CLEVELAND, Ohio – A former employee of WEWS-Channel 5 sued the station's parent company Tuesday, saying an engineer had placed a hidden camera in the men's bathroom this summer.
Brad Brown, who worked as a promotions producer at the station, filed the lawsuit against E.W. Scripps Co. Inc. in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court seeking compensatory and punitive damages, as well as attorneys' fees.
The suit said that once employees learned of the camera in July, the station deleted the recordings from it.
Sam Rosenwasser, the general manager of the station, declined to comment Tuesday.
The lawsuit said Berry Pinney, then the station's director of engineering and operations, placed hidden cameras at the station. About June, Pinney ordered an employee to place a camera in a non-functioning sprinkler in the ceiling of the first-floor men's room, according to the lawsuit.
The camera transmitted images to multiple video screens, according to the lawsuit.
On July 13, an employee noticed video images of the men's restroom on a security-desk monitor, the suit said. Brown's attorneys said in a news release that news employees on a weekend shift noticed the images on the security monitor.
Afterward, the camera was taken down, and the video recordings were deleted, according to the suit. A news release filed by Brown's attorneys noted that the station later said the camera in the bathroom was to catch a vandal.
Tom Merriman, a former reporter at WJW-Channel 8, is a lawyer in the case. He said in the release that Brown's suit might be the first of several.
"They spied on their own employees while we were using the toilet," Brown said in the release. "It is hard to imagine anything more outrageous."
Attempts to reach Pinney were unsuccessful. Brown has left WEWS, an ABC-affiliate, and now works at WJW-Fox 8.
Common Pleas Judge Nancy Margaret Russo has been assigned the case.
Plain Dealer news researcher Jo Ellen Corrigan contributed to this story.