A live-in nanny has been awarded a staggering sum of cash after her fast food mogul boss filmed her in secret by hiding a camera in a smoke detector in her bedroom.
Michael Esposito, 35, owner of three LaRosa Grill franchises, was caught secretly filming 28-year-old Kelly Andrade in the nude.
He secretly installed a camera in the young Colombian au pair’s bedroom smoke detector, capturing ‘hundreds’ of nude videos of the nanny.
Esposito has now been ordered to cough up a whopping $2.78 million (£2 million) after Andrade discovered the camera’s memory card packed with X-rated footage of her. The Manhattan jury awarded the nanny $780,000 in emotional distress damages, plus $2 million in punitive damages.
Here’s dad-of-four Michael Esposito with his wife Danielle Esposito, who must be pretty mortified by the whole thing:
Andrade says Esposito rushed home and tried to break the bedroom door down when he realised she had discovered the hidden camera inside the smoke detector.
The nanny claims she initially pretended to be asleep, but then jumped out of her bedroom window to escape after Esposito kept banging on the door.
Through a translator, Andrade told the Post that she was initially thrilled for the chance to learn English and work in the US, with the Espositos giving her a private bedroom at their $800,000 waterfront home, while she watched their young children.
But she says she became suspicious after finding Esposito frequently adjusting the smoke detector in her bedroom. I mean, that is just a tad suspicious.
Three weeks into the job she decided to take a closer look at the smoke alarm and sure enough, she discovered the camera and memory card containing hundreds of clips of her in various states of undress.
She says her boss arrived home ‘within minutes’ and ‘seemed very worried when he arrived to the house’.
She then jumped out the window, ran down the street and fled to a nearby police station, where she gave them the memory card she had found in the camera.
Esposito was taken into custody on suspicion of illegal surveillance, but he was allowed to walk free on the condition he completes two years of probation and counselling. And pay up the $2.8 million, of course.
At first, I actually thought that maybe that was too much money to award this nanny. But then you think – who knows what he did with those images? He might have put them on the internet for all we know. Not to mention what an outrageous invasion of privacy and breach of trust it is in the first place. This idiot was so keen to film his kids’ nanny naked that he couldn’t even wait a few weeks to gain her trust or install the hidden camera in secret. He would just go into her bedroom and start tampering with it while she was in there.
Well anyway, good thing she trusted her instincts so strongly. Must be awful to come to a new country and land a dream job and then be betrayed so badly. But hey, she probably doesn’t need to worry about finding work now that she’s $2.8 million up. Don’t spend it all at once, young lady!
