(Nov.18) -- A jury has awarded $100,000 to a woman whose doctors supplied photos of her naked torso for a newspaper article without first obtaining her permission, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
The 2006 article, which was about cosmetic surgery, ran in another St. Louis paper, the Riverfront Times. Among other topics, it addressed the fine points of surgery on female genitalia, which embarrassed the plaintiff, said the Post-Dispatch.
"I can't explain to you how horrified I was," the woman, who has been identified in court documents as Jane Doe, told the paper. The Riverfront Times was not named as a defendant. The lawsuit was against the doctors.
The woman's doctors, who are affiliated with BodyAesthetic Plastic Surgery and Skin Care Center Inc. in Creve Coeur, Mo., said the photos were not supposed to be used in the article. But an editor at the Riverfront Times, Tom Finkel, insisted the paper would never have published the photos without permission from the doctors.
Writing in the Times, Finkel also noted that the images of Jane Doe were neither salacious nor in any way identifiable.
He described them as two "side-by-side black-and-white images, each about two and a half inches square. The photos show a woman's abdomen; what you see amounts to vaguely torso-shaped masses of wrinkles and puckers that, depending upon how long you squint at them, might strike you as either medical-journal clinical or abstract-expressionist surreal."
Jane Doe's lawyers had sought $2.5 million to $3 million in compensatory damages alone, said the Post-Dispatch. The jury, which found that the doctors breached their fiduciary duty to the patient but did not violate her privacy, capped the award at $100,000.
The woman had also sued the same doctors for malpractice in connection with her surgery. That suit was settled out of court, reported the Post-Dispatch.
