Sportscaster Erin Andrews sobbed on the witness stand Monday as she recalled the moment she learned that nude footage of herself was all over the Internet posted by peeper Michael David Barrett.
“I said, ‘No, there’s not! I don’t do that!’ ” Andrews, then with ESPN, recalled telling a Sports Illustrated reporter pal who broke the horrifying news to her over the phone in July 2009.
“I could feel my chest and feel it in my head,” she told jurors through her tears. “I saw it for two seconds and said, ‘Oh, my God, I have to call you back,’ and I called my parents.
“I was just screaming . . . I said, ‘Dad! I’m naked all over the Internet.’ ”
Andrews, 37, said she was screaming so loudly that she got a call from the Los Angeles hotel where she was staying, asking if everything was OK.
Andrews spent most of that summer living with her parents — a period she calls her “glazed-over time.”
“I just remember being in my pajamas all day, back in my old room at my parents’ house,” she said. “I put my mom’s quilts up over the window of my room.”
Andrews took the stand in her $75 million civil suit against the Nashville Marriott, where she was staying when Barrett doctored her peephole, allowing him to record a 4¹/₂-minute video of her just after she’d stepped out of the shower.
Her lawyers have said the hotel was negligent when it allowed Barrett to request a room next door to her.
Barrett eventually posted the naked footage he’d taken after failing to get celebrity gossip Web site TMZ to buy it.
“I have to stand up for myself,” Andrews, now with Fox Sports, told jurors. “This could happen to anyone. I want the Nashville Marriott to be held responsible.
“I wanted to be respected, I just wanted to be the girl next door who loved sports. Now I’m the girl with the hotel scandal. It’s embarrassing.”
Andrews said she’s aware that the video will be on the Internet “until the day I die” — but back in July 2009, she was hoping to get it removed before it could go viral.
“My biggest fear was that the longer it was on the Internet, it was going to blow up and blow up and blow up and go viral and get page views and be really bad,” she said.
Then there were the many accusations that it was all a publicity stunt meant to further her career, which “ripped me apart,” she said.
“Nobody knew it was a stalker,” Andrews explained. “Everybody just thought it was a publicity stunt to get more fans.’’
She said even the FBI seemed skeptical about her at first.
“My dad and I flew to LA to go meet with the FBI. They wanted to look me in the eye and see if I had anything to do with this. I remember my dad saying, ‘There’s a female there, too, and she’s going to try to sniff you out to see if you’re telling the truth.’
“I went and I threw up, and I came back in . . . They believed me when I came back after I got sick.”
Even now, sports fans still make obscene comments about her at games — and tweet stills from the video to her Twitter account, Andrews said.
“I’m not gonna say what I hear, but it’s, ‘I’ve seen your this. I’ve seen your that,’ ” she testified.
“It happens all the time, every single game. People tweet me, ‘I should pay the Marriott because it made me famous.’ ”
Andrews is still “so angry” the Nashville hotel never called to tell her that Barrett had requested to stay in a room next to hers.
“This could have been stopped,” Andrews insisted. “The Nashville Marriott could have just called me . . . And I would have called the cops.”
Additional reporting by Danika Fears in New York