We got a chance to talk today to Neil Bruntrager, the St. Louis attorney representing five local women whose before-and-after-boob-job pictures were exposed online by their plastic surgeon -- complete with their first and last names.
Bruntrager revealed new details about the shocking incident. He also shared a timeline that sheds new light on the apology offered by Dr. Koo, which we published yesterday on this blog in an update to our original post. He calls into question her claims that she obtained her patients' permission to use the photos online -- as well as her assertion that she immediately removed the photos upon learning of the website mistake.
As Bruntrager explained, the case only came to light because the original Jane Doe was traveling for work and noticed that the IT guys in the office she was visiting were treating her oddly.
Doe just happens to have a very unusual name ("there aren't two people in the country with that name," Bruntrager says). It took a kindly coworker to explain what was up.
"Have you ever run your name in Google Images?" the colleague asked. When Doe plugged her name into the search engine, she was horrified by what she found -- full frontal torso shots from before and after from her boob job, posted on her plastic surgeon's website and other promotional sites. In some cases, the posts included such personal details as her age and the city she lived in.
On April 28, Doe visited Bruntrager, asking for help to get the photos removed. He fired off a cease-and-desist letter demanding the photos be taken down within 24 hours.
Initially, he says, the response was good: "They said, 'We're going to do everything we can take them down.'" But, seven days later, he says, only her name had been removed -- not the images.
Those images were still online nearly a month later, on May 23, Bruntrager says. And Bruntrager says he was able to learn with a bit of googling that only the first Doe's name had been removed from the website -- despite Dr. Koo's promise to deal with the problem, 29 other women out there still had first and last names attached to their images.
