Julian Newman, the former youth basketball phenom turned social media influencer, has publicly defended his sister Jaden Newman after explicit videos allegedly depicting her began circulating online, telling followers she should not be blamed for the leak and pointing to a former boyfriend as its source.
According to The Express Tribune, Julian addressed the controversy in a video posted on August 6, saying he wanted to respond after repeatedly seeing comments referencing the leak on his own social media pages. He alleged that a former boyfriend of Jaden's was responsible for the material surfacing, though that claim has not been independently verified. Jaden had earlier told viewers during a livestream that she believed she had been hacked.
The videos reportedly began spreading around August 4, 2026, first on X before moving through WhatsApp group chats and third-party aggregator sites, according to Tech Times, which reviewed a TMZ video capture of Julian's remarks. On a Twitch livestream captured in a clip shared on X, Jaden appeared frustrated as viewers pressed her about the material, telling her chat, "Bruh, oh my god... Hey y'all, chill... I need some mods in here... Y'all is doing too much... I unfortunately got hacked."
Julian, in the YouTube video that circulated widely starting August 7, called the situation "unfortunate" and said he had not watched the videos himself. "It ain't her fault," he said, according to Tech Times. He went further in comments captured separately, saying, "My sister, she ain't a h*e, bro. She ain't out here doing what y'all think she doing."
Julian also dismissed people who continued discussing the leak in his comment sections, saying, "Bro, no one cares. I don't care. Get out of here, bro... First of all, y'all only care because it's Jaden. Second of all, what that got to do with me," according to The Express Tribune.
A remark from Julian describing a potential silver lining for his sister's public profile drew widespread criticism online. "On a positive note, she's gonna be bigger than Kim K, man. Like, for real," he said, adding that people commenting on the situation were "gassing her up" and making her "more poppin." The comment, captured in a clip shared by the account FearBuck on X, was widely circulated and criticized as tone-deaf given the nonconsensual nature of the leak.
Jaden Newman, 22, currently plays guard for the Cal State Los Angeles Golden Eagles. She built a public following from an early age, first going viral around age five with footage of her basketball skills, according to Tech Times. She went on to compete at the varsity level at Downey Christian School in Orlando, reportedly setting a national prep record of 70 points in a single game by eighth grade. She later appeared on The Queen Latifah Show and starred alongside her family in the reality series Hello Newmans on the Overtime YouTube channel, amassing more than a million Instagram followers before enrolling at California State University, Los Angeles, in 2022.
A Test Case for a New Federal Law
The leak has become one of the most high-profile early tests of the TAKE IT DOWN Act, a federal law that reached full civil enforcement on May 19, 2026, according to Tech Times. The statute, whose full name is the Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks Act, was signed into law by President Trump on May 19, 2025, with its criminal provisions taking effect immediately and its civil enforcement regime activating a year later.
Under the law, any person whose intimate image or video is published without consent on a covered platform, including social media services, messaging apps, and image or video hosts, can file a removal request that includes a signature, information identifying the content's location, a good-faith statement that the material is nonconsensual, and contact information. Once a platform receives a valid request, it has 48 hours to remove the content and to make reasonable efforts to identify and take down known copies, per Federal Trade Commission compliance guidance cited by Tech Times.
Platforms that fail to comply face FTC enforcement and civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation. In May 2026, the agency sent formal warning letters to fifteen platforms, including Meta, Apple, Microsoft, TikTok, and X, reminding them of their obligations ahead of the compliance deadline. The law separately criminalizes the act of knowingly publishing nonconsensual intimate imagery, carrying penalties of up to two years in federal prison, rising to three years if the victim is a minor.
Among the earliest criminal cases brought under the law, prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed charges on May 20, 2026, against Cornelius Shannon, 51, of New Jersey, and Arturo Hernandez, 20, of Texas, both accused of using artificial intelligence tools to generate and distribute deepfake pornography depicting roughly 140 named victims, Tech Times reported.
The FTC has also opened a victim-facing complaint portal, TakeItDown.ftc.gov, for people to use when platforms fail to act on valid takedown requests within the required window. Separately, Microsoft said in May 2026 that it had expanded its detection infrastructure in response to the law, integrating the hash-based detection system from StopNCII.org across Teams Free, OneDrive, and Xbox to block re-uploads of known intimate imagery.
Even with those tools in place, Tech Times noted that the law's reach has clear limits: it can compel mainstream platforms such as X and TikTok to remove flagged content within 48 hours, but it has no direct authority over the dedicated aggregator sites, private group chats, and dark-web forums where much of the persistent redistribution of leaked material actually occurs. As of this week, neither Jaden nor Julian Newman had confirmed whether a formal takedown request had been filed under the new law, and the identity of whoever originally distributed the videos remained unconfirmed.
