@mickatthemoviesThe part of the Erin Andrews story that sticks with me is the phone call that never happened. A hotel worker could have picked up a receiver and told her a man had just requested the room next door. That's it. Instead, everything that follows happened. Rewind to 2008. Andrews was 30, already a recognizable face in sports broadcasting through her college football work for ESPN, and she had never met Michael David Barrett. He trailed her through three cities, keeping tabs on where she stayed. At the Marriott at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, he got the front desk on the phone, verified she was registered, and asked to be placed in the adjacent room. The hotel handed him the key without a word to her. He then messed with the peephole on her door and filmed her naked while she undressed after a shower, roughly four and a half minutes of it. A comparable recording happened in Columbus, Ohio. When the footage surfaced online in 2009, it racked up close to 17 million views, and this is the gut-punch: before anyone even knew who was behind it, plenty of people decided she had engineered the whole thing for attention. Barrett got arrested eventually, copped to stalking, and drew a 30-month federal prison term. The legal fight came in 2016, when Andrews sued Barrett and the hotel companies for $75 million. She testified about the humiliation and the psychological damage that stayed with her. The hotels' lawyers went after her credibility by pointing out how well her career had gone since the video leaked, even citing endorsement work like Diet Mountain Dew. And the ugly comments kept coming during the trial, with people on her social media still claiming she faked it. On March 7, 2016, the jury came back with $55 million. Barrett carried 51% of the liability, the hotels the other 49%. Copies of that recording are still out there resurfacing, and Andrews keeps talking about what it did to her. What gets me is how low the bar was. A stranger walked in off the street, asked for the room beside a guest, and got it. One heads-up call, Andrews has argued, might have stopped the whole thing before it started. So who carries this? The hotel that failed to guard a guest's privacy, or the man who did the stalking and the filming? fr

@mickatthemoviesThe part of the Erin Andrews story that sticks with me is the phone call that never happened. A hotel worker could have picked up a receiver and told her a man had just requested the room next door. That's it. Instead, everything that follows happened. Rewind to 2008. Andrews was 30, already a recognizable face in sports broadcasting through her college football work for ESPN, and she had never met Michael David Barrett. He trailed her through three cities, keeping tabs on where she stayed. At the Marriott at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, he got the front desk on the phone, verified she was registered, and asked to be placed in the adjacent room. The hotel handed him the key without a word to her. He then messed with the peephole on her door and filmed her naked while she undressed after a shower, roughly four and a half minutes of it. A comparable recording happened in Columbus, Ohio. When the footage surfaced online in 2009, it racked up close to 17 million views, and this is the gut-punch: before anyone even knew who was behind it, plenty of people decided she had engineered the whole thing for attention. Barrett got arrested eventually, copped to stalking, and drew a 30-month federal prison term. The legal fight came in 2016, when Andrews sued Barrett and the hotel companies for $75 million. She testified about the humiliation and the psychological damage that stayed with her. The hotels' lawyers went after her credibility by pointing out how well her career had gone since the video leaked, even citing endorsement work like Diet Mountain Dew. And the ugly comments kept coming during the trial, with people on her social media still claiming she faked it. On March 7, 2016, the jury came back with $55 million. Barrett carried 51% of the liability, the hotels the other 49%. Copies of that recording are still out there resurfacing, and Andrews keeps talking about what it did to her. What gets me is how low the bar was. A stranger walked in off the street, asked for the room beside a guest, and got it. One heads-up call, Andrews has argued, might have stopped the whole thing before it started. So who carries this? The hotel that failed to guard a guest's privacy, or the man who did the stalking and the filming? fr