Image Source: Toglenn, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
What was the Accusation?
Former Playboy model Dani Mathers faced widespread criticism after secretly photographing a nude woman in the locker-room shower area of an LA Fitness in Los Angeles and posting the image to Snapchat in July 2016. The woman, who was approximately 70 years old at the time, had not consented to being photographed. Mathers accompanied the image with a mocking caption: “If I can’t unsee this then you can’t either.” The post prompted accusations that Mathers had both violated the woman’s privacy and publicly body-shamed her.
Mathers quickly apologized after the post generated widespread backlash. She maintained that she had intended to send the photograph privately to a friend rather than publish it to her Snapchat story, but she also acknowledged that taking and sharing the photograph was wrong. LA Fitness revoked her membership and reported the incident to police. The Los Angeles Police Department investigated, and prosecutors subsequently charged Mathers with misdemeanor invasion of privacy. The woman in the photograph was located by investigators but remained publicly unidentified.
On May 24, 2017, Mathers pleaded no contest to misdemeanor invasion of privacy. She was ordered to perform 30 days of community labor removing graffiti and received three years of probation. After entering the plea, Mathers gave an interview to ABC News in which she again expressed remorse, acknowledged that she had made a wrong choice, said she had learned about the importance of privacy, and asked for the woman’s forgiveness. Mathers said that she had not met the woman and therefore had not been able to apologize to her directly.
Key Apologia Strategies:
Mortification, Defeasibility, Good Intentions, Accident, Corrective Action
Video
Transcript
Dani Mathers’ Snapchat Apology:
“I just wanted to acknowledge a photo I accidentally posted here on Snapchat earlier today and let you know guys know that was absolutely wrong and not what I meant to do,” she said in a video posted to Snapchat. “I know that body-shaming is wrong. That is not the type of person I am.”
“I haven’t been able to actually meet the woman involved, although I’ve wanted to. So there’s just been a lot of unresolved issues. I never meant to hurt her. I never, ever intended on showing the world this photo. And that I hope that she could forgive me. I don’t expect her to forget. I don’t expect her to like me. I just — I really want her forgiveness.”
Mathers said the incident made her a target of online backlash and real life privacy problems of her own.
“It’s taught me a lot about privacy. I’ve lost a lot of that myself as well. We’ve had a lot of paparazzi involved in my family life. I had my privacy taken away after I took someone else’s.”
“To hide out at my mother’s house at age 30 because of something I’ve done — it just felt really low.”
“I’m accepting of it. I think that the option between 45 — I think it was 45 — days in jail or cleaning up graffiti was two strange options, but I’m excited to clean up our streets. This is just one more step into learning from my mistake, and I do start this week.”
“So there’s been sort of a mutual ‘I don’t really want to work with them at this moment,’ and they can’t really work with me, due to the sensitivity of this issue. It’s still very current, and I don’t want them to receive any backlash from this as well. So we’ve just sort of walked away from each other. We still have a great relationship.”
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