Employment Law Blog: Comments

This is such a very sad event.  If the roomate is charged with Invasion of Privacy, there are several elements that must be proven:
1.  Disclosure, the intentional publication of embarrasing private affairs - according to the written story, the young man who committed suicide, do so due to the publication of embarrasing photos of him and another party.
2. Intrusion, the intentional unjustified encroachment into another person’s private activities - this element, according to the written account is justified because the person who exposed the pictures clearly invaded the victims privacy and intruded on his private activity with another person.
3. Appropriation, an intentional unauthorized exploitive use of another person’s personality, name, or picture for the defendant’s benefit -this element is clearly justified because the individual who exposed the pictures was not authorized to do so and further exploited the victims name, body and the defendant benefited from exposing the pictures by gaining a type of popularity.
4. False light - the intentional false portrayal of someone in a way that would be offensive to a reasonable person - because the pictures were of sexual nature, and the parties intended for their activities to be kept private, the exposure of the pictures has a high potential to portray each party in the photos as having a specific sexual orientation, which may be false and clearly these types of pictures and the unauthorized exposure of them would seem to be offensive to a reasonable person.