Now that you dirty old men and women have had sufficient chance to ogle the nubile young body of Audrina Partridge from The Hills, let’s put on our tinfoil trucker hats and take a moment to consider how these tawdry pics happened to surface, out of nowhere, one week prior to the premiere of the next season of Audrina’s hit fake reality show. The rumors and hearsay suggest the pictures were taken 4 years ago, but if so, where have they been since then, why weren’t they leaked before, and how did they suddenly find their way onto the Internet with such impeccable timing?
My conclusions, after the jump!
Here’s what we DO know: WWTDD seems to be the first blog to post the pictures and – along with all the T&A – a vague explanation of their origin, which consisted of a few cobbled-together quotes from several unnamed “sources” claiming she posed for these shots after high school but before The Hills made her semi-famous, when she was an aspiring model with misguided ideas about what a Playboy spread could do for her career (answer: make her about as famous as being a sidekick on The Hills).
Outside of the watermarks for Splash News (a paparazzi clearinghouse known for buying about as many exclusive shots as they actually take), we’re given no clue as to the identity of who owned and sold the rights to the photos, but one would assume it was either the photographer or Audrina herself. The obvious motivation for the photographer to sell would be financial, but if that were the case, why would he/she have waited nearly two years to cash in (The Hills debuted back in ’06), and why sell the photos to Splash News discreetly when they probably could have started a public bidding war with Playboy, porn sites, and other deep-pocketed parties? Doesn’t really make sense.
So why would Audrina possibly want to leak the photos herself? Well, the obvious motivation for the sudden appearance – only days before her show’s new season debuts – of these R-rated (though very flattering and relatively tasteful) photographs would be the increased exposure and attention their Internet leakage and ensuing “scandal” would potentially lend to her celebrity going into Season 3. She’s clearly suffered through the past two seasons of the show playing third fiddle as Lauren and Heidi have greedily sucked up most of that sweet, sweet reality star tabloid attention, so being the one everyone’s suddenly talking about this season certainly wouldn’t be a bad thing for Audrina, even if it meant showing off her rack for them to do so.
Mere moments after the photos hit the net, Audrina’s rep released an official statement to TMZ suggesting she regretted taking the photos, claiming they were taken 4 years ago, and expressing her hope that other vulnerable young women will learn from her mistake and spare themselves the humiliation of having hot naked photos of themselves circulated about the Internet. What her statement did not provide was a denial of her involvement in their release, nor any hint as to whom might have been responsible for making these private photos public.
Pretty suspicious. And if we acknowledge the fact that she very well may have been complicit in leaking her own nude photos, why should we even believe they were taken 4 years ago? I mean “barely legal porn queen Audrina” of four years ago doesn’t really look all THAT different from “older and 
wiser D-list reality star Audrina” of today? How do we know these weren’t taken last summer at the cynical suggestion of her publicist? Come on, she’s wearing a “naughty school girl” get up, which (along with pigtails) is the oldest trick in the porn playbook for making a 22 year-old look like she’s 18.
In an interesting question raised by the workings of our postmodern media complex, why would Audrina pose for Playboy when she could just leak her own naked pictures to the Internet, thus absolving herself of the “slut stigma” associated with willingly participating in a soft core porn shoot while still receiving all the ensuing attention and even managing to make herself look like victim in the process? Or perhaps this was just a really coincidental, amazingly-timed pseudo-scandal in which there just happened to be no losers.
The fact is we’ll likely never find out the reality of this situation, and will thus be left with only our unanswered questions, a handful of nice nudie pics to look at, and the aching regret of our having just dedicated eight paragraphs of consideration to the matter.
But still – The Truth Is Out There.
–Alex Blagg
Celebspiracy Theorist
