Legal News

Woman Seeks New Trial Over Inclusion in 'Orgy' Video

By Matthew Heller, Editor

A Missouri woman is arguing that a jury improperly ruled against her in an involuntary nudity case because the hardcore content of a ?Girls Gone Wild? video ?exceeded the scope? of any consent she may have given to appearing topless in it.

?There was no evidence in the [trial] record upon which it could be inferred that the Plaintiff knowingly agreed to have images of her bare breasts placed on a DVD with hard core pornographic images and scenes,? the woman, identified only as Jane Doe, says in a motion for a new trial.

In July, a St. Louis Circuit Court jury rejected the woman's $2.4 million privacy case against Mantra Films, which produces the racy ?Girls Gone Wild? oeuvre, and its owner, Joe Francis, buying the defense's ?blame the victim? strategy.

Doe, a 26-year-old mother of two, said ?no? when a ?Girls Gone Wild? crew asked her to bare her breasts as they were filming at a St. Louis bar in September 2005. But the defense argued that she consented to being filmed topless by dancing flirtatiously for the cameraman before another patron pulled her top down.

?Through her actions, she gave implied consent,? the jury foreman said. ?She was really playing to the camera. She knew what she was doing.?

In arguing for a new trial, Doe attorney Stephen B. Evans (Evans Partnership, St. Louis) makes a distinction between her limited exposure of her breasts at the Rum Jungle bar and the ?sexually explicit? scenes in the ?Girls Gone Wild Sorority Orgy? video in which Doe appears for about 20 seconds.

?The law provides a cause of action to plaintiffs against defendants who exceed the consent expressly or impliedly given,? he says, and

Here, Defendants['] use of Plaintiff's image in a sexually explicit adult pornographic film goes above and beyond any alleged consent that the Defendants claimed they may have received from Plaintiff through her conduct on the night in question.

A hearing on the motion is set for Sept. 16 and Judge John J. Riley can set aside the jury's verdict by finding it was ?against the manifest weight of the evidence.?

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines hard core porn as containing explicit descriptions of sex acts or scenes of actual sex acts. But one problem with Evans' argument could be that the ?Girls Gone Wild? videos are generally considered to be softcore porn.

Doe has said she was ?flirting with the camera? but ?never, ever planned on crossing the line of being exposed in a sexual manner or being on this DVD. I didn't show my boobs. They did.?

By Matthew Heller
On Point

Full post as published by On Point News on September 15, 2010 (boomark / email).