What happened to the Spanish artist behind ‘the worst restoration job in history’? Where is the woman who sent the Quentin Tarantino toe-sucking email now? And how does a victim of internet harassment recover? Survivors of online humiliation tell their stories

Remember that woman who tweeted something about Aids before getting on a plane to Africa? Or the guy who was arrested for a joke about blowing up an airport? Or that girl, dear me, who tweeted a smiling selfie outside Auschwitz concentration camp?

Me neither. I stopped thinking about them long ago. I certainly couldn’t tell you any of their names. But of course the facts are easy to check. Because for the rest of Justine Sacco’s, Paul Chambers’s and Breanna Mitchell’s lives, those moments will be the first thing that anybody finds about them on the internet. Probably the first thousand things. Until Monday morning, Rayhan Qadar could have sympathised along with us, from a distance. He didn’t realise that he was going to spend the rest of his life on Google as “the banker who got sacked for tweeting (a joke) that he’d hit a cyclist with his car”. And life is a long sentence when you’re 21.

You don’t have to have done anything for the internet to claim your name. At 16, Alex Lee became a global heartthrob and, to some, a hate figure, when someone snapped a picture of him simply doing his job: filling bags at Target. Even where some criticism might be fair, the error rarely warrants the punishment. When Sacco tweeted “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding. I’m white!” she was very obviously joking about racism rather than advocating it, but still, not obviously enough. And you’d expect a “global head of communications” to know better.

Mitchell, who was, let’s remember, a schoolgirl, might have considered the sensitivity of a selfie in Auschwitz more carefully, but her picture was nothing like as crass as it seemed. She had talked for years about visiting with her father and, after he died, she had finally managed it. She took her phone out to record the moment and – perhaps out of habit – happened to smile. The picture was online for a month before anyone noticed. “I literally woke up one morning and had literally a thousand things on my phone, notifications,” Mitchell said at the time. “I’ve had death threats. I’ve had people telling me I need to kill myself.” When the race to denounce a bigot begins, people forget about details like whether or not they were guilty.

We don’t need to ask where these torrents of scorn come from because we create them ourselves with our clicks and shares. If we had the proper context we might not laugh, so we don’t want context, and don’t get it. Nor is it likely to ever stop.

But afterwards? While the rest of us forget, what do the forgotten do? Sacco lost her job, of course, but has since found another and seems to be in good spirits. “I was so naive,” she told Gawker last month. With the help of professional advisers and his family, Alex from Target is still working out what to do with his unexpected and enormous fame. Qadar is probably still in shock. As the stories below show, a life can be rebuilt after it’s been stomped on by the internet. It just won’t be the same life that it was before.

Cecilia Giménez

‘130,000 people have seen Ecce Homo now’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cecilia Giménez say that more than 130,000 people have now visited her village to see Ecce Homo. Photograph: Philippe de Poulpiquet/Photoshot

Cecilia Giménez became one of Spain’s best-known living artists in August 2012. Her attempt to restore Ecce Homo – a fresco of Jesus in her local church – attracted global attention and became an online meme. More than two years later, tourists continue to trek to the village of Borja to marvel at what has been dubbed the “worst restoration in history”.

Now when I look at Ecce Homo, I see something positive. But it took me a long time to get to this point. At the beginning I suffered a lot. I cried every day. There were people waiting for me at my door, chasing me down with cameras and questions. It was too much for me – I’m an 84-year-old widow.

I’m not one of the world’s great painters. But I’ve loved painting my whole life and even had a few of my own art shows. For two decades I looked after the painting of Ecce Homo in the Santuario de Misericordia church, fixing it up whenever I thought it needed it. Because of the salt and humidity in our air here, the paint was always peeling. I’m sure that if I hadn’t taken an interest in saving the painting, it wouldn’t even exist today.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The original of Ecce Homo and Gimenez’s restoration. Photograph: AP

That day I noticed how badly the paint was peeling. So I wet the painting, making broad strokes. Then I left it to dry and went on holiday for two weeks, thinking I would finish the restoration when I returned.

When I came back, everybody in the world had heard about Ecce Homo. The way people reacted still hurts me, because I wasn’t finished with the restoration. I still think about how if I hadn’t gone on holiday, none of this would have ever happened.

Reporters told the world the story of the old woman who couldn’t paint and had ruined a painting. That’s not true. It is true that I haven’t done many portraits. But if it hadn’t been for me, the painting would have probably disappeared long ago.

A week after the scandal, I received flowers and a card with a message of support. It was little gestures like that kept me going during the first month. It was so hard. I lost six kilos. I had to take medication for anxiety.

More than two years later, everyone here sees what I did in a different light. The restoration has put Borja on the world map, meaning I’ve done something for my village that nobody else was able to do. So many people have come here – and to our beautiful church – to see the painting … they tell me more than 130,000 people.

When you work in art, your name is everything. And now the name Cecilia Giménez is known. I held an art show last year and I’ve got another planned for the next few months with 20 or so of my paintings. Before all this, my paintings used to sell for low prices, say €500 or €1,000 apiece. Now I’ve been able to sell a few of my pieces for more. I won’t tell you how much – but let’s just say that it was a good price for me.

Interview by Ashifa Kassam

Beejoli Shah

‘I’m still secretly proud of that toe-sucking email’

Beejoli Shah and Quentin Tarantino on a date night. Photograph: Beejoli Shah/Twitter

Beejoli Shah became infamous in Hollywood and online when an explicit email she sent to her friends, about a one-night stand with Quentin Tarantino was forwarded on and went viral. She was fired from her job and struggled to find another one. She now works as a writer for gossip site the Frisky.

Three years ago, while working as an assistant at a fancy entertainment management company in Los Angeles, I went to a party in Hollywood with a few friends – my first Hollywood party – and met Quentin Tarantino.

We hit it off, one thing led to another, and I found myself back at his home, which was when things started to go off the rails. He was nothing but kind and lovely, but when he made a certain request that was outside my sexual comfort zone (oh, let’s call a spade a spade: instead of asking to have sex, he asked if he could suck on my toes while pleasuring himself), I did what any millennial would do: I told all my friends.

In an email that I’m secretly still proud of, but truly never intended for wider consumption, I recounted the facts of the evening, exactly as they happened, to a small army of close friends. I didn’t expect that it would quickly end up being forwarded so many times that friends I hadn’t heard from in years would write me to say: “So, an email you wrote just got sent around my entire trading-room floor.” Given that I worked in entertainment, I lost my job almost instantly, which brought on a feeling of failure that only grew with the rapid internet backlash the email received.

I was called a gold digger, a star fucker, an ugly bitch – you name it. Tarantino fans were relentless. Worst of all, the story spread so far that it even reached Indian newspapers, and suddenly it wasn’t something that just young friends I’d lost touch with heard of – my family, and parents especially, were all put in a position of having to defend me.

Before I found my new job, I went on dozens of interviews with tiny entertainment companies as my once-promising career stalled. It was the first and last thing every employer brought up – HR rules be damned – each interview ending with a resigned: “Your resume and references are impeccable, but I just can’t hire you ... what if I do business with Quentin one day?”

I can see how this is a great story to tell now, three years later, over beers to friends of friends who haven’t heard it before – but the part I often leave out? Just how mortified I was, and honestly, still am. At the time, I went as underground as one can in the digital age. I deleted all traces of social media, ignored every email that poured in from nosy old acquaintances, all inquiring if I’d seen my name splashed across blogs. To this day, it’s never a story I’ll bring up on my own, especially with strangers.

Annmarie Chiarini

‘I changed the laws on revenge porn’

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Annmarie Chiarini became a campaigner against online harassment. Photograph: Patrick Semansky/AP

Annmarie Chiarini’s ex-boyfriend posted pictures of her on a pornographic website. After being told that law enforcement in her state was unable to do anything about her revenge porn ordeal, she attempted suicide in October 2011. She then became a cyber civil rights advocate, campaigning to change laws relating to nonconsensual pornography in her state.

The first time my ex-boyfriend tried to ruin my life, in February of 2010, he attempted to sell a CD containing 88 nude images of me on eBay. He published links on his Facebook page and all the Facebook pages of the college where I teach. He sent links to the auction to family, friends and the chairperson of my department.

The second posting, in October 2011, was worse. He included my full name, the town where I live, the college where I teach and a solicitation for sex: “Hot for teacher? Well come get it!” I was driven to suicidal despair and took medical leave from work.

The laws in Maryland, where I live, were too weak to make a conviction possible, so I gave up on filing criminal charges and decided to change the laws. Although I still felt humiliated and angry, I told my story to senators and delegates, and in September 2013 a Maryland delegate asked me to work with him to support a bill making nonconsensual pornography a felony.

Within a month, I was participating in my first press conference, giving both a voice and a face to an issue that had been invisible. Although the reporters were sympathetic, interviews filled me with self-doubt. I dreaded them because I didn’t trust myself to say the right words, remember the facts and present myself as a composed spokeswoman. For months, I refused to watch an interview. When I finally saw one, I grinned like an idiot as the woman on the screen spoke well, maintained her composure, and smiled back at me.

Arriving at this point was messy and chaotic. I stumbled through weeks of sadness, unable to lift my head. I leaned on my friends, then withdrew from them, then wished they would call me. Even though I made it through, I’m still waiting for the scars it left to fade.

The bill I campaigned for was signed into law in April 2014.