Four women who worked for a private cosmetics contractor, Makeup Art Cosmetics, in a Belk department store in our hometown of Athens, Georgia have each won six-figure verdicts this week after being watched undressing by security guards using a hidden camera in the stockroom of the store.

Store managers installed a hidden camera in a stockroom in 2005, catching the women on tape while they changed clothes before and after shifts.

Lawyers for Belk argued that it installed the camera to catch thieves and said the employees should have known it was there.

[Fulton County Daily Report]

Perhaps. But perhaps you should have told them?

The employees suffered from sleeplessness, anxiety and paranoia due to the invasion of privacy, one of their attorneys, Jay Lewis, said during his closing argument Thursday.

He asked the Superior Court jury for "seven figure" actual and punitive damages for each of the plaintiffs.

But apparently the jury only found the security guards six-figures-worth of creepy.