TV Guide magazine chief content officer Michael Schneider joins Kim Masters to talk about three lawsuits related to celebrity and privacy in the news right now.
- Reporter Erin Andrews was awarded $55 million by a jury after a stalker took videos of her in a hotel room and posted them online. Andrews used to work for ESPN, and during the course of the trial Andrews told the court ESPN had wanted her to go public and say the videos were not a publicity stunt. Andrews now works for Fox Sports.
- Hulk Hogan is suing Gawker for $100 million for invasion of privacy after the website posted a video of a sex tape of Hogan. He is claiming that while Hulk Hogan is his public persona, in private he is Terry Bollea, and that is the person who made the tape. There’s been much debate over the newsworthiness of the video and how much money Gawker made from the extra traffic to the site as a result of the sex tape.
- In a strange, lurid lawsuit, the Palm Beach neighbor of the very private Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter is accusing Perlmutter and his wife of having started a hate mail campaign against him in their neighborhood. In the letters, Perlmutter has allegedly called Harold Peerenboom a sexual predator. He has never been accused of anything of the sort by anyone else. Now, as part of the lawsuit, Peerenboom has been demanding access to certain Disney and Marvel emails, something they’re not particularly excited to share.