Amy Jacobson is a Chicago broadcaster. She was a reporter for WMAQ-TV in Chicago from 1996 to 2007, losing her job after a rival TV station broadcast a video of her in a bathing suit with her children at the home of a man she was investigating in connection with his wife's disappearance.
Jacobson, as part of her job for WMAQ-TV, had been covering the April 2007 disappearance of Lisa Stebic; Stebic went missing on the same day that she asked her lawyer to help evict her husband Craig Stebic from the Stebic home. On Friday, July 6, 2007, Jacobson was recorded on video socializing at the Stebic home. Jacobson was wearing a bathing suit top and a towel and was at the house with her two sons. Several other people were present including Craig Stebic, who was the last to see his wife, and was following his lawyer's advice to avoiding speaking to police, but was in the video talking to Jacobson; and Craig Stebic's sister, who Jacobson later said had invited her to the home to discuss the case with family members. The video was in the possession of rival TV station WBBM-TV, but other news outlets, including Jacobson's employer WMAQ-TV, soon found out about the Jacobson footage. WBBM-TV discussed whether the footage was newsworthy until the evening of July 9, when the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune both ran the story that Jacobson was on tape at a Stebec pool party. Seeing that the print media had already broken the story, WBBM-TV ran two minutes of clips from the video, with commentary from a WBBM-TV reporter, on the July 10 early-morning news. WBBM-TV also reported that, since the disappearance, Jacobson had not mentioned any social relationship with the Stebic family in her reporting, but had been seen at the house frequently and without a camera crew. Jacobson was apparently trying to cultivate sources: Jacobson said she was attempting to get closer access to Craig Stebic; other sources told the Chicago Tribune that Jacobson was attempting a rapport with Craig Stebic's sister. Jacobson's involvement in the case resulted in national coverage and the end of her employment at WMAQ-TV by the end of July 10. Jacobson said that she would not have been fired if she were a man and that she went instantly from a six-figure income to not being able to find work anywhere. Both Jacobson and WBBM-TV received negative criticism: WBBM-TV responded by releasing the videotape, unedited except for the children's faces, the day after the original broadcast; Jacobson responded by limiting her interviews to local news outlets rather than national news outlets. In July 2008, Jacobson filed a multi-million-dollar libel lawsuit in Cook County against CBS, multiple WBBM-TV staff, a Northwestern University professor who spoke about the footage, and a neighbor of the Stebic home. The lawsuit claimed that "The videotape was carefully edited in an attempt to create the appearance of an ‘illicit’ relationship" and Jacobson said that there were other mothers with children at the home when the video was shot. A circuit judge rejected the lawsuit and granted summary judgment in favor of CBS, in July 2013, saying that the CBS criticism and report was "constitutionally protected expressions of opinion" or based on facts, and that the plaintiff failed to establish that CBS fabricated unfavorable content. Jacobson's attorney said that her legal team "always figured there would be an appeal before this went to trial", and intended to appeal on the basis that Jacobson was not a public figure when the video was released and that an earlier judge in the case had made a different ruling. The Illinois Appellate Court, sitting as a three-judge panel, rejected the appeal in December 2014, saying that Jacobson was "lready a well-known local personality and high-profile reporter", that she drew further public spotlight during the period after Lisa Stebic's disappearance, and that her closer involvement with the family "invited scrutiny of her methods". The appellate court also said that the different ruling in the earlier court, claimed by Jacobson, was not actually the statement made by that court. Jacobson petitioned the Illinois Supreme Court, but was denied leave to appeal on January 28, 2015.
Later career
She became co-host with Big John Howell on WIND and was still there.
Personal
Jacobson and her husband, Jaime Anglada, married in 2002. They have two children. Her husband filed for divorce in September 2008, following the lawsuit filed against WBBM-TV.
