I’m a professional dominatrix. Here’s how I fought back after a client stole my intimate images
As the initial shock began to fade, Madelaine decided to take action. “I thought, I don’t want to live in a society where this is just par for the course, where this is just what happens,” she tells GLAMOUR. “It took years to get over it, but I knew that I was going to make a change; I just didn’t know how.”
For around seven years, Madelaine turned her attention to campaigning. She participated in roundtables and interviews that informed the UK’s 2025 Pornography review, spoke out about financial discrimination against sex workers, and co-authored a piece on improving labour standards in the online sex industry. But Madelaine wanted to move quickly. “I knew I needed to do more, and I reached a point where I was exhausted by it all and thought to myself, ‘I just need a guardian angel’. I want to send that image safely. And I don’t think that’s too much to ask.” And so Image Angel was born.
Earlier this year, Madelaine attended Glamour’s parliamentary roundtable about image-based abuse. In one of the most memorable speeches of the evening, Madelaine handed out her Image Angel business cards, encouraging people to pass them around the room until one found its way back to her. She held up the business card and pointed out that, thanks to fingerprint technology, she could technically find out the name of every single person who had touched the card. Similarly, Image Angel utilises watermark technology to track who has accessed an image or video shared on a platform, serving as a powerful deterrent against image-based abuse while also respecting the victim’s autonomy.
Once Madelaine came up with the idea, she searched on LinkedIn for someone who could help make it a reality. “I emailed people at various tech companies and said, ‘Look, here’s the problem. Here are the current solutions. Please, can you help me or point me in the right direction to someone who can build this for me?’ Eventually, one person agreed. Over several months, we worked together to build this. It took so long, but it’s finally ready, it’s finally installed, and it’s finally protecting people.”
“We need more people to insist that platforms use this technology,” says Madelaine. “We need more platforms to take on the technology, and we need the law to tighten up and say that prevention is better than cure.” She reflects on her own experience of image-based sexual abuse: “If Image Angel had been installed, I could have at least found out which platform it had come from. The platform could have then banned that user. They could have helped me add that user, username, or user’s data to a hashing list, ensuring no one ever interacts with that person in an online forum again.”
While much of the rhetoric surrounding ‘sending nudes’ focuses on victim-blaming, Image Angel offers something new. “Denying people the freedom to send a picture or shaming someone because they choose to send a picture isn’t a progressive society,” says Madelaine. “We should allow people to have fun, play and flirt, but knowing that they can safely do that.
“We used to roll about in the hay, and now we send images and messages. And those life experiences build you. It’s exciting and thrilling. You get a flutter when you receive that message. So why can’t you respond in a way that feels authentic?”
For more from Glamour UK’s Lucy Morgan, follow her on Instagram @lucyalexxandra.
