Titans quarterback paid 'exorbitant' amount to remove leaked sex tape from internet, mother says

NEW YORK -- The mother of an NFL quarterback is detailing the lengths her son went to in order to remove a sex tape that had been released on the internet.

Will Levis' mother Wednesday morning said her son spent an "exorbitant" amount of money trying to take down his leaked sex tape.

Beth Levis said he hired a cybersecurity specialist and private investigator after finding out the intimate video of himself and his then-girlfriend, Gia Duddy, was spreading online.

"Ultimately, a lot of the content was taken down, but you can never scrape anything entirely from the internet," Beth Levis said.

She says hackers obtained the material by breaching one of Will Levis' devices when he was in college.

"We come to find out this was an Eastern European hacking group notorious for trying to target what they think might be an attractive couple that they can then expose," Beth Levis said.

The couple split up months after Duddy went viral during the 2023 NFL draft.

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Cameras captured her reactions as Levis kept getting passed over during the first round.

The attention helped to boost her profile on social media.

Experts say high-profile couples like Levis and Duddy are common targets for hackers, who take advantage of simple security mistakes.

"Ninety percent of the time it's something like a reused password; it's a phishing text that looked like it came from Apple computer, you know, for your bank or or a weak account recovery email from 10 years ago," said Scott Spiro, and artificial intelligence and cybersecurity expert and founder of Human-ology.

But there are steps you can take to protect your personal data.

"Make sure that they turn on their two-factor authentication on their, on their email as an obvious one. Make sure to use a password manager, so that you stop reusing your passwords. And make sure that you lock down your, your iCloud or Google or Microsoft account recovery options," Spiro said.

So far, no arrests or charges have been announced in that alleged hack.