Continued…

“Idol” producer Nigel Lythgoe told Entertainment Weekly on Friday he had not seen the pictures, adding: “It’s sad, isn’t it, that your best friends are the ones that come forward with information that will go to Smoking Gun or put your photographs on the Web?”

Barba is not the first “Idol” contestant with racy photos in her past; she appears to be the first one, however, who didn’t at least profit from it first. Second-season finalist Frenchie Davis posed topless for a porn site that advertised underage models, and producers ousted her from the lineup. In the fifth season, the men’s magazine Maxim dug up old editorial photos in which semifinalist and sometime model Becky O’Donohue posed suggestively with her twin sister. By the time the photos hit the Web, though, the votes had been counted, and O’Donohue was voted off the show.

If Barba is still serious about pursuing a career in the spotlight, the scandal is not insurmountable, said Mark Obbie, an assistant professor of journalism and media law at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications. Certainly homemade sex tapes did not hurt Paris Hilton or Pamela Anderson; quite the opposite, though they were already public figures when the video recordings were made. But even celebrities who have seen unpalatable pictures from their past turn up have recovered.

“Vanessa Williams made a pretty decent recovery when she was Miss America and Penthouse printed pictures of her in nude lesbian scenes,” Obbie said. “But she went on to be a hardworking actress, and not in all trashy parts.”

Hanley, from Quinnipiac, says that as society catches up to technology, this sort of story won’t be as scandalous. “This is an example of a culture clash. (There are) people who don’t mind posting racy pictures of themselves or photos of them engaging in lewd behavior, but the culture that’s still in charge does object. Right now things are misaligned.”

Possibly the only thing about Barba that remains to be seen is whether she’s litigious. But lawsuits in these cases are “difficult to win and expensive to pursue,” said Andrew McClurg, a professor at the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law at the University of Memphis. It’s often difficult to track down or prove who posted the picture, or in this case, who made the photos available for Internet publication.

Another obstacle is a section of the Communications Decency Act that provides strong immunity for Internet service providers and Web sites for content they post, McClurg said.

The primary vehicle for legal relief is a privacy tort known as the “public disclosure of private facts,” but that has proved to be a weak foundation for suits against the individuals who do the posting, he said. If the photos were acquired illegally, as Coluccio believes, she could have a stronger case, he said.

The editor of one of the celebrity gossip Web sites that posted the pictures, www.idontlikeyouinthatway.com, directed questions about the post to the site’s legal disclaimer, which says the images posted are believed to be in the public domain, but that it will remove any images proved to be under copyright. It also says that the Web site “posts accurately reported facts, as well as rumor, conjecture and gossip.”

Thanks to the duo’s introduction on “Idol,” Coluccio has been on the receiving end of Internet infamy as well. The show’s producers aired scenes that pitted Barba and Coluccio against each other, and Coluccio thought they made her look like a flirtatious, jealous, spoiled brat. Coluccio said she gets more than 3,000 MySpace messages a week, many calling her nasty names.

No matter how tough it’s been, Coluccio doesn’t regret the experience. “‘We both went to fulfill a dream but were made into characters,” she said. “‘American Idol’ is the fakest show on TV. We’re so real and down-to-earth, and I wish people could see that.”

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