Tuesday 20 March 2012

Mirror apologises to model for serial killer photo error

On Saturday, the Daily Mirror used - without permission - an image of the model Morgana in its 'Women Who Kill' pull-out, to illustrate the story of Vera Renczi.

Today, the paper has apologised:

APOLOGY to Patricia Belda Martinez.

WITH Saturday's Daily Mirror we distributed a supplement entitled 'Women who Kill' which we trailed on the front page of the newspaper with a picture of the front page of the supplement.

One of the women whose story featured in the supplement was Vera Renczi who lived in the former Yugoslavia between 1903 and 1939 and who killed 35 men. Unfortunately due to an error the picture we used, both inside and on the front page of the supplement, was not of Vera Renczi but of Patricia Belda Martinez, who is otherwise known as Morgana and who is a fashion model. The picture we used belongs to Ms Martinez.

We apologise unreservedly to Ms Martinez for our error in wrongly using her picture in the supplement which she, of course, has no connection with and for the considerable embarrassment caused to her by our actions.

UPDATE: Morgana's own blogpost on this is here.

7 comments:

  1. Pretty terrible mistake, but at least they made a very genuine apology. I'm sure the Mail would have blamed it on the model and challenged her to prove that she is not the reincarnation of a Yugoslavian serial killer

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    1. The point is that it wasn't a mistake. They specifically nicked a picture from a website and chopped the copyright attribution off it! If that's a mistake, I'm a table - and if that's an apology, I'm a mahogany one.

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    2. I assumed they just took it off Google Images. Reminds me of a couple of years ago when the BNP distributed a leaflet damning illegal immigrants and illustrated it with a picture of a Gurkha war hero

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  2. In answer to your two queries: First No. Second - Yes

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  3. Considering the sliced off the copyright from the original photo before they published it in the pull-out I find this very hard to swallow.

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    1. As I said in the earlier post, I think they simply found the image, with the copyright already cropped, on another site - a site that comes up as the first result when you search for Vera Renczi on Google Images. My suspicion is that it's laziness that's done for them.

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  4. First No
    Second Not morons but Morgans

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