Paige Duke NASCAR: Should Nude Photos Have Cost Paige Duke Her Job?

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Did NASCAR Really Need to Fire Paige Duke?

When I was 19 my friends and I had a strict no photo policy when we were hanging out. It's not that we were afraid we would be having a bad hair day, or that our outfits would make us look fat. We a result are dudes. We didn't really care.

We had this policy because we were smart enough to realize we were stupid. There was just no need to have photographic evidence of our stupidity. It's not that this kind of thing happened every night, but when it did, it was best to have that only live on in our memories.

Regrettable decisions come on in a flash at 19, and they don't seem so regrettable at the time. Unfortunately for Paige Duke her regrettable decision centered around taking a picture. Paige Duke took nude photos of herself in her dorm room and sent them to her boyfriend.

Paige Duke likely wasn't thinking that this boyfriend would someday be an ex-boyfriend. Also, when you are as pretty as Paige Duke it is asking a lot of any man for them to keep those photos private. And apparently he didn't.

Duke had this to say about the photos coming to light:

I did not intend for anybody to see these and now I'm exploited
These were pictures I had sent an ex-boyfriend when I was 18. This is the most embarrassing thing that could have ever happened to me.

We're still investigating how these pictures got out there. All we know is they came from his computer; he's the only person i sent them to.

He was the only person she sent them to, but for a while they were available to everyone with access to the internet. And it cost her her job.

I lost my job, the best job I could have ever asked for, it was perfect for me.

While the photos were a violation of NASCAR's morality clause, it seems foolish that they would be so strict to that policy that they would have to fire her. Duke meant for these photos to be private, and she sent them long before she was employed by NASCAR.

The controversy that NASCAR may have faced as it rolled into the Kentucky Speedway after having fired Duke is less than the controversy they would have faced with her.

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