Jessica Alba Says Not So Fast, Playboy

Friday, March 03, 2006

Alba demands 'Playboy' pull magazines with her on cover

Jessica Alba is not exactly happy to be the latest cover girl for Playboy. Turns out, no one had told her or asked her permission. Whoops!

I can certainly understand Jessica not wanting to be associated with Playboy magazine, but legally speaking, I'm not sure she has a leg to stand on. More than half of the covers of tabloid magazines are "unauthorized" photos: candid paparazzi shots which are less than flattering to their subjects, and they're not sued. At least they chose a good picture of her...

To be fair, Playboy did have an article which mentions her, which is the same as pretty much every cover girl of every fashion magazine gets. It's a two-way street: the actress/model gets a little publicity and the magazine sells some issues.

Do I completely believe her story that she was "tricked" into providing a publicity photo? Not on your life. Unless she'd also like me to believe that her PR folks are morons.

Here's what I believe happened: Playboy wanted Jessica Alba to be the cover and approached her as part of the feature. She was willing to be included in the article, but didn't want to be on the cover. She provided the publicity photo for use within the article, but not specifically for the cover. Playboy then used the photo as their cover anyway.

So it's basically a matter of degrees, not the huge outrage she would have us believe. She wanted to be part of the show, but not the main attraction; so it wasn't like she or her people were just completely blindsided. They wanted the benefit of getting some good PR to Playboy's readers with the article, but they didn't want the potential downside from some fans of being featured on the cover. Essentially, they wanted to have their cake and eat it too.

The best analogy I can think of is when you're stealing cookies from the jar late at night in the dark, and suddenly someone turns the light on behind you and scares you to death. You're immediate response is going to be to yell at the person who turned the light on for scaring you in order to distract them from the obvious fact that you were stealing cookies...

You might as well eat the cookies now, Jessica...We already caught you stealing them....