Erin Andrews’ father testified Wednesday that the peephole video released on the internet of his daughter undressing in a hotel room rendered her “a shell of the person she use to be.”
The 37-year-old Erin Andrews brought a $75 million negligence lawsuit against the owner and manager of the Nashville Marriott where the secret filming took place.
“She’s depressed,” Steve Andrews told jurors. “She cries, she’s full of anxiety, she’s a very, very changed person. She’s not the girl that we used to know.”
ESPN employed Erin Andrews in 2008 as a sports journalist (she now works as a sportscaster for Fox Sports) when a stalker, Michael David Barrett, crafted a peephole in an adjacent hotel room allowing him to film the attractive former College Game Day host undressing. The video proceeded to go viral after Barrett put it up on the internet.
According to Steve Andrews’ testimony, Barrett called the Marriott and said he wanted to know if Erin Andrews was staying at the hotel and then requested a room right next to hers.
Steve Andrews said in court, “I remember reading [the FBI report] and thinking, how does this happen? That somebody would call a hotel and ask if Erin Andrews is there and they say yes?”
Sporting News reported that Steve and Erin were both “dumbfounded” by the FBI report. “He’s up against the door videotaping my daughter. She’s undressed, she’s getting ready for a football game. If this guy had been a killer, she’d be dead,” the father asserted.
A story at Page Six recounts that in July 2009 the elder Andrews received a terrifying phone call from Erin reacting to finding out a nude video of her surfaced on the internet. “She was just screaming, ‘I’m on the Internet. I’m naked. Everything I’ve worked for is done. We’ve got to get it down. We’ve got to get it down.’”
In 2010, Barrett was sentenced to two and a half years for pleading guilty to interstate stalking. Wednesday Barrett, no longer incarcerated, demonstrated remorse for his actions when he cried while apologizing to Andrews.
Andrews responded by telling her former stalker: “You violated me and you violated all women. You are a sexual predator, a sexual deviant and they should lock you up.”
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