TV sports reporter/personality/hottie Erin Andrews turned a lot of heads over the years. Mine included. Sports tends to be a pretty misogynistic realm, what with being driven primarily by dudes. So it's pretty rare that a female sideline reporter gets to be on anyone's airwaves unless she's attractive. And I must say -- Erin Andrews is pretty good at her job. Oh, she's knowledgeable about sports, too.
Seriously -- it sucks for women that they're objectified for their looks to the degree that they are, but Erin Andrews, after drawing the male eyeballs, managed to actually impress us with her knowledge of the games she covered. She's a damn good sideline reporter who takes pride in doing her job well. But she is a pretty woman, and pretty women have to deal with a certain level of bullshit. Pretty women who are public figures have to put up with more.
Erin Andrews got an industrial size pile of it.
In September of 2008, after covering a college football game for her employer at the time, ESPN, she checked into the Mariott in Nashville. A stalker found out where she was staying and asked if he could be placed in a room adjacent to hers. For whatever reason, the brain-deads at the hotel agreed. Said stalker videotaped her through a peephole, and a video of her in her hotel room, very much naked, was subsequently broadcast to the world.
The video was the very definition of "viral." An attractive woman, known from the male-followed world of sports had a nude video online. Who wouldn't be interested in that? Full disclosure -- I've seen it. I had it on my computer for a while. Frankly, I feel like a perfect schmuck right about now. Because she's suing Mariott, and her testimony took place yesterday, and damn -- she's been through emotional hell.
But something's been rubbing me a little bit the wrong way today. I've read a few articles on a few different sites, and there are people calling the defense attorneys for the hotel chain "disgusting" and "despicable" because they asked her on the stand if her career had taken off since the incident. The reason for that line of questioning is because she's gotten several endorsement deals since then, signed a second contract with ESPN which was richer than the first, and then with Fox Sports, which was richer than THAT one.
The usual suspects have lined up to whine about how inappropriate it is to suggest that having your privacy violated is somehow OK because you subsequently made money. Hell, the local FM radio DJ's were jumping all over it -- them being the last bastions of political correctness, and all. But let's not forget something: We're not talking about whether or not the stalker's actions were OK -- they weren't. We're not talking about whether or not Erin Andrews has been violated in an unspeakable manner -- she has. We're not debating if she deserves to get paid -- she does.
But we're dealing with a lawsuit now. And lawsuits are about cash. And we're not just dealing with whether or not she deserves to be compensated -- it's also about how much she deserves to be compensated. And Andrews is suing for $75 million.
That's a hell of a lot of scratch.
It's not an unfair question to ask if her career has suffered or not suffered for the incident when someone is suing for that much money. It doesn't mean that he, or anyone else, is defending the actions of the stalker who shot the video OR the hotel, who screwed up by not protecting her privacy. He's not saying it's a defense. It's just a mitigating factor in HOW MUCH she's entitled to.
I'll say this: I don't blame Erin Andrews at all. If this had happened to me, I would be suing everyone I could find within a ten block radius of the hotel where it happened. And I say that with the expectation that that video would only get about 20 views, because there probably isn't a single person on the planet who's interested in seeing my fat ass naked. So I don't have any idea what number you could put on the emotional damage she suffered. But they managed to, and $75 million was the number they picked. And if her career is going well, and her professional reputation hasn't suffered any, the number they ultimately land on shouldn't be as high as if it had been.
There's also the basic tenet of our legal system that everyone gets a lawyer, and lawyers shouldn't be tainted with the actions of their clients just because they do their jobs. The system doesn't work if lawyers pick and choose when they try their hardest and when they don't. Just because we recognize this doesn't mean we're abandoning our compassion for a woman who's been publicly humiliated in an era where the humiliation never disappears.
Yet, just because we live in a very horny society and we have the technology to film everyone, everywhere, all the time, doesn't entitle us to break basic trust. And for eight years, this video was talk show fodder and website clickbait. Well, did it take eight years and a video of tearful testimony to figure out that someone was hurt by this? If you were one of the media outlets keeping this story on the front page for months on end, and you're feigning outrage at Mariott's lawyer trying to cut the number down, just spare me. If you feel that bad about it, here's what you do:
Kick in a few bucks.
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