Evan Agostini/Invision/APEmma Watson appears to have been the target of a celebrity photo hacking—this time, for real.
The Harry Potter and Beauty and the Beast star's rep told E! News Wednesday that "photos from a clothes fitting Emma had with a stylist a couple of years ago have been stolen. They are not nude photographs."
"Lawyers have been instructed and we are not commenting further," the rep added.
Private photos of the actress and other allegedly hacked pics of other female celebs have been circulating online in recent hours. It is unclear if they are authentic.
In 2015, Watson, an advocate of the HeForShe campaign and a U.N. Women Goodwill Ambassador, made headlines when she gave a powerful, emotional speech at the United Nations about feminism. Days after her appearance, a website popped up with a countdown, threatening the release of naked pics of the star. None were ever posted.
"I knew it was a hoax. I knew the pictures didn't exist," Watson said in a HeForShe webcast. "But I think a lot of people that were close to me knew gender equality was an issue but they didn't really think it was that urgent or particularly, you know, 'We live in Great Britain, this is a thing of that past'....and then when they saw that the minute I stepped up and talked about women's rights, I was immediately threatened—I mean, in less than 12 hours I was receiving threats—and I think they were really shocked and particularly one of my brothers was very upset."
"If anything, it made me so much more determined," she said. "I was just raging. it made me so angry that I was just like...'This is why I have to be doing this!' So if anything, it actually, if they were trying to put me off it, they did the opposite."
News of Watson's private photos being stolen comes two days before the release of Beauty and the Beast and more than two weeks after Vanity Fair released a photo spread Watson shot that includes a pic of her posing with her breasts partially exposed.
The photo drew criticism from people who said the image undermines the actress' feminist ideals.
"Feminism is about giving women choice. Feminism is not a stick with which to beat other women with. It's about freedom, it's about liberation, it's about equality," Watson later told Reuters. "I really don't know what my t-ts have to do with it. It's very confusing."
In 2014, naked and scantily-clad pictures of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and other celebs surfaced online in a similar "photo dump." That leak, one of the largest breaches of celebrity privacy, caught the attention of the FBI and Apple said "certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions."
"Even worse than seeing women's privacy violated on social media is reading the accompanying comments that show such a lack of empathy," Watson tweeted at the time.
One of the hackers, a 29-year-old Illinois man, pleaded guilty to a single felony charge of unauthorized access to a protected computer. In January, he was sentenced to nine months in prison. Another hacker, a 36-year-old man from Pennsylvania, was sentenced last October to 18 months in prison for a felony violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
In 2012, a man received a 10-year prison sentence for releasing private photos of Scarlett Johansson and Mila Kunis.