The victim, 24-year-old model Brittanie Weaver, spoke Thursday at the sentencing hearing.
"I felt the defendant saw me like a piece of meat," said Weaver.
The crime was caught on surveillance video. Weaver was standing in line at a pet store in Sherman Oaks when the man, Julio Mario Medal, walked up right behind her, bent down and pretended to pet her dog. But in reality, he was using his iPad to take photos up Weaver's skirt.
Medal was sentenced to five years probation for his crime. Medal had already pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of secretly videotaping for sexual gratification and unlawful loitering. The judge also ordered Medal to undergo five years of sexual compulsion counseling and community service.
"To film someone up her skirt, it's disgusting, it's wrong and it's criminal," said Gloria Allred, Weaver's attorney. "Hopefully what he has done will now be known in the community and he will have to live with that."
Weaver is a professional model, and she says the experience caused her to miss work and take time off from school.
"I was very consumed by this, very consumed," said Weaver. "It wasn't like he just sporadically did it. The surveillance shows him waiting in the corner watching me, and that's the part that sickened me the most because he had planned it."
Weaver and Allred want lawmakers to make this type of crime a felony, requiring the culprits to register as sex offenders.
"This is serious. This is not a joke. This is not a minor infraction," said Allred.
The crime happened in March. Initially, Weaver was told there was no way to track down the stranger who had snuck up behind her, but she noticed he was wearing a Los Angeles County-issued ID badge around his neck. The badge said court interpreter and she saw the name Mario. So she searched on the Internet for two days before finding Mario Medal on the website LinkedIn.
"I knew that I had clues. I knew that I had proof and I knew what had happened to me. I put all of my faith in God and said I'm just going to go for it, because I had nothing to lose at that point," she said.
Police eventually arrested Medal four months after Weaver provided them with the photo and the identification she found on the Internet. Medal is due back in court on Oct. 22 to discuss paying restitution to the victim.
