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The family of an 18-year-old girl who died in a car accident nearly six years ago in Orange County continues to be haunted by gruesome photos of the crash that were posted online.
Nikki Catsouras was killed on Oct. 31, 2006 after speeding 100 miles per hour in her father’s Porsche and clipping another car on the 241 Toll Road.
Her mother, Lesli, said she knew her daughter wouldn’t come home alive that afternoon after she watched Nikki take the car keys and run out of the house.
“I tried to stop her, I couldn’t,” she said.
Nikki’s family is proceeding with a lawsuit, which will get a jury trial to determine if the California Highway Patrol must take responsibility for its employees’ conduct of releasing the graphic photos outside the agency — CHP has admitted to the Catsouras family that its dispatchers violated department policy by releasing the photos. The Nikki Catsouras Story: When Christos and Lesli Catsouras come face-to-face with the death of their daughter, Nikki, they couldn’t imagine anything worse. T when confidential and highly graphic police photographs mysteriously surface on the Web, Christos makes. Nikki Catsouras Death Photographs – Nikki Catsouras Car Accident. Just days after 18 year old Nikki Catsuras’s death in a horrifying car crash in 2006, her father received an email with celebritiesdeaths.com. The Story: The Nikki Catsouras photos contention concerns the spilled photos of Nicole 'Nikki' Catsouras death (March 4, 1988 – October 31, 2006), who passed on at 18 years old in a rapid auto accident in the wake of losing control of a Porsche 911 Carrera, which had a place with her dad, and slamming into a toll corner in Lake Forest, California. Photos of Catsouras' severely distorted body were distributed on the web, driving her family to make lawful move because of the trouble this caused.
Lesli said Nikki was having a “psychotic episode.”
Nikki Castagneto Death / Nikki Castagneto Photographer Dead – Obituary – According to a press report, a popular photographer, Nikki Castagneto died on December, 2019, Nikki Catsouras was pronounced dead following a tragic accident.
“It could have been the beginning of schizophrenia. We were going to find out that day. The day of the accident, she had an appointment at 3 p.m. to see a neuropsychiatrist,” she said.
Neither Nikki nor her parents had the opportunity to figure out what was wrong with her.
Instead, the family was left to deal with Nikki’s tragic death, which went viral after a California Highway Patrol dispatcher released graphic photos of the collision.
“Three weeks after the accident, it was on 35 websites,” said Nikki’s father, Christos. “January of 2007 was when it was on thousands of websites.”
Lesli said, “Every day we’d get another phone call…somebody else saw them…neighbors were seeing these photographs, kids in the neighborhood, kids from Nikki’s school.”
The couple said they begged the CHP to help remove the photos, but claimed the agency didn’t do enough.
Nikki Catsouras Death Photographs Body
The family sued and eventually won a $2.3 million settlement, but millions of people on the Internet had already viewed and commented on the pictures.
In one anonymous post after another, Lesli said bloggers added insult to incredible loss.
The family was forced to read comments like, “It’s her own fault she’s dead”, “She got what she deserved” and “So a spoiled little (expletive) stole her daddy’s Porsche.”
Those weren’t the messages, however, that compelled Lesli to write a book on cyberbullying called, “Forever Exposed: The Nikki Catsouras Story.”
It was deranged comments like, “I was so happy! I raped her corpse.”
Some people even wrote about masturbating to the horrific pictures.
“That killed me, it destroyed me,” said Lesli.
No matter what the family did to avoid the photos, bullies found a way to post them.
Christos said he saw pictures of the accident in an email disguised as a business link.
“When I clicked on it, it said, ‘Daddy, I’m alive.’ That’s how I first saw the pictures and what was attached to it,” he said.
Two of Nikki’s three sisters were so haunted by online threats to put up the pictures at the girls’ school, they asked to be homeschooled.
The girls also don’t have Facebook accounts out of fear of being cyberbullied.
Nikki Catsouras The Whole Story
Lesli said she hopes her new book sends a strong message to parents and their children.
“When you torment someone online, you don’t see what you’ve done to them. I want them to see what they’ve done to us,” she said. “Parents need to talk to their kids…they need to teach them not to be bullies.”
Christos said, “I bet when those guys sent out those pictures, I bet they didn’t think, in a million years, it would do what it did to our family. It’s ripped us apart. Just by hitting send.”
For more information on Lesli’s book, visit Forever Exposed.
See the original article at cbslocal.com
By Jessica Bennett | NEWSWEEK4 Girls Finger Painting
Published Apr 25, 2009
From the magazine issue dated May 4, 2009
While the specifics of the Catsouras case are unique, the broader issue—of how current laws seem impotent when faced with the viral spread of malicious Internet content—is becoming a widespread concern. Until it was shuttered last year, a site called Juicy Campus stirred controversy by spreading rumors about college students' alleged sexual escapades. Sites like DontDateHimGirl leak dirty allegations about unsuspecting men. And two Yale Law School alumnae have spent years going after the perpetrators of nasty gossip about them, posted on a legal-discussion board.
But while libel and slander are regulated by law in the real world, in the cyberworld almost anything goes. In 1996, Congress passed legislation—Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act—that immunizes Web sites from liability for the speech of individuals, under the rationale that companies like AOL shouldn't be responsible for the actions of each user. As a consequence, victims of a damaged reputation have little legal recourse. A person could try to sue the individuals who post on a Web site—as the Yale women have done—but in the world of anonymous postings and shared public computers, just finding a person's real name can be next to impossible. Even if you do identify them, and they agree to remove the content, it's unlikely the content is contained to that Web site alone. 'We have created a deck that is so stacked against private individuals who want to protect their name and privacy that you don't even have a fighting chance,' says Fertik of Reputation Defender.
That's why, legally, anyone can post bloody images of Nikki Catsouras—but it doesn't explain why so many people feel compelled to look. Some are driven by simple curiosity, psychologists say—the same urge that causes passing motorists to gawk at accidents. But online, anonymity allows us to go further, without the fear of public judgment. 'It's like having a mask,' says John Suler, a cyber-psychologist at Rider University. That mask can cause us to behave in ways we normally wouldn't—fueled by a kind of mob mentality. 'The people looking at these photos don't have to face this family, and it disconnects them from the victims they're hurting,' says Solove, the author of a book about Web privacy, 'The Future of Reputation.'
Two and a half years after Nikki's death, her loss hangs over the Catsouras family. They've made her room into a makeshift music studio, but there are still folders with her schoolwork, a closet full of clothes and her posters of Jim Morrison, Radiohead and the Beatles line the walls. Danielle, the daughter closest to Nikki in age, and Kira, the youngest, both study from home now, afraid to face the rumor mill at school. Christiana, the middle daughter, is finishing up her sophomore year, but memories of her sister pop up when she least expects it, like when a firefighter mentioned Nikki in a driver-safety lecture; Christiana fled the room crying.
Nikki Catsouras Death Photographs Accident
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Lesli and Christos forbid their daughters from using social-networking sites like MySpace, and have enabled computer settings that prevent photos from popping up on their screen. But Nikki's story is pervasive: Google delivers 246,000 results for 'Catsouras.' Recently, Christiana needed the address to a local hair salon called 'Legends.' She typed 'Legends Ladera Ranch,' the name of their town, into Google, and Nikki's name, as the 'legend' of 'Ladera Ranch,' popped up. 'It's the simple things you never expect,' says Christos. 'We live in fear of the pictures. And our kids will never Google their name without the risk of seeing them.'Porsche Girl Accident
Today the entire family is in therapy, and they've taken out a second mortgage to cover the costs of their legal battle. They still eat dinner as a family each night, but Nikki's seat sits empty. At times, they wish they could put it all behind them. But for the moment, they're focused on the June 1 deadline for a California appeals court to rule on their case. 'In a perfect world, I would push a button and delete every one of the images,' says Lesli. In the real world, she finds some comfort in working to change the laws, so that photos of some future family's dead child might stay locked away, leaving only smiling, lively images to remember.