Nashville at law: Online leak of racy pix prompts lawsuit

Woman accuses big-name photo processors of letting Valentine's Day shots get onto Web. Also: Veteran lawyer loses right to practice over commingled funds [From our print edition featured in Monday's City Paper]

Email | Print By E. Thomas Wood

The e-mail came in on a Nashville woman’s Yahoo! account one Friday afternoon last year. It was from someone calling himself Paul Unser, with his address showing as “latinluvr78@gmail.com.” Its subject line: “Amazing what you can find on the Internet.”

Opening the message, the recipient saw a single line of text: “You really should be more careful with who you let point a camera at you, and when.” She saw two photos of herself attached below. They were pictures of her in what she would later describe as “intimate” poses. One was named “wow.jpg.” The name of the other is too indecent to be printed here.

The woman, whom this story will not name for privacy reasons, filed suit on Oct. 8 in Davidson County Circuit Court against Walgreen Co. and Hewlett-Packard Co., as well as HP’s Snapfish photo processing service.

The complaint says she uploaded the photos to Snapfish through Walgreen’s supposedly secure Web site to be part of a Valentine’s Day photo album for her boyfriend. “In fact, however, the security of the Walgreens.com Web site, ‘hosted’ by Snapfish, was seriously breached as evidenced by the e-mail,” the lawsuit states. It describes the photos as “private, personal [and] intimate,” while describing the text of the message as “lurid and disturbing.”

The legal action accuses the defendants of being either “negligent” or “reckless” in failing to keep her images secure within their online system. The woman says their conduct amounted to “an intentional or reckless infliction of emotional distress by means of extreme or outrageous conduct.”

She is seeking unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. Nashville lawyers David Randolph Smith, Timothy T. Ishii and Raymond T. “Chip” Throckmorton brought the case for her.

Michael Polzin, a spokesman for the Walgreen Co., said the company was unaware of the lawsuit until asked about it for this story. “We also have no record of a complaint by this person regarding the alleged incident,” Polzin said.

“We will, of course, fully investigate the allegations,” he added. “However, we’ve never heard of anything like this happening with our systems in the past.”

A Hewlett-Packard spokesperson responded that the company does not comment on pending litigation.

Board of Professional Responsibility, Supreme Court of Tennessee

Board v. David S. Weed. Suspension announced Oct. 13. A veteran Nashville lawyer loses the right to practice for the next three years after entering a conditional guilty plea to violations of Supreme Court rules. The board found that while serving as director of the Tennessee Receiver’s Office, Weed “commingled receivership funds and failed to maintain adequate accounting records,” the announcement stated.

In August, Weed was indicted by the Shelby County Grand Jury on two counts of official misconduct. He is accused of misappropriating funds from an entity he was overseeing as receiver, Cherokee Child and Family Services of Memphis, which places children in subsidized child care. No trial date has been set. Weed took over Cherokee in 2001 after its personnel were found to have stolen huge sums of money meant to provide childcare for the poor.

Weed was of counsel to the Nashville firm Weed, Hubbard, Berry & Doughty PLLC when it was formed in 2000. The firm, now Hubbard, Berry & Harris PLLC, removed Weed’s name in 2004, telling the Tennessee Secretary of State’s office in a letter that he had “not been a functioning member since the inception of the PLLC.”