Sportscaster Erin Andrews took the witness stand in her $75 million suit against the Marriott Nashville today and tearfully explained to the jury how vulnerable and humiliated she felt after learning a stranger filmed her nude at the hotel in 2008 and posted the footage online.
Erin, 37, who was with ESPN covering football at the time but now works for Fox Sports, is suing the hotel at Vanderbilt University for not protecting her privacy because a man named Michael David Barrett requested a room adjacent to hers and then altered her peephole to shoot the video.
When a reporter friend called Erin to tell her about the video, Erin testified that she watched about 2 seconds of the footage before calling her parents in rage and confusion.
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“I was just screaming,” Erin said. “I said I was naked all over the Internet. I didn’t know where it was. I said, ‘Dad! I’m naked all over the Internet. I don’t know what it is! I don’t know where I am!’ I even got a call from the hotel asking if everything was okay because I was screaming so loud.
“My biggest fear was that the longer it was on the Internet, it was going to blow up and blow up and blow up and go viral and get page views and be really bad,” Erin testified.
“I just kept saying, ‘We gotta get it down. We gotta get it down.’ And we can’t get it down! And we’re never going to get it off.”
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When asked what she would have done had she known someone had requested the room next to hers, Erin replied: “I would have called the police.
“No one ever called me or told me when I checked in that he asked to be put next to me,” Erin testified.
Earlier in the day, Barrett, a former delivery truck driver, testified that he was financially motived to video Erin. He said he posted the footage online after a celebrity gossip website declined to buy it.
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“I’m not proud of what I did,” he testified.
Erin also told the court how hurt she felt when some people suggested she leaked the footage of herself as a stunt.
“Probably, for like three months, everyone thought it was a publicity stunt. That ripped me apart,’’ Andrews said.
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“I’m so angry, Erin declared. “This could have been stopped.”
Since the incident, Erin said she has experienced anxiety and depression, spontaneously cries, and that she has trouble sleeping.
