Although she is many years past the height of her career, singer, actress, and motion picture director Barbra Streisand is still around in 2024, having just turned 82 last month. Among many other accolades in her long career, she is a rare "EGOT" -- that is, a person who has won an Emmy (for television), a Grammy (for her singing), an Oscar (Best Actress for 1968's Funny Girl), and a Tony (for her work on the Broadway stage).
Her influence as an entertainer can be discerned, if from nothing else, by a surprise cameo she made on a Saturday Night Live sketch in 1992. Madonna, Rosanne Barr, and Mike Myers (in drag) are playing three Jewish women on a stereotypical all-female talk show, "Coffee Talk" discussing among other things Streisand's recent film, The Prince of Tides, when the singer herself suddenly appeared on the set. All three of the performers screamed; Mike Myers adlibbed the line, "I can die now!" and Madonna -- herself no slouch in the celebrity department -- improvised a kowtowing motion, as if honoring to her inspiration.
But along with her entertainment fame and success, about 20 years ago Streisand made an unintended contribution to the language, when she launched an ill-advised lawsuit against photographer Kennth Adelman. Adelman, along with his wife, Gabrielle, flew up and down the California coast beginning in the late 1990s to document the status of the California coastline. The Adelmans initially wanted to document the condition of a stretch of coastline near San Simeon in San Luis Obispo County that was the subject of a controversial project, and so they flew in a helicopter along the coast, photographing as they went.
And then in 2002, long before Google Earth, the Adelmans launched the California Coastal Records Project. It was intended not only to document the physical beauty of the California coast but also to provide a record of its "before" condition at that time, both to document erosion and also to create a record in case someone undertook illegal activity that altered the shoreline. They posted these photographs, eventually nearly 100,000, on their website, https://www.californiacoastline.org, documenting the entire coast from Mexico to Oregon.
In February, 2003, the Adelmans received a letter demanding that a photograph depicting Barbra Streisand's mansion (and there is no other word for it) perched atop a bluff in Malibu in Los Angeles County, be removed from the Records Project's archive. After the Adelmans declined, In May, 2003 Streisand sued Kenneth Adelman in Los Angeles Superior Court, seeking $50 million in damages and a court order that the photograph be removed from the website. Her lawsuit was grounded in a number of legal theories based on invasion of privacy, claiming that its availability made her and her property vulnerable to stalkers and others intending to invade her privacy more directly.
According to the Adelmans' account on their website, before the lawsuit the offending photograph had been downloaded a total of six times -- and two of those were by Streisand's own attorney. As soon as the lawsuit was filed, however, Streisand quickly experienced the flip side of great fame: once news stories began to appear about the lawsuit, the photograph was viewed more than a million times, and was reproduced in many news stories, too.
Hence, Streisand's legal action generated precisely the attention to her coastal aerie that she wanted to avoid. And it was all for naught: not only did the judge rule against Streisand's quixotic lawsuit, he pinned her with more than $150,000 to compensate Adelman for the legal fees he had incurred defending himself.
And two years later, a writer named Michael Masnick seized on the incident to coin the phrase "the Streisand Effect" -- that is, that an attempt to cover up something has the opposite effect, giving the thing someone tries to suppress the very notoriety the suppression effort was intended to prevent. As the old saying goes, forbidden fruit is often the sweetest.
And if you plug "the Streisand Effect" into a search engine, you'll find a number of other examples on the Wikipedia page devoted to the topic. Headlining the article, of course, is a cropped version of the very photograph Ms. Streisand tried to censor back in 2003.
And so, Streisand's own effort to clamp down on the Adelmans' photograph cost her money, and a lot of bad publicity. But most of all, it permanently linked her name to the notion that covering something up invariably creates greater publicity for that thing.
Frank Zotter, Jr. is a Ukiah attorney.
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