The following is an article that appeared in the Nj Star Ledger
After ‘Idol’ dreams, an Internet nightmare
Monday, February 26, 2007
BY VICKI HYMAN AND NAWAL QAROONI
Star-Ledger Staff
Be careful what you wish for.
Whatever 20-year-old singer Antonella Barba expected to gain from auditioning for the star-making machine “American Idol,” it was likely fame, not infamy. But Barba — until last month a Catholic University student from Point Pleasant with a nice voice — is now at the center of a perfect storm of celebrity and technology, sexuality and morality.
Photos of Barba topless, hands covering her breasts, and on the toilet, appeared on the Internet just as she emerged as a semifinalist on television’s top-rated show earlier this month. Over the weekend, racier photos materialized, including several shots of a beautiful brunette performing a sex act on a man who is not identified.
Her best friend and fellow “Idol” auditioner, Amanda Coluccio, said the tamer shots are of Barba, including a full-length shot of Barba naked, covered with rose petals, taken for a calendar she made for her boyfriend of several years. But the lewdest of the bunch, she is certain, are not Barba, a Red Bank Catholic High School graduate who had been studying architecture until she got her break on “Idol.”
“They were meant to be seen by one person and one person only,” Coluccio said at her Holmdel home. “The really bad ones aren’t her. I’ve studied them. It’s not her nose. She’s never had (acrylic nail) tips in her life. She’s the least slutty person I know.”
“Idol” producers won’t make Barba, or any of the semifinalists, available for interviews until after they are ousted. But Coluccio, who speaks with Barba daily, says they believe someone from Catholic University broke into her computer and posted the pictures.
“She’s been crying. She’s horrified,” Coluccio says. “She’s most upset about what her parents think.”
If it’s Barba or not, the unseemly association is likely to persist, regardless of how she does in the competition, said Rich Hanley, an assistant professor of journalism at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., who specializes in interactive communications. Among the semifinalists, Barba’s singing has drawn some of the harshest criticism from the judges, so her “Idol” dreams likely will die faster than her Internet celebrity.
“This is a breaking situation in terms of the digitization of fame,” Hanley said. “Young people need to understand that anything they put on the Web is going to come back and haunt them some time in their career. Because it’s everywhere, there’s never going to be a minimal response. There’s always going to be a maximum response.”
As for Barba’s “Idol” popularity, it’s possible a voting bloc of hormone-addled teenage boys is asserting itself, and there is an influential Web site, www.votefortheworst.com, that encourages viewers to vote for the “most entertaining train wreck.” It’s backing Barba.
Barba is next scheduled to appear with the remaining 10 female semifinalists on Wednesday. A spokeswoman for the show would say only that it does not comment on contestants’ private lives.
According to Coluccio, producers told Barba that they are reviewing the most recent, and most explicit, photos, and that Barba doesn’t believe her position has been jeopardized by the pictures.
“Idol” producer Nigel Lythgoe told Entertainment Weekly on Friday he had not seen the pictures, adding: “It’s sad, isn’t it, that your best friends are the ones that come forward with information that will go to Smoking Gun or put your photographs on the Web?”
Barba is not the first “Idol” contestant with racy photos in her past; she appears to be the first one, however, who didn’t at least profit from it first. Second-season finalist Frenchie Davis posed topless for a porn site that advertised underage models, and producers ousted her from the lineup. In the fifth season, the men’s magazine Maxim dug up old editorial photos in which semifinalist and sometime model Becky O’Donohue posed suggestively with her twin sister. By the time the photos hit the Web, though, the votes had been counted, and O’Donohue was voted off the show.
If Barba is still serious about pursuing a career in the spotlight, the scandal is not insurmountable, said Mark Obbie, an assistant professor of journalism and media law at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications. Certainly homemade sex tapes did not hurt Paris Hilton or Pamela Anderson; quite the opposite, though they were already public figures when the video recordings were made. But even celebrities who have seen unpalatable pictures from their past turn up have recovered.
“Vanessa Williams made a pretty decent recovery when she was Miss America and Penthouse printed pictures of her in nude lesbian scenes,” Obbie said. “But she went on to be a hardworking actress, and not in all trashy parts.”
Possibly the only thing about Barba that remains to be seen is whether she’s litigious. But lawsuits in these cases are “difficult to win and expensive to pursue,” said Andrew McClurg, a professor at the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law at the University of Memphis. It’s often difficult to track down or prove who posted the picture, or in this case, who made the photos available for Internet publication.
Another obstacle is a section of the Communications Decency Act that provides strong immunity for Internet service providers and Web sites for content they post, McClurg said.
The primary vehicle for legal relief is a privacy tort known as the “public disclosure of private facts,” but that has proved to be a weak foundation for suits against the individuals who do the posting, he said. If the photos were acquired illegally, as Coluccio believes, she could have a stronger case, he said.
The editor of one of the celebrity gossip Web sites that posted the pictures, www.idontlikeyouinthatway.com, directed questions about the post to the site’s legal disclaimer, which says the images posted are believed to be in the public domain, but that it will remove any images proved to be under copyright. It also says that the Web site “posts accurately reported facts, as well as rumor, conjecture and gossip.”
Thanks to the duo’s introduction on “Idol,” Coluccio has been on the receiving end of Internet infamy as well. The show’s producers aired scenes that pitted Barba and Coluccio against each other, and Coluccio thought they made her look like a flirtatious, jealous, spoiled brat. Coluccio said she gets more than 3,000 MySpace messages a week, many calling her nasty names.
No matter how tough it’s been, Coluccio doesn’t regret the experience. “‘We both went to fulfill a dream but were made into characters,” she said. “‘American Idol’ is the fakest show on TV. We’re so real and down-to-earth, and I wish people could see that.”
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