Holy Martha!
Posted by gigantichound on 14 Jun 2007 at 04:55 pm | Tagged as: Stuff
Only just caught up with this one.
On the down side, it would suck. On the up side, the out-of-court settlement would send you to Martinique for quite a while. (Garçon!)
Yeah, not only would it suck, your name would come up in search engines attached to “sexual assault” and the photo would end up being mysteriously used years later to wrongly represent the same person. It’s the beginning of a movie-length nightmare for this man. Frank magazine had more details — there’s something interesting about who the guy in the photo is — but I can’t remember it.
This reminds me of an article I saw in Macleans back in the days when people like Michael Milliken and Ivan Boesky were big news–the article was on white collar crime and in the middle of the article they had four small head and shoulders photos in a row, the first three of well-known criminals and the fourth of some expert on white collar crime. The caption with their names read something like “Name1, Name2, Name3, and Name4: joining the ranks of white collar criminals”–maybe not quite as explicit as that maybe but still problematic. If you read the article really carefully you could tell that the caption was misleading.
An apology ensued in due course. The reason I remember all this though is that I noticed the photos and the caption and thought “that’s funny, that last photo doesn’t look like a white collar criminal,” and so I did actually take a closer look at the article to figure out who the fourth guy was. Funny illustration of heuristics at work.