Were the comments taken down? I didn't see a link for them in that post---seems fishy. I wonder if the trolls over took the comments section.

Voyeurism ends when you film the intrusion of privacy and then put that shit online without consent. I wouldn't doubt that plenty of commenters are keen on minimizing what happened. Rad fems have been talking about treatment of women as public property for along time, though...and surprise, here we are!

I posted a link to that on the open thread yesterday, and there were no comments at that point, so I don't know what to say on that count.

Whatever it is legally, it's something, so hopefully the method by which this was done makes the culprit obvious and his balls get tacked to the wall.

This is the kind of criminals that make it very hard to sustain my moral objections to cruel and unusual punishments.

It's gross and it's wrong. What was this guy thinking?!?

Erin Andrews should have the right to sue every single media that linked to the video or published any stills from it. For MILLIONS IN DAMAGES. That would probably do more to throw cold water on this kind of thing than any criminal prosecution of the original pervert. Though the original pervert loser should still get his ass thrown in jail for 20 years.

I think this could be classified as a type of assult - if you look at it in a non-traditional way. I think this could easily be viewed as a type of mental assault. I can't even imagine how I would feel if someone did this to me. Those feelings would be amplified a million times if I was a public figure and it was receiving the kind of exposure that it is. I wouldn't be able to just brush it off, and a lawsuit and money would not replace the horrible feelings that a breach of privacy of this magnitude would create. I say it's a type of mental assault.

I do not know about the legal definitions of assault and how this would work. What I do know is that victims of voyeurism often feel as though they've been physically assaulted. They go through the same kinds of trauma associated with it and it is horrible and painful and humiliating and just awful all around.

While I agree what happened to Andrews is a crime and the person responsible should (and will be) prosecuted, what's with the trend of "Can we classify X crime as Y crime instead so it sounds worse?" All it really seems to do is cheapen other crimes. What's next? "Is verbal harassment rape?" "Is vehicular manslaughter genocide?" "Is public urination assault with a deadly weapon?"

Let me reiterate that I don't think what the taper did to Andrews isn't a serious crime or isn't harmful to her.

When Andrews parades herself on the sidelines at sporting events, she is a willing participant in being ogled. I'm not suggesting she deserves it, but that's what her job entails, being "tail" on the sidelines. Similarly, if (hypothetically) she went to the beach in a public place and got caught wearing a skimpy swimsuit or nothing at all, that would be a voluntary act and she would have no basis for complaint about people posting such photographs.

The taping of her while nude however, is an invasion of her privacy and an unwilling act perpetrated on her. She was no more willing to be filmed nude than the several cases of children in Florida who have been molested at water parks. What's most shocking is the attitudes I see elsewhere, that a lot of "men" have no qualms about viewing it, as if they had some right to or there were no ethical issues involved since they didn't tape it themselves.

I have no patience for someone like Andrews, but here, I fully support any anger she might feel and give credit to ESPN's management for siccing their lawyer in an effort to track down and prosecute the individual who taped it, although I have my doubts that they will succeed in finding the person responsible.

I also find it an amusing irony that virus writers have attached code to some copies of the video. Those who look at the picture deserve the damage that happens to their computers (provided it only happens to their own, not others on a network).