Psychiatrists sometimes term this phenomenon as "Celebrity Worship Syndrome", which is somewhat of a misnomer, because we are talking about celebrity obsession, not praying to them. It can take various forms; it's often a part of growing up. My favorite baseball player was Harmon Killebrew of the Minnesota Twins; I checked out his biography from the local library and listened to Twins' games on an Iowa station I could barely pick up while living in Kansas. When I was at UT, it was sitting in on a class being taught by philosopher Charles Hartshorne, famous for his resurrection of the ontological argument (proof of the existence of God). When I was an MIS doctoral student and young professor, it was meeting people whose research I had studied, e.g., Gordon B. Davis, Blake Ives, and Ben Schneiderman. But in my case, it never really crossed the line of being interested in or wanting to intrude on their private lives.
But there are a lot of other people whom are interested in personal details; this is clear from the fact that are many celebrity-oriented shows, magazines, and blogs. And the phenomenon has not gone unnoticed by men's magazines, such as Playboy. They have pursued celebrity women for years, offering huge modeling fees to be featured in nude pictorials; there's only one reason they do it: it sells loads of magazines. Recently fired Miss California Carrie Prejean has repeatedly mentioned that the pageant organization had forwarded her an offer from Playboy (after her famous defense of traditional marriage at the Miss USA contest caused a firestorm across politically-correct California, angry over the recent passage of Proposition 8). I mean, does anyone doubt that Playboy desperately wants to sign South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's notorious Argentinian mistress?
What's worse than that, however, are those paparazzi whom go beyond the fair game of public appearances, trying to intrude on the privacy of celebrities, without their knowledge or consent (e.g., women sunbathing topless in their own fenced-in backyard). I mean, doesn't a celebrity woman deserve a right to her privacy in a bathroom stall without worrying about being seen by hidden or undetected cameras?
We finally see some constitutional protect of privacy rights, long overdue, in the 11th Circuit of Appeals, which this past week reversed a district judge's moronic decision to uphold Hustler's sophistical defense of "First Amendment" claims to publish the late Nancy Benoit's 1983 nude modeling pictures released without her estate's knowledge or permission. (According to Nancy's mother Maureen Toffoloni, Nancy and her first husband eventually decided against a modeling career and had been been promised by the photographer that the pictures and/or videotape had been destroyed. There is some dispute over whether Nancy was aware that the photographer had made a videotape of the nude session, and the photographer/Hustler are arguing that Nancy's request only applied to pictures, not the videotape. This is patently disingenuous argument; what is the qualitative distinction between a nude picture and nude stills from videotape? Nancy's decision to destroy the nude pictures was unambiguous in intent.)
Nancy Benoit, who had been featured as a pro wrestling valet/manager, most prominently under the name "Woman", divorced her first husband to marry pro wrestler Kevin Sullivan in 1985. Nancy eventually divorced Sullivan around the time frame of a scripted rivalry between Sullivan and a rising wrestling star, Chris Benoit in 1997. Nancy retired from wrestling in 1997. This bears directly on the topic of interest, because it seems the reason Nancy left wrestling was that Sullivan wanted to book her into a pay-per-view skit which would end with her being topless. In 2000 Nancy married Chris Benoit and eventually gave birth to their first and only child, Daniel.
On June 25, 2007, Chris Benoit murdered his wife and then Daniel before committing suicide. There is no definitive ruling on what caused the death, although there was much speculation of steroid use. (I believe that mental illness played a role; there were signs of paranoia in his being followed from airports or dealings with neighbors, and there were a lot of religious/Biblical text messages left or being sent around the time of the murders. However, I'm not a psychiatrist.) It should be noted that Dr. Phil Astin, who has been connected to Chris Benoit and others, pled guilty back in March to some 175 counts of improper prescription drug authorizations.
From March 2008 Hustler Cover
Redefining Bad Taste
I have no idea, after a woman has been murdered, what kind of perverted mind thinks of checking to see if there are any past nude pictures around so a magazine can financially exploit the tragedy; doesn't Nancy's mother have enough grief to deal with given the untimely loss of her daughter?
Even if we set aside the moral outrage, the fact is that many so-called WWE divas (attractive young women whom wrestle and/or serve as a valet/manger) have appeared in exclusive Playboy pictorials. Nancy Benoit had considerable audience of wrestling fans to negotiate a lucrative modeling assignment of her own. In fact, she was very happy living outside of the spotlight, in her role as homemaker and mother, and by all accounts, Chris and Nancy were involved with their local church.
The Circuit Court was exactly right; there was nothing newsworthy in unauthorized 25-year-old stills; the only thing newsworthy was Hustler's audacity in trying to sell magazines by promising a peek at the bare breasts of a murder victim, a violation of her constitutional rights of privacy.
