Erin Andrews’ Peeping Tom civil case gets under way

A Nashville hotel failed to protect Fox sports reporter Erin Andrews when, with no questions asked, it told a stranger where she was staying and then let him book the room next door, the sportscaster’s lawyer said Tuesday during her $75 million lawsuit.

“The Nashville Marriott could have completely prevented this early on if they had followed the standard they were supposed to follow,” Andrews’ lawyer, Randall Kinnard, told jurors in his opening statement.

From his hotel room, stalker Michael David Barrett, a former Illinois insurance salesman, doctored a room-door peep hole, allowing him to film a nude video of Andrews that he later published online and tried to sell.

“The man was not a member of the ESPN crew. He wants to be right next to Erin Andrews for some bad reason, for some no-good reason, and they put him in there.”

Andrews, 37, filed the lawsuit against West End Hotel Partners, which is the franchise owner of the Nashville Marriott at Vanderbilt University, and Windsor Capital Group, which manages the hotel.

Barrett, who was sentenced to 30 months in jail in 2010 for the gross invasion of privacy, was also named in the suit.

Kinnard insisted that the hotel ignored a “red flag” by giving out her room number, 1051, to a male caller when they should’ve said, “I’m sorry, we can’t tell you that.”

“What could a man calling a hotel asking to be placed next to a woman mean? It could be an ex-husband, it could be an ex-boyfriend, somebody that wants to hurt that woman,” the lawyer said.

Kinnard added that Andrews is still devastated by the nude video that went viral when Barrett posted it online.

“This is not like being in a car wreck and breaking an arm and the arm heals and you get over it,” he said. “There have been millions and millions of hits on this video around the world. It happens.

It continues to happen. It will never stop.”

Andrews wiped tears from her eyes as Kinnard showed jurors video taken of the inside of her hotel room, where she was staying while covering a Vanderbilt football game for ESPN.

In his opening statement, the hotel’s lawyer, Marc Dedman, blamed Barrett for the incident, saying he was a deceptive, “serial stalker” who had already tried to film Andrews undressing in hotel rooms twice before.

He insisted that Andrews’ room number showed up on a hotel phone Barrett used. Once he had that, he saw the room next door was being clean and requested it for himself, Dedman said.

“He never used Ms. Andrews’ name the whole time he was at the hotel,” Dedman told jurors. “He exploited the entire industry.”

In the past, Barrett called up hotels Andrews was staying at, pretending to check on a reservation under a false name.

“It’s under Jeff Scott and Erin Andrews,” he would say, according to Dedman.

“He has connived. He has deceived. He has pretended to be a spouse in the relationship,” the lawyer said.

Several former hotel workers also testified on Tuesday, addressing Nashville Marriott policies.

Former employee Jennifer Baxter testified that employees aren’t allowed to give out room numbers, while the customer service representative who made Barrett’s reservation, Tikima Baker, said she’d never been told not to tell guests who else was staying at the hotel.

David Davenport, who was a maintenance worker at the hotel at the time, also testified that even in 2005 they were required to check on and secure peepholes every three months because of privacy concerns.

When asked by Kinnard if it was “standard” that employees “used common sense,” Larry Strachan, former director of operations at the hotel, replied, “Yes sir, but as we know, common sense is not always common.”

Additional reporting by David K. Li