While there, a stalker, then-50-year-old Michael David Barrett, had booked the room next to hers, set up a camera in the peephole of her hotel room’s door, and recorded her in the nude while she was changing her clothes. She alleges that employees of the hotel gave Barrett the dates she would be at the hotel and also gave him a room directly next to hers. He noted that even within the past six months, almost 400,000 people watched the videos, the Tennessean reports: “There’s a saying that once it’s on the Internet, it’s on the Internet”, he said.
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“Right now, someone’s watching that video”.
In the video, Barrett recalled how he’d watched Andrews at least a dozen times on TV and came up with the idea to sell a nude video of her after seeing that she was trending on Yahoo. In 2009, the sportscaster and Dancing With The Stars host was surreptitiously videoed while naked in what she assumed was the privacy of her hotel room. The father said she was so disturbed about the secret footage that she vomited before agreeing to an Federal Bureau of Investigation request that she watch the nude videos so agents could find clues about who took it.
“She just looked at me and said, ‘Dad, that’s what I want to do, ‘ ” he told the jury of nine women and five men.
Comstock said the ordeal seeped into relationships, with Andrews concerned about how she would tell potential suitors about the violation.
The hotel owners, for their part, claim that Barrett is a criminal and that they were unknowingly tricked into giving him the rooms next to those occupied by Miss Andrews.
A computer scientist who traced views of what have become known to some as Erin Andrews’ peephole videos testified Thursday that the videos or still pictures from them were seen by more than 16.8 million people worldwide.
Barrett spent years in prison for altering a peephole and videotaping Andrews as she changed clothes back in 2008.
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Barrett was an executive at a Chicago-area insurance company when he shot the video at the Nashville hotel in September 2008. The trial is expected to go as long as two weeks. Jansen said he knew it was in the billions or trillions.
