Grimes admits to “hacking” indie blog Hipster Runoff in 2012

Grimes has admitted to taking down the controversial indie blog Hipster Runoff a decade ago.

As Pitchfork reports, the website in question went offline back in 2012 due to an apparent hacking. The platform’s anonymous founder and operator, Carles, told Vice at the time that there had been “signs of foul play on the server”.

“And some of the last actions before it crashed are very suspicious.” he continued. “My server disk has crashed and remote backups were sabotaged.”

During a video interview with Vanity Fair as part of her recent cover feature for the publication, Grimes – real name Claire Boucher – was presented with a photo of herself kissing a friend at a party.

“Back in the day, before the ‘woke’ era, I actually got cancelled for this,” Grimes explained of the 2012 image. She went on to say that the photograph in question subsequently “got leaked to this website called Hipster Runoff“.

Grimes continued: “And then he [Carles], like, ran this story, and this was, like… I was trying to be like all integrity and, you know, like, start my career. And it was, like, ‘Grimes gone wild’ or something.”

Boucher described the resulting Hipster Runoff post as a “super wack, mean story”, which then became “this meme that was going all over the internet”.

Grimes added: “But my friend who worked for – I will not say which video game – had access to… OK, well I don’t wanna get him in trouble, but, anyway, we were actually able to DDoS Hipster Runoff and basically blackmail them.

“We were like, like, we’re not gonna let you put your site back up until you take the story down. And he did, in fact, take the story down. And it was like my coolest hacker moment. So, yeah, that’s the story of this photo.”

You can watch her explain the story at the two-minute-20-seconds mark of the video above.

Jackie Singh, an expert in cybersecurity, has since penned a blog post on Medium in which she outlines the potential ramifications of Boucher “admitting crimes to a major magazine”.

According to Singh’s article, Hipster Runoff was sold at auction for $21,000 (£15,935) after being put up for sale in 2015. It had remained inactive since the supposed 2012 hack, with Carles being unable to restore the blog from backups.

Elsewhere in her interview with Vanity Fair, Grimes inadvertently revealed that she’d had a second child with Elon Musk.

The Canadian artist has also recently launched her ‘Book 1’ era, which she’s said features “by far my greatest work that I’ve ever done”. She’s previewed the album with the December 2021 single ‘Player Of Games’.