Legal Research

PCC answers loaded question of Epic Boobs girl

By scott

The Press Complaints Commission have cleared the mazine Loaded of breaching the privacy of a young women with an article headlined “Wanted! The Epic Boobs girl!”, published in the February 2010 edition of Loaded. Whilst the PCC commented on the questionable tastefulness of the article - which displayed pictures of the girl, then aged 15, which were originally posted to her Bebo site - they concluded that the information, in the same form as published in the magazine, was widely available on the internet to such an extent [The complainant’s photograph, for example, came up in the top three in a Google image search on the word “boobs”. At the time of complaint, there were 1,760,000 matches that related to her and 203,000 image matches of her as the “Epic Boobs” girl.] that its republication did not raise a breach of the Code.

I’m with the PCC for a change on this one. Whilst having some sympathy for the young lady in question, the ‘damage’ was clearly done before when her Bebo pictures got into the wider internet community, and whoever shared them originally - it is unclear whether her photos were originally open for all to see.

I do however also agree with the PCC that Loaded’s decision to publish pictures of a 15 year old girl as part of an attempt to get the woman in question to pose for them now is nothing short of sleazy.

Full post as published by Information Overload on May 13, 2010 (boomark / email).