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May 09, 2016 By Christopher Roberts YACHT

Here’s a strange story. YACHT are now selling their sex tape. The electro-pop duo of Jona Bechtolt and Claire Evans have been romantic partners since 2006, as well as bandmates. They filmed a sex tape purely for their personal pleasure and use, but it was leaked to the Internet “due to a series of technological missteps and one morally abject person,” as they have explained in a Facebook post. While they are commencing legal action against the person responsible for the leak, the duo have made the unusual choice to actually sell the tape on a new website they’ve launched named fuck.teamyacht.com. “This video is out there now. We can’t change that. But we can try to be ‘as YACHT as possible’ about it and take some kind of ownership over what has happened,” the band wrote in a separate Facebook post.

The website allows you to pay $5.00 to download the tape and has this introduction:

“If you’re here, it’s because you want to see a sex tape made by Claire Evans and Jona Bechtolt of the band YACHT. That’s okay-we’re not here to judge. A video that we made privately has been released to the public. We have commenced legal proceedings against the individual who made it available without our consent. That said, we don’t have any illusion that this tape is ever going to vanish completely from the Internet.

“Instead, we’ve created a platform for you to purchase and download the video directly from us. If you absolutely must see this video, we ask that you refrain from downloading it from a torrent, or streaming it on a tube site. Controlling how this video is seen, and who profits from it, is the only form of agency we have left over this exploitative situation.”

On Facebook, Bechtolt further explained the situation:

“Claire and I - who have been romantic and artistic partners since 2006 - made a ‘sex tape.’ It was intended for us only. We don’t feel the need to justify the reason we made it. Anyone reading this who has been in a long term partnership understands that preserving the relationship is an ever-changing and challenging thing. It’s especially difficult when the lines between career and romance are as merged as ours are. The financial pressures that we’ve been under, which de facto extend into our extracurricular lives, created a circumstance in which we felt like we needed a bit of an escape from the day-to-day. So we turned on a camera, became naked, and had sex. We assumed that we were the only people who would be privy to that video. I guess we were naive. Now you have the option to be privy to that video. For us, that’s a shame. We feel like art is an act of generosity. The art we make for the public is for that expressed purpose. And now we’re in an awkward situation where the art that we made for us and us alone is being viewed by anyone who has the inclination to hit play - a true and humiliating blurring of the public and private.

“Our tastes in the bedroom might seem uncommon to some, and possibly off-putting. But considering the variables that go into any sexual experience, wouldn’t anything seem uncommon, and possibly off-putting? This is our private life. And no one should have governance over what people do consensually in their private lives.”

We, of course, would suggest that you allow Claire Evans and Jona Bechtolt their privacy and don’t watch their sex tape at all, regardless of how and where you see it.

Below is YACHT’s recently shared a cover of Prince’s “Annie Christian” (originally found on his 1981 album Controversy).