Lawsuit after birthday suit! Jessie Nizewitz, a New York model and former contestant on the VH1 reality show, Dating Naked, has filed a $10 million lawsuit against producers of the show, claiming that her crotch was exposed on TV.
The lawsuit, which was filed in NYC on Wednesday, Aug. 20, explains how Nizewitz, 28, was "promised that all frontal and genital nudity would be blurred out when broadcast."
Instead, the filing reads, she was "shocked, horrified and outraged to observe this intrusion into her privacy for all to see," when her episode aired on July 31. Nizewitz was featured, naked while wrestling on the beach, when a brief uncensored image of her, ahem, crotch was flashed across the screen. (The cable series will typically reveal bare butts, but will blur boobs and private parts.)
According to the suit, Nizewitz was humiliated on social media by viewers. "Immediately Plaintiff became subject to ridicule by those watching," the suit read via Entertainment Weekly. "Plaintiff has suffered and continues to suffer extreme emotional distress, mental anguish, humiliation and embarrassment. … Defendants knew or reasonably should have known that broadcasting an individual’s vagina and anus on national cable television would cause substantial and severe emotional distress."
Nizewitz told the New York Post that the guy she was dating at the time never called her again after the episode aired. "My grandma saw it," she told the paper. "I saw her this week and she didn’t have much to say to me. She's probably mad. My parents are just annoyed."
"I have no problem going to a beach in a bikini or people seeing me on TV in a bikini," Nizewitz told EW in a statement via her attorney, Matthew J. Blit. "Although I went on this show knowing that I would be nude while taping it I was told that my private parts would be blurred for TV. If you watch an episode, you will see that the blur actually makes it less revealing than a bikini would. Obviously, I did not expect the world to see my private parts, this is not what I anticipated or what any other contestants on the show anticipated."
She is suing Viacom, which operates VH1, as well as two production companies.
