DOCUMENT: Celebrity, Sports

Kournikova: A Victim Of Nipple Profiling

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Kournikova: A Victim Of Nipple Profiling

The way Frank Ramaesiri tells it, he mistook a topless sunbather for Anna Kournikova due to the similarity in the diameter of the nipples of the two women (hey, that seems like an honest mistake).

Testifying yesterday (5/14) in New York federal court, Ramaesiri told of how he sold his home video--shot years ago in Miami Beach--to Penthouse, which printed stills from the video in its current issue, promoting the images as "exclusive" nudes of the 21-year-old Russian tennis star.

As this transcript shows, Ramaesiri claimed that he compared his video to revealing photos of Kournikova (wearing clingy tennis tops) found on the Internet and concluded that he had a nipple match. As it turned out, the naked woman was actually Judith Soltesz-Benetton, who is now suing the magazine for $10 million (hence yesterday's court hearing).

"I'm an idiot, and I apologize to Ms. Kournikova and Ms. Benetton," said a weepy Ramaesiri. In these transcript excerpts, Ramaesiri describes the unique "checklist" he used to compare the images and apologizes to all involved. (11 pages)

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