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Erin Andrews tells peep hole victimization story on Oprah

posted by ...Because I Played Sports
Saturday, September 12, 2009 at 5:42pm CDT

Photo Credit: http://www.earthlingchic.com

I Tivo’d Oprah today and got to see a story that I’d been waiting for awhile. ESPN reporter Erin Andrews told the queen of talk television the story of a complete invasion of privacy as a female sports reporter.

This is the first and only interview Erin will conduct with herself as the subject of the story. Now that it’s over, she told Oprah she’s ready for football season to begin and, even more importantly, she’s ready to move on.

What Erin told Oprah was the story of a classic peeping Tom, only today’s peeping Tom lives in the age of a World Wide Web, an environment where anybody can create content and share it with the world. While the Web is awesome in its own right, it takes no mercy upon sexy female journalists (especially in the sports world).

Essentially, someone hid a video camera in the peep hole of her hotel room, video taped her walking around naked, and posted the video to the world. Within minutes, through promotion by sites like Deadspin (and then the rest of the online sports world, followed by closely traditional media), over 300 million people had searched for this video. Erin Andrews told Oprah she was worried her career might be over.

But as we saw on Oprah today, it’s far from over. Erin has come out stronger, but still struggles with daily life because, like victims of all crimes, she now suffers paranoia, is often questioned about the circumstance, and feels like she cannot be safe.

In my opinion, the bigger question becomes – is this the type of career we want for women in sports?

I mean, think about it. As a woman who wants to work in sports, you can either become a professional athlete (and get paid average money), get involved in coaching or athletic adminstration (where you’re likely a minority), sports marketing (where you’re definately a minority), female sports journalism (where you’re probably awesome but undervalued and scared to lose your job right now), or enter what I call the world of “male sports journalism,” which can be lucrative but hard to get into, and if you do, you’re at risk to becoming a victim like miss Erin Andrews. (Note there are other careers as well – I’m just noting a few that come to mind)

So what kind of future (or present) has the sports industry created for young women who want to dedicate their careers to sports? Interested in hearing from the community on this one – it’s a topic that has been on my mind lately.