Holly Madison, the former reality TV show girlfriend of Hugh Hefner and a Las Vegas showgirl, is charging in a lawsuit that casino managers secretly filmed her and other women in their dressing rooms.
Madison's company, Awesometown Inc., filed the lawsuit on Monday against various people connected with her production at Mandalay Bay's 1923 Bourbon and Burlesque, including Robert W. Sabes, Noel Bowman, Robert Fry and Avil Kopelman,
according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The lawsuit alleges that a digital video recorder was placed in the women's changing room and the contents from the recorder were then streamed to the defendants' computers and other digital devices without the knowledge or consent of Madison, reported the Review-Journal.
The newspaper said the law firm involved in the Madison case, Garcia-Mendoza and Snavely, filed a second lawsuit on behalf of other dancers involved with Madison's show at the Mandalay Bay.
The lawsuit charges that Kopelman, the general manager of 1923 Bourbon and Burlesque, allowed other employees to see the dressing room feed, and a dancer, Burgendy Candace Kirtz, found the camera. The lawsuit stated that it was stage manager Andrea Benitez-Moody who saw the stream on Kopelman's office computer on Aug. 7.
"It's a crime," Madison's attorney Eva Garcia-Mendoza told
E! News. "Not only Holly has been damaged – but four of the dancers that I filed a suit for separately. They are going through some serious emotional distress right now. Who might have seen them? What they might have done when changing clothes? It was very personal."
Jared Kahn, an attorney for 1923 Bourbon and Burlesque, defended the club, telling
Fox 411 that the women chose to dress in a public corridor near a backdoor exit that was under general surveillance.
"Once management learned of the camera it was re-positioned to monitor a smaller area," said Kahn, pushing back against charges that the video was shared with others. "The performers elected to change costumes in the public corridor when they really could have dressed in the private area that was available to them.
"We are not aware of any dissemination of the video," Kahn continued. "The video system has a log that shows what images have been captured off it and there was no images that have ever had a captured image report off it."
Related Stories: