A woman who was in a Taiwanese plastic surgery ad says her life was ruined after the image went viral.
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Ms Yeh told BBC News that the contract signed between her agency and Taipei-based J Walter Thompson states that the ad with caption “The only thing you’ll ever have to worry about is how to explain it to the kids” would be used in newspaper and magazines exclusively by that clinic only.
BBC Yeh said she is considering legal action against the ad agency and the surgery clinic.
“Apparently, the parents in the ad have had plastic surgery, and not surprisingly, they both look extremely attractive”, the Rocket News 24 reporter wrote [emphasis ours]. “I didn’t know that it would be used so widely on the internet and there would be so many made up stories about it”.
‘Just because I’m a model, people can hurt me like this and I can’t fight back. “I just want to hide”.
Heidi, who had previously modelled for fast food chain KFC and Japanese beauty brands, originally posed for the shoot back in 2012.
Although Goldenberger mostly brushes off the meme as an occasional annoyance, if Heidi Yeh’s case makes it to the Taiwanese courts, she will be hoping to follow the footsteps of “Techno Viking” – a man who sued a filmmaker for breeching his “personality rights” when he was recorded dancing at an electronic music festival in Berlin. There is a clear physical difference between the parents and their offspring, whose faces, Yeh claims, were altered in post production so that they do not has the big eyes and Westernised features of their parents. The image was turned into various memes all poking fun at the people featured.
YOU may recall the story of a husband suing his wife for failing to declare she had had plastic surgery after their children turned out “ugly”.
He then discovered she’d had cosmetic surgery before they met and chose to sue her for deceiving him.
“When I first heard about this from a friend, I thought it was just a one-off rumour”, Yeh said in a tearful interview with the BBC. “Then I realised that the whole world was spreading the story and in different languages”. “People actually believed it and thought this had happened to me”. Even the relatives and family of her current fiancé have asked about it. And when spotted somewhere, public starts to gossip.
As well as the impact on her personal life, she said her modelling career went downhill because of her notoriety. As a result of the incident, her career was adversely affected and she was offered only small roles in advertisement.
Yeh said she is considering suing the ad agency and the surgery clinic in an attempt to put the rumors to bed.
Now, she’s pressing ahead with her claim and is demanding $5million new Taiwan dollars in damages. “But alas, plastic surgery, of course, does not change your genes”.
“Our campaign was created for print publication in the Taiwan market”.
But Heidi’s lawyer Chang Yu-chi said: We gave you the copyright and the right to edit it, but we didn’t give you the right to let another company use it, and to use it online’.
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She ended up posting a video to YouTube responding to the bullying. “The children may not use social media now, but it will hurt them when they grow up”, she said. The photos were also uploaded on JWT’s Facebook page.
