Georgia Court Says It’s Legal to Film Video Up a Woman’s Skirt

Justice is blind—unless it’s looking up your skirt.

<a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-177233333/stock-photo-femida-goddess-of-justice-with-scales-and-sword-wearing-blindfold-against-dramatic-stormy-sky.html?src=CGojIZUshVwNhdeiOTKxHw-1-56">Nejron Photo</a>/Shutterstock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


In a win for folks who believe women’s bodies are public property, the Georgia Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a supermarket employee who followed a customer around the store, secretly recording a video of the view up her skirt. Citing a “gap” in Georgia’s criminal statutes, Judge Elizabeth Branch and five colleagues ruled earlier this month that “upskirting” is permissible under current law.

“It is regrettable that no law currently exists which criminalizes [the appellant’s] reprehensible conduct,” Branch wrote.

Security footage from a Publix store in Houston County, Georgia, shows employee Brandon Lee Gary stooping down behind a woman and aiming his cellphone camera underneath her skirt as she picked an item from the supermarket shelves. Then he did it at least three more times. Upset after catching him on the floor behind her repeatedly, the woman left the store. She later returned to complain to the store’s manager, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Gary later admitted to police officers that he was responsible for the video recordings.

Following the June 2013 incident, a local judge convicted Gary of criminal invasion of privacy, deciding that “there’s no more blatant invasion of privacy than to do what [Gary] did,” according to the appeals court ruling. But in Gary’s appeal, the court examined whether his conduct was actually criminal under the state’s invasion-of-privacy law. The statute forbids “any person, through the use of any device, without the consent of all persons observed, to observe, photograph, or record the activities of another which occur in any private place and out of public view.”

On July 15, the court ruled 6-3 that the space underneath the woman’s skirt did not count as a “private place.” In a four-page meditation on the meaning of “place,” including definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster’s New World, the majority determined that the relevant location meant the supermarket, and not the space concealed by the woman’s clothing. The recordings, according to six judges, were taken in a public place.

In an angry dissent, Judge Amanda Mercier slammed her colleagues’ decision, arguing that the legal understanding of “private place” should include places on an individual’s body that are “out of public view,” and which people can expect to be “safe from casual or hostile intrusion or surveillance.”

“We have decades of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence setting forth limitations on law enforcement’s ability to merely pat down an alleged suspect on top of their clothing to protect the sacrosanct bodily privacy of even those who are accused of violating criminal laws,” Mercier wrote. “But today, with the stroke of a pen, we are in effect negating the privacy protections from the intrusions of fellow citizens.”

Georgia isn’t the first state to give a pass to fans of “upskirting.” Similar rulings have been handed down in Massachusetts, Oregon, Texas, and the District of Columbia.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate