If you don't want your picture on the news...

There is a simple rule that everyone should know. Repeat after me: "If you don't want your picture on the news, don't break the law." It is a simple rule, and obvivously someone has either forgotten it, or never learned it in the first place. My father taught me this rule, along with keeping your mouth shut about your "knuckle dragging" connections and never get a tattoo ("permanent identifaction mark") if you plan on doing something that the law frowns upon. He never taught me about DNA, and I had to teach myself about the IRS (not to flib on my taxes, just to fill out the paperwork properly--"Is a scholarship taxable income or not?").

As I said it is obvivous that someone either doesn't know this or forgotten it. As proof, I present:

Call girl's (Ashley Alexandra Dupre "Kristen") lawyer blasts media for using photos

Now, I am not sure if it is Dupre, or her lawyer, who decided that she is not a public figure. But obvivously, they are from other planet. You don't decide if you are a public figure. The public, or their Cthulhutic informer does. The instance I found out that New York Governor (now ex-governor) Eliot Spitzer was caught with his hand in someone else's underwear drawer, my "inquiring mind" wanted to know what she looked like.

Ok, she is not much to look at; or at least, not bodicious enourgh to risk losing one's political career over. And how good of a personality could an aspiring twenty-two year old musician have? Obvivously, Spitzer throw away his career for nothing.

Wait.

I shouldn't say things like this---she is not a public figure. Or so, her lawyer claims. I know better, you know better, and I bet her lawyer knows that he is talking with the tongue of a toad.

The lawyer, who is nameless at this time (probably not a public figure yet), is saying that the media is wrong for talking about Dupre and showing her pictures. He says that the media is using her likeness without her consent. And that we shouldn't be talking about her.

Newsflash, as a writer, I know something that this lawyer does not. The instant you break the law, or are an accessory to a crime, or do something else that more than a hundred people know who you are---you are a public figure. And most of your rights to a private life has gone out of the window.

Let's face it, if I write about you, you are either obscure (no one has ever heard of you) OR you are a public figure (the whole United States knows who you are, or wants to). Gee, Dupre, what category are you in? I know what the latest 7Eleven robber looks like, and his lawyer is not screaming that he is not a public figure; so what makes you any less than one?