In an interview with Standard Media, Cindy Sanyu was asked to clarify whether or not the nude photos that leaked in 2008 were photoshopped. Cindy without hestiation said "they were real".
Qn: Your nude photos that leaked to the public some time back. Were they real or Photoshopped?
"Yes they were my real photos." -- Dancehall/R&B/Pop singer Cindy Sanyu said.
Qn: How did they reach the public domain?
In 2008, The Dat Dat Singer's nude photos were leaked by red pepper and she recalls how her friends called her at 3:30am in the morning but none of them were telling her the truth about what happened.
“People started calling me at 3:30am in the morning. No one was telling me what was wrong. They would just tell me, ‘get the paper. Your photos are in the newspapers’,” — former Blu*3 singer Cinderella Sanyu, -- according to an interview with Cindy carried out by the Observer a few weeks after the leakage
“Another friend called to ask if I had seen the paper and I forced him to read to me over the phone what everyone was calling me about. I was in shock. It was like the world stopped moving,”
Then there was her Italian boyfriend Mario Brunetti with whom she had been for about three and half years.
“He was hurt. I explained to him what I knew and suspected.” The fourth born of seven children, Cindy also had her siblings to worry about. “I did not cry until my sister Daphne Kyaligonza called me Crying... Then I started crying”. “Those pictures shut me down for a day.”
The pictures couldn’t have come at a worse time for the singer who was still recovering from being forced out of the girl group Blu*3 earlier in the year.
With her nude photos selling on the streets in Kampala, Cindy found herself under pressure from ‘sympathizers’ to shelve her musical dreams indefinitely.
“I got calls from people I did not know telling me to leave Uganda. Some were calling me to tell me that I should go for a holiday for at least two months. That is when I came to suspect that those photos were meant to stop me from singing.”
Humbled, Cindy said, “My mother’s [friends] came to see her because they had heard that she had collapsed. Some thought she had died. But when she called me, she told me something I will never forget. She said ‘they fought you and put you down but they forgot to kill you’.”
