While perusing thorough The Times-Picayune today, I came across this article. It is about this girl who is suing the makers of the "Girls Gone Wild" videos for using her image and embarrassing her. My personal thought on the subject is that she should have been embarrassed BEFORE she bared all. However, I do understand that there are those who will do anything for plastic beads and as long as they keep it in the Quarter that's fine. The moral of the story is … "if you wouldn't do it in front of grandma…"
***Getting on my soapbox*** As a mother, a Krewe member and a lover of Carnival, I do have a problem when people flash me or when they are exposing themselves around children. I have an even bigger problem with the people who encourage flashing. I don't want to see women's breasts. I have my own thank you. However, I would like to thank some of the male flashers. Some of my best laughs have come on days when the temperatures were below 50 degrees. ***Getting off my soapbox***
http://www.nola.com/rose/t-p/index.s...ry/rose10.html
Carnival knowledge
The case of the coed who bared for beads and wound up starring in a voyeuristic video
01/10/02
By Chris Rose
Staff writer/The Times-Picayune
As we enter another grand and ostentatious Carnival season, consider this a cautionary tale:
After her sleep deprivation had worn away, Becky Lynn Gritzke probably thought her romp through Mardi Gras 2000 was nothing but a warm and hazy memory, like it is for so many other college students who drift through our annual Bacchanalian celebration with such admirable, detached blasé.
Ah, youth.
But, one year later, Gritzke's activities that Carnival season came into focus -- very clear focus -- when some friends told her they had seen her celebrating. On television. On a late-night ad for the wildly popular "Girls Gone Wild" video series.
She sure was having fun that Mardi Gras season, if you catch my drift. She caught beads. And the camera caught her.
Turns out, Gritzke, a Florida State University student, is not only featured on the late-night ads for "Girls Gone Wild," she's on the cover of the box the video comes in, she's on the video production company's Web site promotions and she's all over billboards in Europe for a different video series called "American Girls."
This is not the legacy she expected, she says, when she -- if you'll pardon the term -- showed her wits.
So she's suing M.R.A. Holdings, producer of the notorious and gratuitously titillating "Girls Gone Wild" series -- "Mardi Gras Coeds," "Sexy Sorority Sweethearts," "College Girls Exposed," etc. -- for "embarrassment, humiliation, mental pain and suffering and the invasion of her privacy."
Gritzke says the video gives the impression that she was "willing to be associated with and participate in the risqué and sometimes pornographic displays in the videotapes," thus portraying her "in a false light." Gritzke says the camera that caught her flagrante delicto al fresco was hidden from public view. (You are allowed to arch your eyebrow at this last statement.)
And she wants money for all this trouble. No specified amount, just "damages."
M.R.A.'s legal rejoinder was pretty straightforward: When you flash, we make cash.
OK, that phrase doesn't actually appear in any of the legal documents in this case, but it basically comes down to this: M.R.A. says that if you bare all for the wandering masses on Bourbon Street then you have sacrificed your rights to privacy.
And so we find ourselves in another only-in-New Orleans debate. Choose your position on this matter. Now, let's discuss. Where to begin?
Half of you are saying she got what she deserved for coming to our city and acting in such a lewd fashion; she does, after all, concede in her lawsuit that "during the parade and other Mardi Gras celebrations, numerous celebrants, including Plaintiff, removed their shirts or some other item of clothing." (You've got to love the legal dialect. Lawyers could make baking cookies sound like a stilted exercise. But I digress.)
The other half of you are saying: For crimminy Christmas (or insert your preferred term of exasperation here), the girl was just blowing off a little steam. Everybody does it. Does she really deserve this public humiliation for the act? Should these Hollywood sleazeballs be allowed to profiteer from her temporary lapse in judgment?
My response: All these arguments make sense to me. Therein lies the conundrum. It's the annual debate around here: How much is too much? What laws should be relaxed at Mardi Gras to allow the holiday's traditional exuberant self-expression but then, what actions and activities violate the community's "reasonable standards" -- admittedly a near-oxymoronic term during Carnival's waning hours.
Neither Gritzke, her family nor her attorneys returned several phone calls to discuss this matter so the six-page lawsuit against M.R.A., mostly muddled in legalese, is all we know of their thoughts on this matter. They believe M.R.A. should not be allowed to profit from her image. Period.
The "Girls Gone Wild" tapes are "recordings of what is public," says M.R.A. legal rep Ron Guttman. "What happens in public is not private. It's there for all to see. There can be no expectation of privacy. It's a basic First Amendment case and the law says what it says and we win."
Guttman did allow that M.R.A. once made a cash settlement in a similar case but realized that was a bad precedent. "We're not going down that slippery slope again," Guttman said. They have filed a motion to dismiss the suit in the Second Judicial Circuit Court in Leon County, Fla.
Next step is up to the judge.
What do you think? If you want to debate this matter of local import, e-mail me your thoughts and we'll hold a public discourse in this column. But before you rush out to video stores to bear your own witness to this specific case, be advised: As the ad says: "Girls Gone Wild" is not available in stores. Only by mail order and the Internet.
However, if you walk into any French Quarter T-shirt shop or those Bourbon Street lingerie boutiques, you'll find plenty of knock-offs, a dozen or more similarly themed video compilations of varying professional quality.
It's big business, this public voyeurism racket. The "Girls Gone Wild" video series is a constant presence in the Billboard Top 100 sales category.
And these local bootleg tapes fly off the shelves into the hands of salacious consumers from all over the country, so be advised: Now that you know where you may end up if you flash some flesh, well . . . let's be careful out there.
