Team Rodent - Carl Hiaasen [8]
That’s when Charlie “grabbed him by the breastbone and pushed him back.” Moments later Charlie found himself in the custody of Disney security guards. The kid said Charlie had tried to choke him. Charlie denied it. “I was wrong to touch him,” he said, “but he kicked my wife.” And there were witnesses.
It didn’t matter. The guards took Charlie to a small room, where he was interviewed and photographed with a Polaroid camera. Then he was escorted out the front gate and informed he was banned from Disney World for twelve months. His picture would be posted, the guards warned, and he would be arrested for trespassing if he was spotted anywhere at the park.
On the long drive back to Jacksonville, Charlie kept saying, “I got thrown out of Disney World on Church Night!” He was so angry that he phoned the newspaper when he got home. Columnist Robert Blade wrote about the incident in the Florida Times-Union. Readers clipped the article and mailed protests to Disney. Soon afterward Charlie received a letter from the company’s chief of security: “This is to notify you that, effective immediately, the trespass warning against you for Walt Disney World Resort Complex has been lifted.”
Officially Disney says its security forces work closely with local police. A sheriff’s deputy is assigned to the grounds to make arrests or otherwise assist the guards, if needed. All crimes in the Reedy Creek Improvement District are supposed to be reported promptly to law enforcement authorities. That doesn’t always happen, due to Disney’s fanatical obsession with secrecy.
In 1991 the company learned that one of its wardrobe assistants was spying on female performers at Cinderella’s Castle. The young man would masturbate while surreptitiously videotaping the women as they changed costumes.
One phone call to the local sheriff’s office could have ended the peep show, but Disney security officers chose to conduct their own surveillance, which went on for three months. According to court records, the company deliberately didn’t inform the women at the castle about the investigation, and in fact permitted the secret taping to continue. Eventually Disney’s security guards photographed the wanker in the act, confronted him, and got a confession. He later was arrested by a sheriff’s deputy, who’d allegedly overheard employees talking about the illegal videos in the coffee room of the Disney security office.
Six female dancers from the Kids of the Kingdom chorus later sued, demanding $37.5 million in damages. They asserted that the dressing areas in Cinderella’s Castle had been plagued by Peeping Toms who carved small eyeholes in the walls, and that Disney had known about the problem.
As for the sting operation, in which the company used its own video camera, the dancers charged that on January 8, 1992, Disney security allowed the suspect “to remain in this hidden place, masturbating, observing and videotaping the female Kids of the Kingdom cast in states of partial or total nudity for over one hour and 15 minutes and did not apprehend [him] until the female performers left for their 11 o’clock performance.”
Disney acknowledged it didn’t tell the performers they were being spied upon, but the company said it acted properly. Moreover, the company preposterously claimed the dancers had no cause to sue, because they had “a diminished expectation of privacy in their particular job requirements and … therefore knowingly assumed the risk of the matters alleged.”
In refusing to dismiss the lawsuit, the judge said ordinary citizens would find the company’s conduct “outrageous.” On the eve of trial, Disney’s attorneys settled the case with the Kids of the Kingdom for an undisclosed sum.
Litigation and rotten publicity often go hand in hand, and Team Rodent is ever-wary of both. Several employees caught exposing themselves to tourists have