Penthouse serves double fault over 'Kournikova' pics

Penthouse magazine is facing two potentially crippling lawsuits over claims it published topless photographs of a Benetton heiress under the name of Anna Kournikova.

The tennis player confirmed she had filed a suit against the magazine just a day after it emerged that Judith Soltesz-Benetton, the daughter-in-law of Luciano Benetton, had launched a £7m lawsuit.

Penthouse yesterday apologised to both women for identifying the pictures incorrectly.

"We deeply regret this unintentional error and offer our heartfelt apologies to both women," the magazine said in a statement.

David Schwab of California-based company Octagon, which represents the 20-year-old tennis player, confirmed she had filed a suit against the owners of the magazine in a federal court in Los Angeles.

"The complaint is for defamation, false light invasion of privacy, misappropriation of identity and various other violations of Miss Kournikova's rights under federal and state law," he said.

Ms Soltesz-Benetton's lawyer, Judd Burstein, claimed the magazine knew about the mistake weeks ago, but published the photos anyway.

A US judge has ordered the magazine to stop distributing the June issue to newsstands and blocked it from putting pictures on a website.

The judge ruled that Ms Soltesz-Benetton would suffer irreparably if Penthouse sent the pictures beyond its current distribution of 1.2 million homes and newsstands.

Ms Soltesz-Benetton claims she was shocked to learn that a photographer had taken a dozen topless photographs without her knowledge when she was in Florida seven years ago.

The latest edition of Penthouse featured a 10-page spread of the photos.

Kournikova had denied through an agent that the photographs were of her.

In the statement, Penthouse said it had examined the purported images of Kournikova in "painstaking detail" and received assurances from the photographer before deciding they were genuine.

"We were wrong," the magazine said. "In over 30 years of publishing this magazine, we have never made an error of anything approaching this magnitude."

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