For much of the late 2000s, “Gossip Girl” was The CW’s flagship series, with fans glued to Leighton Meester, Blake Lively, and Penn Badgley. But halfway through 2010, one viewer crossed a very real line. Longtime fans may remember when a teenage hacker leaked scripts from Season 4 of the fan-favorite teen drama.
Revisiting the incident years later reveals just how chaotic the situation became. For its 10-year anniversary, Vanity Fair published a “Gossip Girl” history recounting the journey of being the signature show on The CW and how that success created new problems behind the scenes. The teenage hacker managed to access the scripts and stay one step ahead of both the creative team and the authorities. As one producer told Vanity Fair, “All season, our scripts were ending up online, and we couldn’t figure out how.”
Even by today’s standards, the breach was massive. A Top 10 show on a national network had explicit plot points circulating in shady corners of the internet for an entire season. Naturally, the team at “Gossip Girl” moved quickly to get to the bottom of it.
Producers brought in an investigator to track the script leaks
As the problem wouldn’t subside, the producers decide to bring in reinforcements. In the Vanity Fair history, they said authorities were brought in to identify who was leaking the scripts — and to see whether there was anything law enforcement could do.
Little did they know, the hacker in question wasn’t even in the U.S. — or Canada, for that matter. The culprit was somewhere in Europe, and the producers were stunned when they discovered the truth. “We hired a private investigator,” a producer shared. “We didn’t understand what was happening, because everything was getting leaked, every detail … A teenager, I think either [from] Russia or Bulgaria, had hacked one of the writer’s e-mails, and was selling scripts on eBay.”
Once again, the situation sounded more like a movie plot than something unfolding behind the scenes of a hit TV show. But, according to those involved, the teenage hacker was very real. After gaining access to a writer’s email, the leaker suddenly had a steady stream of story details at their disposal. While it may have felt like a major win for the person responsible, with an expensive, high-profile production on the line, there was only so long they could escape scrutiny.
One major complication made the leak even harder to stop
Despite the Gossip Girl team hiring a P.I. to track down their hacker, there was one more big curveball in the case that they couldn’t have planned for. Namely, the person in question was a minor, making prosecution even more complicated than the crew could have imagined.
Figuring out how to cover their tracks while still getting Season 4 out into the world became infinitely harder. As anyone who’s spent time on the internet knows, once something is posted, it’s notoriously difficult to erase. So, the team got cranking and managed to push through with a lot of effort behind the scenes. As the producer lamented, “It was a f****** production nightmare. We would have to ‘X’ out every script. We would have to print on red paper … It was like there was a ‘Gossip Girl’ in our system.”
The real-life “Gossip Girl” didn’t return, and things eventually went back to normal. Luckily for the people behind the cameras, that was all the excitement they could take in Season 4. Sometimes, it’s probably better when art doesn’t imitate life.