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News > Companies
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Playboy eyes WorldCom, Andersen
Magazine that published 'Women of Enron' seeks women from WorldCom, Arthur Andersen to pose.
July 15, 2002: 3:10 PM EDT

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Companies losing their shirts is, not surprisingly, good news for Playboy magazine.

The magazine, which is doing its own part to uncover and highlight corporate accounting misdeeds with the "Women of Enron" pictorial in the current issue, is now looking for women from troubled telecom WorldCom Inc. and embattled accounting firm Arthur Andersen to pose for future issues of the magazine.

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The men's magazine says it is seeing strong newsstand sales of its current issue, which highlights Enron on the cover. While national sales figures for the August issue are not yet available, company spokeswoman Elizabeth Norris said sales in the Houston area, home of Enron and six of the 10 women who posed nude or semi-nude in the pictorial, have been about five times normal.

The publisher said once the August issue was published, it started getting phone calls from employees at WorldCom and Andersen who were also interested in posing.

Norris would not reveal what Playboy paid the Enron employees who posed but she said all were paid the same as each other, and that WorldCom and Andersen employees who pose will also be paid that same amount.

She said the magazine had about 450 inquiries from past or current Enron employees and that it interviewed 300 of them in order to select the 10 women highlighted in the feature. Women from WorldCom and Andersen interested in applying need to send two photographs, one with them wearing a two-piece bathing suit and one a head shot, to the magazine.

Enron filed for bankruptcy protection in December after being forced to restate results. Playboy announced plans for its Enron photo spread in March.

Enron's auditor, Arthur Andersen, has been convicted of federal obstruction of justice charges for destruction of Enron documents, and has seen a number of other clients reveal accounting problems as well. The most serious documented so far is WorldCom, which has admitted it improperly classified $3.8 billion of expenses, inflating a key measure of earnings.

The magazine traditionally has had photo spreads of high-profile women, some involved in public scandals, including Jessica Hahn, who helped bring down evangelist Jim Bakker, and more recently Darva Conger, the winning contestant in the controversial Fox show, "Who wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire." The Enron pictorial was the first scandal-based feature in which the subjects were unknown to the general public.

Playgirl, which is an unrelated publication that features pictures of nude men, plans to publish a Men of Enron feature in its issue available in September.  Top of page






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