Posted by Andrew Unterberger on 03/29/2011 at 12:52 PM News

The Popdust Files: christina aguilera, Nicole Richie, Photo leak

Us commoners can afford to casually discard private photo albums in random hotel rooms without worrying about the consequences, but when you’re Christina Aguilera, you might want to at least consider wiping it with a magnet a few times to be on the safe side. Aguilera recently left a digital storage card in a French hotel, recovered by an anonymous someone who discovered hundreds of “highly intimate” photos of Aguilera on the card. Now, that someone is attempting to sell those photos to whoever wants them bad enough.

RadarOnline.com broke the story after the anonymous source sent the site 109 of the photos, in an attempted sale of the private album. They include pictures of the downward-spiraling pop star living it up with noted party girl Nicole Richie, and lying in bed and “kissing passionately” with her boyfriend Matt Rutler. Some of the more scandalous shots listed by Radar supposedly feature Aguilera posing with two naked male maybe-strippers, dancing on a table, and mimicking oral sex on both an unidentified male with a sex toy and a chocolate-covered banana at a theme park. It will be interesting to see how these photos, if eventually released, affect her position as a judge on NBC’s upcoming reality competition The Voice—though if CBS is apparently willing to wipe the slate clean with Charlie Sheen, perhaps major-network tolerance for pop scandal has expanded some in modern times.

The hits keep coming for Aguilera in 2011, who just can’t seem to catch a break these days. Then again, with all the paparazzi out there more than willing to take embarrassing photos of Aguilera on their own time and dime, you do have to wonder why she’d be willing to do so much of their job herself. Maybe next time at the theme park, she should keep the chocolate-covered-banana-play as a private moment between friends, without the photographic commemoration. You’d be surprised how little you end up going through those old albums ten years down the road anyway.