UPDATE: Jezebel reports the Yacht sex tape is a hoax they’ve been planning for months. Billboard reached out to a rep for the band for comment.
Original Story: Jona Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans of the indie band YACHT acknowledged on Monday (May 9) that a sex tape they made in private had been leaked to the public. But rather than succumbing to being victimized, the couple of 10 years is taking ownership of the situation and selling the video.
Bechtolt and Evans took to Facebook on Monday morning to explain the full context of the video — effectively taking a lot of the sexual fantasy away — and asking that people not watch.
In the post, the bandmates and lovers blamed “a series of technological missteps and one morally abject person” for the video’s release. They continued, “We have commenced legal proceedings against the aforementioned person, but now that it could potentially circulate, we feel like it’s important for you to know what happened and why.”
Read the full post here:
Several hours later, Bechtolt and Evans changed their tactic — crediting their fans’ “overwhelming support” amidst such an “uncomfortable and pretty bizarre situation.” After apparently researching some other famous sex tape scandals where the subjects either lost court cases against those leaking the video or failed to see any money off of them, they decided to distribute the video themselves and appeal to the curious public’s common sense of decency.
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“This video is out there now,” they posted in a follow-up note. “We can’t change that. But we can try to be “as YACHT as possible” about it and take some kind of ownership over what has happened. So we’re asking you one thing: if you feel like you 100% have to see this tape, don’t stream it on some tube site, or download a torrent. Instead, we beg of you to download the video, Louis C.K.-style, directly from us.”
Now they’re selling it for $5 at the cleverly chosen url https://fuck.teamyacht.com