell the story.”
Beer addressed the leak in 2023, in her memoir, The Half of It, where she recalled not feeling protection when her personal Snapchats went public.
Speaking with PEOPLE at the time, Beer said she hoped by sharing her “honest journey” and the dark moments she endured, it’ll give online bullies pause before the fire off nasty vitriol on the internet.
“I hope by sharing my honest journey that perhaps someone that wanted to hide behind a keyboard to be mean or poke fun at someone else’s expense thinks twice before they hit ‘send,'” Beer told the outlet. “I hope that we can find the strength to support each other and that we can work to treat others in the way we would want to be treated.”
