The original cover featured a nude prepubescent girl, which stirred controversy in the UK, US and elsewhere. As a result, the album was re-issued with a different cover in some countries.

The success of Virgin Killer was similar to other Scorpions albums featuring Uli Jon Roth as lead guitarist; it "failed to attain any serious attention in the United States" but was "quite popular in Japan"[6] where it peaked at number 32 in the charts.

We didn't actually have the idea. It was the record company. The record company guys were like, "Even if we have to go to jail, there's no question that we'll release that." On the song "Virgin Killer", time is the virgin killer. But then, when we had to do the interviews about it, we said "Look, listen to the lyrics and then you'll know what we're talking about. We're using this only to get attention. That's what we do." Even the girl, when we met her fifteen years later, had no problem with the cover. Growing up in Europe, sexuality, of course not with children, was very normal. The lyrics really say it all. Time is the virgin killer. A kid comes into the world very naive, they lose that naiveness and then go into this life losing all of this getting into trouble. That was the basic idea about all of it.

In 2008, photographer Michael von Gimbut emphasized that his wife, the model's mother and sister, and three female assistants had been present during the shooting and stated, "Back then, we loved and protected children and did not sleep with them."

Back in those days [the 1970s] it was RCA, our record label then, went over the edge with Virgin Killer. Today when you think of child pornography on the net, you would never do something like that. We never did this in the sense of pornography, we did it in the sense of art. It is about the song and the label was pushing the idea because they wanted to get the controversy to help the album sale and you cannot get better promotion than that. Looking back from the band point of view it was never an album cover that we took home to our parents and said, "Look what we just released.." There was always mixed feelings about it and even 30 years later it caused a scandal at Wikipedia because the site for that album was blocked and even the FBI was getting involved. All of that after so many years, can you believe that?

In August 2015, a court in Sweden said that it considered the album cover to be child pornography.

In December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a UK-based non-government organization, added the Wikipedia article Virgin Killer to its internet blacklist due to concerns over legality of the image, which had been assessed as the lowest level of legal concern: "erotic posing with no sexual activity".[26] As a result, people using many major UK ISPs were blocked from viewing the entire article by the Cleanfeed system,[26][27][28] and a large part of the UK was blocked from editing Wikipedia owing to the means of blocking in use. Following representations by the Wikimedia Foundation (who host the Wikipedia website)[29] and public complaints,[30] the IWF reversed their decision three days later and confirmed that in future they would not block copies of the image that were hosted overseas.[4] The IWF stated that one of the reasons for reversing their decision was that it had increased public interest in the image, an example of the Streisand effect.