Erin Andrews On Oprah "I'm Getting Better, It's Been A Nightmare"
Sept. 11 2009, Published 10:30 a.m. ET
ESPN reporter Erin Andrews appeared on Oprah Friday in her first, and she claims, last, televised interview regarding her summertime peeping Tom horror.
Until Friday Andrews had refused to comment publicly but she opened up to Oprah about the nightmare of being secretly taped naked in her hotel room and having the tape spread over the internet. Reports say the clip was searched over 300 million times before her attorneys demanded it be taken down.
"I'm getting better," Andrews replied when asked how she is now. "It's been a nightmare and I kind of everyday want to say I am going to wake up, I'm ready to wake up."
When asked if the camera was planted specifically to tape her, or just anybody in the hotel room at that time, Andrews said, "I'm not at liberty to say. I don't know. I do know I'm a victim of a stalker, I know this happened in at least two rooms."
Andrews explained how she found out about the nude tape - she was working on an event and received a phone call from a friend alerting her, and telling her to log onto her computer as people were saying it was her naked on the internet. "I laughed at him and said 'no it's not,'" she said. "'Nobody has naked footage of me, this is not me,' and I was laughing."
However, the laughter soon turned to horror when she realized it was indeed her. She tells Oprah that the first call she made was to her parents, where she screamed, "I'm dying, my career is over, I'm done!"
Andrews says that now she has to live with it and that the ordeal will never be fully over as law enforcement have told her, "You're going to have to deal with the fact this is never going to come off the internet. They're never going to get it down."
Nowadays Andrews is recovering but still suffers from anxiety and paranoia, sharing that her trip to Chicago was the first time she has stayed in a hotel room on her own since the incident.
But there is some good news. Andrews says, "I'm excited to get back to work. I feel it's really going to help me move on."