An employee at a Philadelphia branch of ACORN, the national community organization under fire for allegations of wrongdoing, has filed a lawsuit in federal court against the two filmmakers who set off the controversy last fall with their undercover videos.The civil lawsuit filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia accuses the filmmakers, James O'Keefe and Hannah Giles, of illegally recording their conversation with the worker, Katherine Conway-Russell, and then publicizing the videos, which Conway-Russell says "caused emotional distress, harm and injury."
Conway-Russell is featured in one of several videos recorded by O'Keefe and Giles, who posed as a pimp and prostitute and visited ACORN offices around the country with a hidden camera. The videos, released initially through the conservative Web site BigGovernment.com, showed ACORN employees seeming to offer to help the couple skirt tax and housing laws while setting up a brothel.