Over the weekend LIVENEWS.com.au got a fairly strong email from the lawyer of Verne Troyer, aka Mini Me from the Austin Powers series.
The lawyer claimed that the leaked “sex-tape” of Mr Troyer featured (in part) on LiveNews was a “violation of his privacy”.
Without any admissions but having respect for his claim for privacy, we took the material down.
But this is what gets my goat. And this is not in any way directed at Mr Troyer, but rather, at the general culture of ‘celebrity sex tapes’ that has arisen in the past decade or so.
If you are a celebrity, you’d be well aware by now of the impact the media has on your life and your affairs.
You’re constantly hounded by two-bit shark scum-dogs, crawling in gutters and hiding in bushes to capture gratuitous shots of up-skirts, down-blouses, nip-slips and flab-rolls.
If there were a convenient hand-held spray to blast in the faces of these barnacles to make them instantly violently ill you’d be spritizing the mollusks until they were puking onto their expensive photography equipment.
But unfortunately, this isn’t possible.
So why give them a free ride by exploiting your own exploits?
With the seedy pool known as the internet, it’s no longer the trashy tabloids and mediocre marathons you need to be concerned about. Because once it’s on here, it can’t be removed. It will be copied, stored, archived, photo-shopped, remixed and reborn until the end of eternity.
This is the thing: being a celebrity, you can’t really stop the thinly-mustached vulture in the Hawaiian shirt poking through your garbage to find your table scraps before running an exclusive story on your gravy stains. But what you can do is say no to the red-light on the handy cam.
So take my advice. If you are about to become busy in the boudoir – make sure your posterior isn’t preserved for posterity.
If you are about to get your freak on – turn off the DV cam, so the geeks can’t log on.
And if you are embarking on a wild adventure to the land of Jumpin’ Springs - just take in the natural environment.
Don’t make a travel documentary.
