Video on student site offends girl
March 21, 2001
Some Web sites on the ISU campus attract loyal audiences, from StrangeSearch, which browses the ISU computer network, to Strange Hamster, which provides a 24-hour surveillance of a furry rodent wandering around a cage.
Talenos.com is yet another ISU student-run Web creation. The site, www.talenos.com, features all sorts of oddities, ranging from a “virtual reality” tour of Maple Hall to a parody of the film “American Beauty,” titled “Bosnian Beauty.”
“I guess you’d call it a post-adolescent satire page on society as a whole. Or just college entertainment,” said Gus Aramayo, co-creator of Talenos.com.
But one of the site’s film clips wasn’t considered funny by a person it featured. The video, now known as “Drunk ISU Girls,” was posted on the Web site in January. It features five girls who are supposedly in various states of intoxication.
The ISU Office of Judicial Affairs on Monday contacted Matt Newcomb, co-creator of Talenos.com, and told him to remove the video from the site after they received complaints of harassment from one of the girls featured in the video, Elizabeth Mowrer, freshman in agricultural education.
Newcomb, sophomore in computer engineering, filmed the video.
“We told them where it was going to be posted so they could have easily contacted us,” Newcomb said.
Mowrer declined to comment.
“At first, after the video had been up for a while she said it was okay,” Newcomb said. “She came over to our floor, and she said she was fine with it. A month later she called out of the blue and threatened me with charges [of] harassment because she said I was degrading her character.”
Newcomb said he did not take the video off the site after the incident.
“It was very sudden, which was kind of what upset me. I didn’t really see it coming,” he said. “Since she told me it was fine after she was sober again, I considered it consent.”
After Mowrer threatened to charge him with harassment, Newcomb said he added a disclaimer to the video and kept it posted on the site.
“I had a disclaimer on the movie, and there was a disclaimer on the site that said it was all not to be taken seriously,” he said. “I left it up more as a statement.”
Aramayo and Newcomb both said Mowrer was the only person from the video to contact them.
“We actually never even met any of the other girls,” said Aramayo, sophomore in mechanical engineering.
Newcomb said he contacted Student Legal Services for advice but did not receive a lot of help.
“They weren’t very helpful at all. They said basically . that they don’t really know . what’s right or not,” he said. “Before, DPS called me about it. I talked to them and they said nothing was going to happen.”
Newcomb said the Office of Judicial Affairs told him to remove the video from his site or further legal action could be taken.
“I didn’t want to mess with the charges,” Newcomb said. “It’s a matter of [whether] she was not able to consent because she was drunk. She was also underage, though. The dilemma is who was more right.”
Although “Drunk ISU Girls” has been removed from the Talenos.com site, it is still floating around on the ISU network and possibly elsewhere on the Internet, Newcomb said.
“I told [Judicial Affairs] I can’t control it because once it’s been on the Internet, anyone can take it,” he said.