The sportscaster was also ordered to help FBI identify the person who taped the videos by watching them frame by frame.
- February 27, 2016
AceShowbiz -
Erin Andrews left a Nashville courtroom in tears after learning that more than 16 million people had watched her nude videos. On Thursday, February 25, a jury viewed the clips that Andrews' stalker, by the name of Michael David Barrett, secretly recorded at two hotels years ago.
Barrett shot the videos in September 2008 at the Nashville Marriott at Vanderbilt University and a hotel in Ohio. Andrews was covering the college football for ESPN at that time. She filed a $75 million lawsuit against Marriott in October 2015, alleging Nashville Marriott workers helped facilitate Barrett's videotaping by revealing that she was a guest at the hotel.
Her court documents stated that the hotel's employees told him her room number and complied to Barrett's request to be placed in the room next door to her. Through a peephole, Barrett took a four-and-a-half minute video at the Marriott hotel and uploaded it online.
Computer scientist Bernard Jansen testified that the estimate number of online views of the images between July 2009 and January of this year reach 16.8 million people. "Every minute, 1.5 people are watching that video," the professor from Penn State, told jurors. "Right now, someone is watching that video."
Andrews herself was told to watch the videos with the FBI on Wednesday to help identify the person who took them. Her father Steve Andrews testified that his daughter vomited after agreeing to watch the video frame by frame. The jurors took their turn on Thursday and at least one of them, a woman, at times averted her eyes from the projector as the images were shown, CBS News reported.
"She is afraid. My daughter has been scared for eight years. For eight years, she has been terrified that there is something else out there, that there is someone else looking for her," Steve said in his testimony. "She doesn't trust anymore. She is a shell of the person she was before this happened." The case will resume on Monday.
Barrett pleaded guilty to stalking and was eventually sentenced in 2010 to two-and-a-half years in prison.
