Ariana Grande Says 45 of Her Songs Were Stolen in a Single Year. Now She's Suing.

“In 2023 alone, 45 unreleased songs belonging to Ms Grande were hacked, stolen, and leaked,” the filing says. “Since her music debut in 2011, hundreds of similar leaks have taken place.”

Ariana Grande sued on Monday in Los Angeles County Superior Court. There are no real names on the complaint — the defendants are “John Doe 1 and John Does 2 through 100” — and her lawyers say the object of the exercise is to find out who they are. Billboard reports that the route is likely a court order compelling internet service providers to hand over identities. (The BBC's write-up describes two hackers; the filing's own language, quoted by The Verge, runs to a hundred Does. We've gone with the document.)

The way in was the people around her

The complaint says the hackers repeatedly targeted people who work with Grande — photographers, producers. In 2024, per the filing, someone set up an email account impersonating one of her photographers and talked a digital technician into sending over unreleased pictures; Billboard counts two phishing attacks that year. Another alleged incident involved a producer's mobile device, though the outlets covering the filing date that one differently: The Verge places it the year after a 2019 breach, the BBC puts it in 2025. The year is in dispute.

That said, the filing doesn't describe her as untouched. Her lawyers also say she has “constantly and recently been the target of cyberattacks.”

What came out of all of it, per the complaint, is a catalogue rather than a couple of tracks — “still-in-production, unreleased masters and demos, footage from recording sessions, music videos, behind-the-scenes photographs and videos, as well as album and photoshoot outtakes.” Her lawyers say the hackers then “sold this personal data and content on the dark web for significant sums of money,” and that it was also published on social platforms like X, TikTok and YouTube.

The legal claims are invasion of privacy, violation of California's computer-hacking law, and conversion — the civil-law equivalent of theft. “Neither Ms. Grande nor any other public or private figure should have to suffer such violations caused by these wrongdoers who hide in the shadows and wreak technological havoc with impunity,” her lawyers write.

She was already saying it in 2024

She was making this complaint in public two years before she made it in a filing. In a 2024 interview on the Zach Sang show, Grande talked about Fantasize — a song written with Max Martin that got out and went viral. Studio sessions she had recorded before leaving for Wicked, she said, were “all over TikTok, thank you so much, I'll see you in jail. Literally.” The people responsible, she added, were “pirates, crooks, illegal!”

The suit lands in a busy month for her. Her eighth studio album, Petal, arrives Friday, and the world tour reaches the UK in August — a run she has hinted will be her last for “a long time.” “One last hurrah - for now,” is how she put it on Amy Poehler's Good Hang podcast.

What a lawsuit can and can't fix

Here's our read, and it's an argument rather than reporting — no source draws this conclusion.

Suing a hundred John Does is a discovery play. The whole strategy rests on a judge agreeing to make an internet company turn an anonymous account into a person with an address, and even a clean win there doesn't un-leak what is already out. The demos are gone. Some of them have been gone for years.

Which is why the most revealing thing in the filing isn't a number — it's a word. Her lawyers describe what the leaks damage as “the direct and sacred relationship that exists between her and her fans.” Sacred is not a legal standard. There's no cause of action by that name, nothing a judge can order restored under that heading. It reads to us like the language of somebody describing a loss the law isn't really built to measure, filed in a document that can only offer her the things the law does measure: privacy, property, access.

We're covering a filing about phishing emails and a hacked Dropbox because of who she is to this audience. That part we'll own as our own view — but if you've ever queued for one of these tours, you don't need it explained.