Nude ‘Bambi hunts’ a hoax, city says
Las Vegas firm staged
events in order to sell
videotapes, probe shows
July 25 -- View a July 16 package on MSNBC TV on the alleged hunts. MSNBC's Chris Jansing reports.
By Mike Brunker
MSNBC
July 25 — The city of Las Vegas has concluded that a local company’s claims that it was charging men up to $10,000 to “hunt” naked women with paintball guns was a hoax, it was reported Friday.
“IT WOULD APPEAR from all sorts of admissions ... that the purported Hunt for Bambi was a scam, that it was all staged, that there were actors and actresses and there wasn’t even the real shooting of paintballs,” Mayor Oscar Goodman told the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Thursday.
City officials told the newspaper that the mastermind of the scam, Michael Burdick, acknowledged that some hunts were staged in order to fool the media and generate sales of spoof hunting videos.
Goodman’s office did not immediately return calls from MSNBC.com on Friday.
Word of the company’s alleged activities first surfaced two weeks ago, when a Las Vegas television station aired a report featuring footage from what it identified as one of the hunts and interviewed both a hunter and his “prey,” one of whom said that she cried after being hit in the posterior by one of the paint-loaded pellets.
The KLAS-TV report attracted little attention until July 15, when paintball equipment manufacturer Brass Eagle Inc. issued a press release denouncing the concept and calling on local officials to investigate whether the hunts endanger the women’s health and welfare.
PAINTBALL FIRM’S CONDEMNATION
“We condemn this irresponsible activity and do not endorse or condone the use of paintball products for such activities,” said Lynn Scott, president of the Bentonville, Ark., firm.
Goodman also was alarmed. “As soon as I found out about this, I called for an investigation,” he said at the time. “Las Vegas is a place where anything goes, but this crosses the line if this is real.”
Questions were raised almost immediately about the veracity of the company’s claims. Snopes.com, which researches so-called urban legends, noted that the huntingforbambi.com Web site lacked proper contact information and stated that some readers who sent e-mail expressing interest in booking a hunt received no reply to their inquiries.
But David Krekelberg, who responded to an e-mail inquiry from MSNBC.com the day after the paintball company lodged its protest, insisted they were real.
Krekelberg acknowledged that the company was formed to market a hunting spoof videotape, but he said that the tape sales had shown there was a market for real armed pursuits and claimed the company had conducted about 20 pursuits, most of them in the desert outside Las Vegas.
“It’s basically like a game show,” he said. “There’s a whistle, and maybe 20 minutes to an hour later, we have a girl with a big red welt on her butt, or maybe none.”
He said the women were paid inversely to the pain they experience — $1,000 if they get shot and $2,500 if they don’t — to give them added incentive to elude their armed pursuers. He said they were given the option of wearing protective gear on their eyes and head and that the hunters were barred from shooting the women above the waist.
The KLAS piece on the hunts that aired last week included criticism from clinical psychologist Marv Glovinsky, who told the station that the game could be dangerous for men who can not distinguish fantasy from reality and could lead them to act out violence against women.
“If you’re blurring reality and fantasy and you can’t make the distinction, and your emotions overpower your intellect or your higher mental function, you’re going to get into trouble,” he told the station. “And if you have control problems to boot, that’s really going to cause problems.”
Krekelberg said that the TV piece had unleashed a torrent of criticism that he and his colleagues were degrading women, a charge he vigorously denied despite the inclusion on the company’s Web site of photos of nude women “mounted” on walls much as a deer would be after being killed.
“The women who think this is abusive and degrading need to put their attention where it should be, and I think that’s Afghanistan,” said Krekelberg. “We love our girls. Why do you think we pay them so much? There are desperate people in this town who could be taken advantage of. We choose not to do that.” |
