The Catsouras Conundrum: An Update To Our May 4 Story

For the past two years, Christos and Lesli Catsouras had done everything in their power to keep grisly accident-scene photos of their daughter's death, leaked by the California Highway Patrol, from going viral on the Web. They'd spent thousands of dollars on legal fees, hired a company to scrub the Internet and lobbied on their own, contacting site providers and monitoring domain names.

But when NEWSWEEK approached the family to tell the story of Nikki Catsouras, and the brutal aftermath of her death, Christos and Lesli had a decision to make: would the good that came from publicly discussing their ordeal outweigh the bad, even if that discussion drove traffic to the images? This was not a decision they, or I, took lightly. I knew how much pain the family had suffered, and I didn't want to be the trigger for anything that would cause them more. Out of respect to the Catsourases, NEWSWEEK could ask readers not to look for the photos; we could disable comments on the Web version of our piece and monitor how the story spread. But that was about it—once our article appeared, there weren't very many guarantees we could make.

Ultimately, the Catsouras family decided to tell Nikki's story. They thought that it might just help their cause. "We did everything we could before we ever went public," says Lesli, "but it was just like this war we were fighting by ourselves. Honestly, knowing our daughter's photos are on 500,000 Web sites versus 5 million just doesn't matter anymore. They shouldn't have been on any."

When NEWSWEEK'S piece was published, it (and accompanying media) got some 4 million page views, and during peak traffic hours, searches for the photos did indeed increase. But as fast as curious users could search for Nikki's name, hundreds more lent support—by way of e-mail, letters and phone calls to the Catsourases' home. Within days, a network of lawyers had reached out to the family's attorney; private citizens from around the country vowed to lobby, volunteer and pray. One man pestered YouTube into removing 20 video montages of the still images. Still others have banded together on SupportNikki.org, a Web site launched last week by the family's tech team, ReputationDefender, to help advocate for removing the photos elsewhere online. "I think we knew this had to get worse before it got better," says Lesli. For the Catsouras family, recent weeks have revealed that the perfect isn't the enemy of the good.

© 2009