text: The saga of the illegally obtained nude photos of dozens of celebrities has taken a darker turn. According to Reddit administrators, photos of gymnast McKayla Maroney and MTV actress Liz Lee, shared to 130,000 people on popular forum r/TheFappening, constitute child pornography. 
   
   Maroney’s lawyers have confirmed that the illegally obtained photos were taken while the gymnast was underage. The attorneys’ letter, sent to Porn.com and other websites, demands that the images be removed. 
   
   Additionally, Reddit users have been sharing revenge-porn photos of the actress Liz Lee, whose photos were not part of the initial leaks, but were taken and leaked by her boyfriend when Lee was 16. 
   
   The ongoing leak—dubbed #CelebGate, or more distastefully, “the Fappening”—includes naked photos of A-listers including Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton. It’s prompted outrage, and threats of legal actions from the women targeted. It has since emerged that the photos of at least one of the celebrities were taken when they were under 18. 
   
   The Reddit community r/TheFappening has become the main hub for the leaked photos, due to the fact that Reddit is one of the few mainstream websites that isn’t proactively deleting all links to them. In an urgent post, the subreddit’s moderators warn the community that the site’s admins have informed them that Maroney was underage in the photos “and that we quickly need to remove them. 
   
   “If we don’t remove them,” moderator SickOrSane continues, “this subreddit will most likely be banned, very quickly.” 
   
   The moderator also warns against sharing Lee’s photos, which are apparently also being posted on the subreddit. 
   
   
   
   
   
   Redditors have immediately begun to panic, discussing the potential implications of their downloading and sharing child pornography. 
   
   
   
   
   
   Despite the proliferation of child pornography across r/TheFappening—in addition to the stolen intimate photos of adult celebrities—the Reddit admins have chosen not to remove the community, apparently content to let the moderators sort it out instead. They have, however, hidden the forum from r/all, a list of all content on Reddit. 
   
   
   
   
   
   The focus, throughout the subreddit, is the potential ramifications community members may face for possessing child porn. 
   
   Here, redditors respond to Classiest_Erection with step-by-step instructions for how to use software to wipe his hard drive, which ostensibly contains illegally obtained underage nudes. We’re watching a crime being aided and abetted in real time. 
   
   In another instance, notwhoyouthinimnot goes out of his way to proactively encourage redditors to remove all record of their criminal activity. 
   
   Other community members are only too eager to help. 
   
   
   
   
   
   Some are more concerned with the fact that their community may be banned than the fact it’s being used to share flagrantly illegal material. 
   
   The moderators, meanwhile, are joking about the fact that child porn has been found on their community. (The linked photo in the screenshot below is not pornographic.) 
   
   Reddit admins may yet change course and decide to ban r/TheFappening. Even though redditors are using the site to instruct one another how to hide evidence of the child porn they downloaded via Reddit, administrators seem happy to allow the community to exist. 
   
   It still remains unclear how the photos were leaked, though Apple has strongly denied early reports that hackers gained access to them through a vulnerability in iCloud. 
   
   Photo via teuobk/Flickr (CC BY 2.0) | Remix by Fernando Alfonso III ||||| The bizarre silver lining to this whole leaked celebrity nudes thing: a group of Redditors is so enamored with Jennifer Lawrence's naked body that they've donated thousands of dollars to the Prostate Cancer Foundation in her honor. 
   
   Yesterday, a post on r/TheFappening, a Reddit thread dedicated to, erm, discussing and cataloging the dozens of naked celebrity pictures that hit the internet over the weekend, urged readers to "Be the hero TheFappening deserves" by donating money to prostate cancer research, which, the joke goes, Lawrence has supported in the past. (Get it? Masturbation may reduce risk of prostate cancer in men, and many of these men, upon viewing the photos—you're smart, you get it.) 
   
   Horndog J-Law fans came out in droves, and TheFappening is currently the top fundraiser for PCF's Safeway Foundation $1 Million Matching Grant Challenge. According to TheFappening's donation page, they've given $5,273 to the cause so far, and the homepage for the fundraiser lists "Reddit The Fappening" as its most successful donor. 
   
   Well, congratulations to you, you proud masturbators of Reddit: TheFappening somehow feels even more skeevy for your noble actions. If the rumors are true, and the weekend's leaks were just the tip of the iceberg, they may find a cure just yet. 
   
   [Image via AP] ||||| McKayla Maroney I Was Underage in Hacked Nude Pics 
   
   McKayla Maroney -- I Was Underage in Hacked Nude Photos 
   
   EXCLUSIVE 
   
   Olympic gymnastsays she was under 18 when the hacked nude photos of her were taken ... and now she's taking legal action against several porn sites that reposted the images.TMZ has learned one of Maroney's attorneys fired off a letter to Porn.com ... informing the site that McKayla was underage in several of the photos. The letter demands the images of McKayla -- who turned 18 last December -- be taken down immediately.Another attorney for the gymnast sent a different letter to multiple websites stating Maroney owns the copyright on the hacked photos.The legal claims by her attorneys are a strong indication the photos really do show McKayla -- even though she said on Twitter they were "fake photos." It's also possible only portions of the images are really McKayla. The letter is not specific.A rep for Porn.com tells us they immediately removed the pics once they got the letter from Maroney's attorney.
target: – Some Internet users who started out gleeful about the leak of celebrities' nude photos are now busy trying to scrub their hard drives of child porn. Lawyers for McKayla Maroney, who turned 18 in December, say the Olympic gymnast was under 18 when the photos of her were taken and demanded that porn websites remove the images, reports TMZ. Maroney had initially tweeted that the photos were fakes. At Reddit, users of a forum that has been used to share leaked pics have been warned that some pictures of Maroney and MTV star Liz Lee were taken when they were underage and if they're not deleted, "this subreddit will most likely be banned, very quickly." The warning was followed by panicked discussion of how to erase the images, reports the Daily Dot, which describes efforts to advise users how to "remove all record of their criminal activity" as the "aiding and abetting" of a crime. The Prostate Cancer Foundation, meanwhile, has decided to return thousands of dollars donated by users of the same subreddit as "guilt money" for viewing the celeb photos, rather crudely " in honor of Jennifer Lawrence " (Gawker has the explanation here). "Guys, we're literally worse than cancer," one user wrote after the donations were returned, as per the Washington Post. (Apple says the leak wasn't a result of "any breach in ... iCloud or Find My iPhone.")