Court Closes Book on Wife’s Intimate Photos

When Tricia Kellerman approached a Fullerton photographer last November to have intimate pictures of herself taken as a Christmas gift for her husband, she admitted being a little embarrassed.

“I was hesitant because I was slightly overweight and, after having three children, wasn’t in the best of shape,” Kellerman said in a sworn court declaration. She is the wife of the North Orange County Community College District chancellor.

But the photographer, Ray Westbrook, was so pleased with the way the pictures turned out he placed them in his sample book for potential clients.

And that is how photos meant to be private found their way into the very public domain of Orange County Superior Court, where a judge ordered Westbrook to cease his display of the pictures.

In her court papers, Kellerman said she first thought of having the pictures shot when she saw an advertisement for the Westbrook Studio of Photography in a local magazine.

Westbrook assuaged her fears, she said. He “commented that I made a very good model. He said that he was taking more film of me than the usual and that he was going to make lots of money off of me because the photos were going to be fabulous and, therefore, I would want to buy them all.”

‘Unique Christmas Gift’

When Westbrook asked if she wanted any nude photos taken, she said she consented because “I felt the photos would be a very intimate and unique Christmas gift for my husband.”

But Chancellor James S. Kellerman wasn’t the only one to see the pictures. On March 25 a friend told Tricia Kellerman that her daughter had come across the photos at Westbrook’s studio.

When Kellerman told her husband, the chancellor went to the studio to discover on display “four 8-by-10 photos of my wife,” one of them semi-nude, his court statement says. He found additional photographs in the sample album, the statement says.

Kellerman took the photos from the studio and gave them to his attorney, who filed the suit against Westbrook--who, in turn, had filed a police report saying the photos had been stolen.

The case was closed on Friday, when Westbrook was ordered not to display the photos.