WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Several multi-million-dollar mansions in Palm Beach have surveillance cameras on their property.
That includes a Palm Beach couple titled "Jane and John Doe" in a lawsuit.
The couple filed a lawsuit claiming two workers from a company that installs and repairs surveillance systems spied on them through their indoor cameras.
Andrea Lewis, the attorney for the "Does," said the homeowners wanted the cameras for one reason: "To look at their home and monitor it when they're not there," she said.
Lewis said in the summer of 2020, the homeowners had electrical problems with the security gate and climate-control system.
The suit adds they contacted Ask the Advisors of West Palm Beach, the company that installed the home electronics system for the house's prior owner.
According to the suit, Ask the Advisors senior technician Jeremy Lewis said the home's "digital video recorder was not operational and needed to be replaced."
Just four days, Andrea Lewis added, after Ask the Advisors installed the new equipment, the homeowner logged in expecting to be the only one to log on.
"Instead," Andrea Lewis said, "what he found was shocking."
What he found, according to the lawsuit, was two technicians from Ask the Advisors who "used those cameras to secretly spy on a family thousands of times … repeatedly watching them have sex and when they were nude/semi-nude."
"These intruders really, who were in the system without permission, they were focused largely on the wife," Andrea Lewis said. "It's devastating for her. She is still seeking medical therapy and mental health treatment because of this."
According to the suit, the homeowner complained to Ask the Advisors two top executives.
One asked, according to the suit, "not to get the police involved."
Palm Beach police did get involved as they interrogated Ask the Advisors system designer Michael Reilly, one of the two technicians accused of video voyeurism.
Here is a snippet of the interrogation:
Police: "Was that in the bedroom?"
Reilly: "A bedroom. Yes."
Police: "A bedroom? OK. How many times did you watch that? Do you remember?"
Reilly: "I don't recall. I mean, once I saw that I was just bailing out of it."
Palm Beach police filed criminal charges against Reilly and Lewis. They pleaded not guilty to video voyeurism.
Police found 43 pages of logins that the homeowners' attorney called proof that Reilly and Jeremy Lewis accessed the cameras and watched the couple live and on recorded video clips.
"What you see in the logs is that they find a clip that they like, and they keep watching it over and over and over," Andrea Lewis said.
The suit is claiming Jeremy Lewis, who allegedly fixed the new digital recording device, should not have been "sent into innocent and unsuspecting customers' homes."
Court records show Jeremy Lewis pleaded guilty to the attempted first-degree murder of a woman in 1992 and was sentenced to 10 years of probation.
Lawyers for Jeremy Lewis and Reilly declined to comment on the case.
Ask the Advisors attorneys asked the judge to dismiss the case and emailed a statement to Contact 5.
Attorney Steven Parrish called the lawsuit "a false narrative," adding that they "vehemently deny the allegations which are riddled with factual inaccuracies, and we intend to vigorously defend the claims."
Ask the Advisors called the two technicians charged with voyeurism "high-performing employees who never had any customer complaints and who passed multiple background checks. Because of pending criminal charges filed against Mr. Reilly and Mr. Lewis, they were terminated."
As for the cameras in the home, Audio Advisors, the parent company for Ask the Advisors, said in a statement that it "does not have any other customers with cameras in similar sensitive indoor areas. The 'John Doe' plaintiff placed cameras that he purchased elsewhere, in a guest bedroom that was originally an office and added those cameras to the new network video recorder as it was in the process of being installed and configured by 'Audio Advisors.'"
Andrea Lewis said the homeowners did not buy or install any cameras.
"They hired this company to give them a sense of security," she said. "And instead, what happened was Ask the Advisors and their employees came in and violated their trust in the worst possible way."
No date has been set for the lawsuit to head to a jury trial or for the criminal charges against technicians Jeremy Lewis and Reilly.
