Women pictured in Wisconsin strip club’s ads fight for payment after winning lawsuit

A Wisconsin strip club that used photos of celebrities, Playboy Playmates, and well-known models including Carmen Electra in its advertisements lost a lawsuit filed by those women and has so far refused to pay the $170,000 judgment and legal fees awarded in the case.

The women never worked for the Cajun Club, which sits on a hill in Houlton, Wis., across the St. Croix River from Stillwater, and their attorney argued in the trademark infringement case that the club’s ads were false advertising in violation of Wisconsin’s right of privacy statute.

A jury agreed, awarding a $70,000 judgment to be divided among the 13 women who brought the suit against the club’s owner, Richard “Jake” Jacobson of Prescott, Wis.

“Each Model was, at a minimum, denied the fair market value payment she would have received if Defendants had obtained her consent to use her image,” said Stephen Chamberlin, an expert witness who testified on behalf of the plaintiffs.

The club was also ordered in September by U.S. District Judge William M. Conley to pay half of the women’s legal fees, or $96,609. The case has continued in federal court as the women’s attorney, Edmund S. Aronowitz, of Royal Oak, Mich., has sought to force Jacobson to pay up.

Aronowitz declined to comment on the Cajun Club case, as he has in the dozens of similar lawsuits he’s filed against strip clubs in Milwaukee, Detroit, Iowa and elsewhere, often with many of the same models as plaintiffs. He told the Wisconsin federal court that he’s litigated over 50 of the image rights cases for his clients at $500 an hour.

It’s not clear what comes next for the case, but if Jacobson’s past legal fights are any indication, the Cajun Club litigation could drag on.

Jacobson fought the City Council in Coates for years to keep a strip club open in that Dakota County city. He eventually lost and saw his Jake’s Strip Club shut down by a federal judge. He fought back by painting his building a garish pink and in 2002 paid a legal fee of $6,400 with four $100 dollar bills and 600,000 pennies that he dumped on a table at a council meeting.

Jacobson, who also owns Fat Jack’s Cabaret in Bock, Minn., said Friday that the Cajun Club lawsuit is “complete grift.” Pointing to Aronowitz’s history of suing strip clubs across the country for using the photographs of well known models, Jacobson said the suit feels like “ambulance chasing.”

“We don’t think we’ve done anything wrong,” he said.

None of the women who sued Jacobson live in the region, and many of them don’t even live in the United States. The majority are models who command huge fees for public appearances or would be well known to viewers of shows like “Real Housewives of Miami.”

The lead plaintiff, Arianny Celeste Lopez, has 9 million followers on social media and has appeared on the covers of magazines ranging from Sports Illustrated to Playboy, according to court documents. She’s also well known as an “Octagon Girl” who appears during mixed martial arts fights held by the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

A photo that shows Lopez wearing only a short skirt with her arms crossed in front of her chest was used to promote the Cajun Club on Facebook, Aronowitz argued in court, but the photo was originally intended only for Lopez’s Instagram account and as a promotion for the UFC.

Presenting numerous contracts and pay stubs in court, Aronowitz showed that Lopez earned $135,000 for a one-day shoot for Playboy, and regularly earns tens of thousands of dollars for public appearances and one-hour photo shoots. She should have been paid $100,000 by the Cajun Club.

In a trial that took place in September last year in federal court in Madison, Wis., Aronowitz made similar arguments for each of the women, showing their past earnings for television and magazine appearances and calculating what they should have been paid for the advertisements used by the Cajun Club.

The women’s legal case was straightforward, said Jorge Contreras, a University of Minnesota law professor.

“You’re talking about the right of publicity,” he said, explaining that courts have agreed the individuals have an exclusive right to commercialize their image. It’s the same argument that college athletes have made in the NCAA as they sought to control their name, image and likeness. A club can’t defend itself by claiming freedom of speech because the pictures are being used for commercial purposes, he added.

“If we’re telling the story of these women, if we’re telling the truth, I am allowed to [use their pictures] under the First Amendment. But I can’t just advertise my own nightclub using their picture,” he said.

In its defense, the Cajun Club’s attorneys made a list of 24 reasons why they thought using the photographs was legal, including that the women signed a release with their photographer and therefore relinquished rights to the photo, that the women suffered no commercial harm, and that it was the women’s fault for not securing the photos with a proper release form, among others.

Once the women learned the photos were being used, they “failed to take any steps to minimize or mitigate any alleged unauthorized use of the subject photographs,” the club’s attorneys said in their reply.

The trial included testimony from a Towson University marketing professor who conducted a survey about the advertisements.

In his 19-page study titled “An empirical analysis of consumers’ perceptions of likelihood of confusion created by misappropriation of likeness by the Cajun Club,” Professor Thomas J. Maronick found that 83% of survey respondents consider women at a gentlemen’s club to be either “Very Important” or “Important” in their decision as to which club to attend. After the survey takers were shown the Cajun Club advertisements, a majority believed the women had approved the use of their image, his study showed.

The pictures are actually tightly controlled by contracts negotiated between the models and the magazines, said Chamberlin, a modelling agent who testified during the trial. A 30-year veteran of the industry who has represented Brooke Shields, Tyra Banks, Claudia Schiffer and others, Chamberlin during his testimony pulled back the curtain on the high-stakes negotiations that take place for supermodels, saying none of the images that the Cajun Club used were intended for strip club advertisements.

“We know exactly what they’ll be shooting, what product, and what type of work, and then we know how that’s going to be distributed and any other questions. It’s all negotiated before the model sets foot onto the set,” he testified.

Even if the women had consented to the use of the photographs in Cajun Club advertisements, Chamberlin said, it would have cost the club more than $1.2 million in fees.

The jury ruled in favor of the women and said they were owed amounts ranging from $1,500 to $15,000.