This Playboy Model Just Did a Really Ugly Thing

Dani Mathers says she became a Playboy model because she loves the female body. She had a funny way of showing it Thursday when she posted a photo to Snapchat of a nude woman in a locker room at an LA Fitness in Los Angeles, with the caption, "If I can't unsee this then you can't either." The 29-year-old, named Playboy's 2015 Playmate of the Year, then shared a selfie of herself covering her mouth, as though to hide a laugh. The backlash was hard and swift. The photo is "body shaming at its worst" and "maybe illegal," Kelsey Garcia writes at POPSUGAR. Twitter users, some of whom called on LA Fitness to ban Mathers, were equally outraged. "Shame on you," wrote one user. "Now we know who you really are. Can't unsee that either."

In a series of Snapchat videos, Mathers later said she was "deeply sorry" and had only meant to share the photo with a friend, per the BBC. "I love the female body and I know that body shaming is wrong and that's not what I'm about," she added. In other words, "she knows body shaming is wrong, but was going to do it anyway—just privately," writes Sam Escobar at Good Housekeeping. Escobar also casts doubt on her claims of a posting oops, noting it's "extremely easy" to tell the difference between posting direct to a user versus to one's Snapchat story. Mathers has since deleted all of her social media accounts except for Facebook and says she will "take some time to myself now to reflect on why I did this horrible thing." LA Fitness tells TMZ that Mathers' "behavior is appalling and puts every member's privacy at risk. We have handled this internally and also notified the police." (Snapchat just got sued by a teen over sexually explicit content.)