A Manhattan woman has filed a $10 million lawsuit against the makers of the hit movie “Couples Retreat” over her unwitting – and salacious – appearance in the Vince Vaughn flick.
Irina Krupnik “only learned of defendants’ lascivious use of her photo in the film” after it was released in theaters – and was horrified to discover it was being used as a “masturbatory prop” for star Jon Favreau, the makeup artist says in papers filed in Manhattan Supreme Court.
“That photo was taken nearly ten years ago for a modeling job when Ms. Krupnik, a native of the former Soviet Union, was just 21-years-old,” the suit says, and she was unaware that the bikini shot would be used in a “sexual and degrading context” in a big budget Hollywood movie a decade later.
The movie is a comedy about four couples trying to work out their differences at a resort in Bora Bora. In one scene, Krupnik’s picture is shown in a fictitious brochure that Favreau’s “overweight, unhappily married male character” uses “to masturbate while his wife is in the washroom,” the suit says.
Favreau, “playing a character at least twice the age of Ms. Krupnik in the photo, waits until his wife leaves their hotel room before lifting his sleeveless T-shirt over his prominent belly. He then liberally lubricates himself while leering at the image of the youthful Ms. Krupnik on a beach, a scenario apparently intended to be humorous,” the suit says.
Krupnik, however, was not amused to find herself as a fantasy object for Favreau’s “much older, dessicated and overweight character” to “pleasure himself,” the suit says, noting that the scene “would be a crime if Mr. Favreau attempted it on a New York City subway.”
Krupnik, who abandoned modeling years ago and made herself over as a top makeup artist – Vogue Magazine dubbed her the “Brow Queen” in 2004 – found out about her movie debut from “clients and acquaintances who viewed the movie, recognized her and notified her that her picture was being used in this tawdry and shocking context,” the suit says.
Those “clients and acquaintances, and other viewers, reasonably but falsely understood from the publication of Ms. Krupnik’s photograph . . . that is she is the type of person who would agree to having her photograph and likeness used publicly as an object for masturbation,” the suit says.
Krupnik’s lawyer, Tom Mullaney, said Universal Studios, which created and distributed the movie, should have used somebody who wanted to be in the movie.
“Certainly NBC Universal has the resources to do that,” Mullaney said, adding what happened to his client is “just not right.” He acknowledged that his client had signed a general release at the time the picture was taken, but she’d never imagined it would be used in a “quasi-pornographic context.”
The suit charges the company with invading Krupnik’s privacy and defamation, and seeks $10 million in damages for her “great humiliation, embarrassment, emotional distress, shame, ortification and injury to her reputation and career.”
A rep for NBC Universal was not immediately available for comment.