Woman Confronts Voyeur Who Was Filming Her Crotch on a Train, and He Reacts Like a Bumbling Idiot
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An Australian woman named Tegan Portener is gaining attention for posting a Facebook video showing her confrontation with a visibly flustered man, who allegedly filmed her crotch without permission on a train.
Portener, whose Facebook post has more than 7,000 shares as of this posting, wrote that she noticed that the unidentified man sitting in front of her on the train was acting strange during the journey, but that she ignored his behavior to take a nap. When she woke up, however, she noticed he was filming her shorts from underneath the chair beside him. She then started filming him and caught him in the act of recording her:
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Roughly one minute and ten seconds into the video, Portener films herself directly asking the man what he is doing. He freezes up, and she continues to question why he put his phone under the chair.
"Stopped videoing [sic] because my phone ran out of memory but essentially he acted all offended, and I just told him to stop and he nodded," she wrote on Facebook.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported on Thursday that a 30-year-old man was charged for the incident. His computer and phone hard drives are reportedly under investigation as well.
"If he's done this to anyone else then they'll probably see that on the hard drives," Portener told the publication.
Portener has received a lot of support for exposing her alleged harasser on video:
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Portener has also faced criticism and victim-blaming from those who feel she brought the situation on herself by wearing shorts, as evidenced by Facebook messages she posted:
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Filming someone's private parts without their consent is an unfortunately common form of harassment, and Portener is not the first to call this behavior out on social media. Several months ago, Boston musician Jase Dillan posted a viral Facebook video of a man who allegedly filmed her crotch and butt without her permission on the streets of her city.
After allegedly seeing him do the same thing to a few other women, including some women who looked like they were underage, Dillan filmed and followed the man for more than two minutes to teach him a lesson about filming people without their consent. The video has more than three million views.
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"You don't like being filmed without permission?" she said in the video. "Because that's what you've been doing."
A legal loophole?
While social media allows women to shame others for taking photos of their private parts without consent, peeping in such a way is still legal in some places.
In Massachusetts, the commonwealth's high court ruled that upskirt photos were, in fact, a protected form of speech.
The trial of Boston man Michael Robertson — who was caught in the act of taking upskirt photos on a train— sparked the First Amendment battle.
Robertson's lawyer, Michelle Menken, argued the Constitution protected a person's right to film whatever they see.
“If a clothed person reveals a body part whether it was intentional or unintentional, he or she can not expect privacy,” Menken said in front of the state Supreme Judicial Court.
Menken added that Peeping Tom laws protect people from being filmed in restrooms and dressing rooms but that people who are wearing clothes in public places are not protected under law. She also said that her client merely saw "what was right in front of him."
“What he saw was in plain sight," she said. "He did not place his camera directly up a women’s skirt. He saw what was in front of him."
