A woman is suing T-Mobile after an employee found a video of her having sex on her phone and sent it to himself for his own purposes.
Keely Hightower, 24, took her phone into the telecoms company's Tampa, Florida store last May only to later find that shop worker Roberto Sanchez Ramos had emailed a sex video on the phone to himself.
Hightower is now suing Sanchez Ramos and Global Innovative Group, the company that owns the store, for negligence after the incident caused her mental anguish and emotional distress, the Tampa Bay Times reports.
"It's a question of how do you address the really gross invasion of her privacy and the turmoil that she's had to deal with ever since?" said Christopher Klemawesch, Hightower's lawyer. "That's what we're trying to address."
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Hightower says she took her phone to the T-Mobile store last May for maintenance and noticed that shop worker Sanchez Ramos, 26, had been spending an unusual amount of time with her phone.
She says when she checked her email the next day, in the trash she found an email - attaching the video - sent from her address to an address that was clearly his.
The video showed Hightower having sex with another person in bed, with her face clearly visible in some frames of the video.
Hightower immediately began worrying about what Sanchez Ramos had done with the video in the meantime and where it might have ended up.
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"My heart dropped...My thought was just like 'where did the video go?'." Hightower told the Tampa Bay Times.
"'What happened after that?'. That was my main concern ... I didn't want the video out there in the public."
Hightower immediately called the police and Sanchez Ramos was quickly arrested and charged with a computer-related offence.
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He pleaded guilty to that offence and was sentenced to six months in Pinellas County Jail before he was eventually released last October.
Incredibly, T-Mobile hired Sanchez Ramos despite him being convicted for scheming to defraud another T-Mobile store in around 2016. He was still on probation for that charge when cops arrested him.
In 2013, Sanchez Ramos has also been accused of stealing two iPads from a Walmart which he had been working at.
Hightower and her lawyer have now said Sanchez Ramos shouldn't have been working at the T-Mobile store to begin with and have looked to shut down any signs of victim-blaming.
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"The question is not 'Why did she have this on her phone?'" Klemawesch said. "The question is, 'Why is this store employing this person and allowing him to access her private materials?'."
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