The following article was pulled from AJC.com earlier today and produced by the AJC’s Mark Bradley.
This one’s for Mrs. Lou Bradley of Maysville, Ky. Or, as I like to call her, “Mom.” And Mom always said — and I mean always — that “your sins will find you out.” Last week a video of Erin Andrews, of whom you’ve heard, surfaced on the Internet. It was shot through a peephole in a hotel room and it featured — and here the hearts of 10 million fanboys go all a-flutter — footage of Ms. Andrews unclad. Her lawyer acted quickly to have such footage removed from the Web.
“While alone in the privacy of her hotel room, Erin Andrews was surreptitiously videotaped without her knowledge or consent,” wrote her attorney, Marshall P. Grossman of Santa Monica, in a statement released on PR Newswire. “She was the victim of a crime and is taking action to protect herself and help ensure that others are not similarly violated in the future. Although the perpetrator or perpetrators of this criminal act have not yet been identified, when they are identified she intends to bring both civil and criminal charges against them and against anyone who has published the material. We request respect of Erin’s privacy at this time, while she and her representatives are working with the authorities.”
If you check today, you’ll not find the video on the Internet. What you might find, according to Samuel Goldsmith of the New York Daily News, is a download purporting to feature Ms. Andrews but containing instead a big fat computer virus. Which, not to get all judgmental, is what you deserve.
As Graham Cluley of Sophos, an anti-virus developer, told Game On!, a USA Today sports blog: “”Hackers are no slacks when it comes to taking advantage of a hot internet search trend, and they have been quick to set up bogus webpages claiming to contain the video footage of Ms Andrews in her hotel room.”
A confession: While I have seen Ms. Andrews in person — she lives in Atlanta — I don’t quite understand the mania that has occurred since she became a sideline reporter on ESPN. (She used to do in-game updates for TBS during Braves games, and nobody seemed to find those exceptional in any way.) Yes, she’s attractive, and yes, she’s on TV, and yes, she covers sports, which caters to an audience of males, but still … a peephole video?
That’s just sick. That’s not even funny sick — it’s “Psycho” sick. (The Bates Motel, as you’ll recall, featured a peephole. And a nut behind the front desk.) Even Deadspin, a site not renowned for its sense of shame, has felt the need to apologize for directing readers to the (since-deleted) video.
And here’s a word from Mrs. Bradley’s son: Making like Norman Bates isn’t cool, isn’t sexy, isn’t anything but … gross. Now go and sin no more.
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