Defense in Erin Andrews case offers sexist, specious argument

A growing bank account doesn’t heal emotional wounds.

That’s an important message that needs to come out of sportscaster Erin Andrews’ $75 million civil suit against the operator of a Nashville Marriott hotel where a video showing her naked was secretly recorded.

I hope jurors get that message. That they realize it’s a specious argument to use the fact that her career trajectory continued in the aftermath of that viral video to undercut her claims. And no, the money she’s seeking won’t heal those wounds either — but the hotel needs to be slapped financially for what it allowed to happen.

I also hope that the story lines exposed in this case lead to changes in hotel management across the nation, particularly when it comes to access to guest-room information. For now, this sad story should remind us all that no matter how “nice” our hotel accommodations appear to be, security is not necessarily intact.

Moron Michael David Barrett altered the peephole to Andrews’ hotel room and recorded the video, before releasing it in 2009. Barrett served 30 months in prison for stalking her; Andrews is also suing him.

West End Hotel Partners, which owns and operates the Vanderbilt University-area hotel where the taping took place in 2008, wants to claim only Barrett is to blame.

Hardly. According to Barrett, a house phone in the hotel’s restaurant displayed the actual number of a guest room. So Barrett simply picked up the line, asked the hotel operator to connect him “to Erin Andrews,” noted the room number on the read-out and headed up to her floor to case the joint.

Barrett says he then went to the front desk to check in, asking specifically to have Room XX, which he had determined was next to Andrews’ room. Once in the room, he simply listened until she left, altered the peephole; when she returned, he listened for the shower to start then stop, walked into the hallway and began videotaping.

The operation that runs the Marriott is still trying to poke holes in Barrett’s story, but so far they’ve been unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, in a risky, if not unexpected, defense, the hotel operator’s lawyers are raising questions about how affected Andrews was by the video from a financial standpoint. They went so far as to quiz her on endorsement deals she made in the years since the video’s release. In fact, they walked right up to the line of questioning just how much of a victim Andrews really is.

The most generous description one could put on their line of questioning is, in the words of an ABC News legal analyst, “How much is it worth and who should pay it?” Given what Andrews already has gone through, as revealed in earlier testimony, my perspective is not that generous.

Like all women who try to break into sports news, Andrews never had an easy road, especially given that her career began about the time that Internet trolling was becoming big sport among many. She was almost immediately dubbed “sideline Barbie” and more attention was focused on her appearance than on her interviews.

Then to have a nude video of herself be seen by millions and millions of people — who would argue that would cause intense mental and emotional suffering. Maybe those wounds are as easily “visible” as so-called physical suffering, but I think the scars are apparent if you listened to her painful testimony. Perhaps even more telling is listening to the testimony of her mother and father about the shock and horror — and how it has affected their daughter.

Beyond the horrors of the video itself came her employer’s insistence that she speak about the ordeal in a one-on-one interview on camera before she returned to work in order to rebut whispers that she wasn’t herself behind the scandal. Employer ESPN has denied that it was anything but supportive of Andrews in the aftermath of the ordeal. But it sure sounds like ESPN was concerned about protecting its own brand.

And, yes, I know all the Andrews testimony is geared toward winning, but they deserve no less. Maybe not $75 million, but then again, why in the world did the hotel not reach a settlement? No way does the hotel come out looking anything but bad.

Andrews deserves a lot of credit for putting herself through this latest public spectacle in an effort to stand up for herself and other women who regrettably find themselves victimized in similar ways.