Everyone Hates This Playboy Model Who Posted a Naked Photo of a Stranger at Gym for Internet Bullying
(Photo Via Good Housekeeping, which supplied the black box for the victim’s privacy. Original via Snapchat/Dani Mathers)
A Playboy model took the arts of bullying and of making fake, bullshit apologies to new heights this week after she had the stunningly awful idea to post a photo of a nude, unwitting stranger in a gym locker room and post it to Snapchat so the public could mock the woman’s figure.
According to Good Housekeeping‘s Sam Escobar, 2015 Playboy Playmate of the Year Dani Mathers was in the sauna at an LA Fitness gym when she spotted a random woman who was also using the locker room. The other woman is not a Playboy model. She’s just an average woman with gray hair who was at her gym and wanted to take a shower there. The woman was nude, as many of us in the locker rooms of our gym, and somehow Mathers found the woman’s perfectly ordinary, average American nude body to be hilarious and worthy of public shaming and mockery, so she took a photo of the woman–without the woman’s knowledge or consent–and posted it to Snapchat alongside a photo of herself cracking up, like an asshole.
“If I can’t unsee this then you can’t either,” Mathers wrote on the photo.
This is such unbelievable assholery I can’t believe it. One hears about high school kids doing stuff like this, but Mathers is a grown-ass woman. This degree of bullying has no place in the world, and this is a good sign of why we need to stomp any inclination of bullying out of our kids when they’re young. We too often assume that bullies will outgrow their bullying with time and maturity. Evidently that is not always the case.
For starters, it is unconscionable to take a photo of an unwilling nude stranger in a gym locker room. That woman did not consent to having nude photos of herself posted all over the Internet. She was in a gym locker room. She had a reasonable expectation of privacy in that setting.
Who does this? That woman was working out at the gym and then taking a shower, just like any of us might do.
The response to Mathers’ “funny” Snapchat post was furious and swift. People hate this. Many of us have been naked in gym locker rooms and can imagine how humiliated we’d be if someone did this to us. Mathers’ followers told her in no uncertain terms that she was a vicious bully and ought to be ashamed of herself.
Mathers responded with the classic, “I didn’t mean to post that!” apology.
“I just wanted to acknowledge a photo that I accidentally posted on Snapchat earlier today and let you guys know that that was absolutely wrong, and not what I meant to do. I have chosen to do what I do for a living because I love the female body and I know that body shaming is wrong and that’s not what I’m about, that’s not the type of person that I am. That photo was taken to be a personal conversation with a girlfriend, and because I am new to Snapchat, I didn’t realize that I had posted it and that was a huge mistake.”
Good Housekeeping‘s Sam Escobar–who is the former editor of Mommyish sister site The Gloss–says Mathers’ response sounds like baloney, because they say anybody who has used Snapchat for even a few minutes could tell that those photos were posted publicly and not sent directly to another user.
On top of that, Mathers’ apology is garbage because this would be horrible behavior even if it were meant to be sent to just one other person. She still took a photo of an unwilling stranger’s naked body so she could share it with someone else so they could mock the woman’s figure.
That woman did nothing to justify this. She was just possessing a body that Mathers’ thought was worthy of ridicule.
I hope that woman is OK. Hell, I hope that woman has no idea any of this is going on. Her face is tiny and grainy in the photo, and there’s always a chance no one was able to recognize her and her anonymity at least is safe. This is one of those few cases where not knowing might be better. No one deserves to have their privacy violated like this.
Update: LA Fitness says it has officially banned Mathers from any of their gyms and reported the incident to the police. According to TMZ, she’s also been fired from a job she had making regular appearances on LA’s KLOS radio station.
