Eric Dane and wife Rebecca Gayheart were recently seen on a stemy home video without pants. Or shirts. Or many functioning brain cells remaining.
Now the couple is suing the pants off the company of a celebrity gossip blog that posted the weird Eric Dane nude tape (not a sex tape) last month.
The 12-minute home video, which featured the couple along with former Miss Teen USA Kari Ann Peniche, 25, are suing for copyright infringement.
They are seeking $1 million from Gawker Media. Whether they get that sum or even have any legal recourse at all here is a different matter entirely.
In the lawsuit, Dane’s lawyer, Marty Singer, argues that Gawker was warned that posting the video on Defamer.com violated the couple’s legal and privacy rights, but that it “went on to maliciously distribute an uncensored copy” of the tape.
If Rebecca Gayheart and Eric Dane expect a quick and substantial settlement, they may be in for a reality check, however. [Photos: PacificCoastNewsOnline.com]
Singer suggests that the blog was trying to defame Eric Dane, with malicious intent. The blog’s name is Defamer.com, so he might have a case. Right?
Nick Denton, publisher of Gawker, says not so much: “To quote the great Marty Singer – if you don’t want a sex tape on the internet, ‘don’t make one!'”
Dane and Gayheart “were partially and sometimes fully disrobed in the video, recorded it behind locked doors in Peniche’s bedroom,” the lawsuit states.
But unless the tape was stolen from Dane by Gawker, is posting it online a crime? That’s a legal dilemma stickier than … oh, never mind, it’s just sticky.
As for how it was released in the first place, that’s a big mystery, but there’s a theory that Mindy McCready stole it from Kari Ann Peniche in rehab. Really.