POLAND TWP., Ohio - A woman living in Poland Township tells 21 News, when she got into her backyard hot tub shirtless last year, she had no idea her video was being taken — and according to legal experts, it’s unclear whether police will be able to do anything about it. 

“I'm a very violated person right now,” Alicia Culleiton said. “I’m a victim.”

According to her, the video was taken by her neighbor last year on a security camera and spread to others without her consent. She said she has filed two police reports with the township police department, one in April 2024 and one in August 2025. As of Tuesday, no criminal charges have been filed in the case. 

“I believe when the neighbor sent them it was malicious,” Culleiton said. “It was to cause me harm and to make me be embarrassed.”

It is usually legal to record a neighbor’s property on a home security system, especially if the recording is inadvertent or impossible to avoid, according to Joe Ohlin, an associate attorney at Hartwig Law. The parts of the neighboring property being recorded can also play a role in its legality.

Under Ohio’s voyeurism law, no person can secretly videotape, photograph or otherwise record another person “in a place where a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy” — say, a bathroom or bedroom. But it is legal to record the more public portions of another person’s property, like their front yard or driveway. 

That language applies when the person in the recording is nude — and even when a person unconsensually shares the photos or videos, under the state’s law on dissemination of image of another person. 

If the person in the disseminated images is “knowingly and willingly in a state of nudity or engaged in a sexual act" and "knowingly and willingly in a location in which the person does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy,” the person sharing their pictures cannot be criminally convicted under that statute. 

According to Ohlin, there are subjective and objective measures to meet in determining whether a place grants reasonable expectation of privacy.

“So me as an individual, okay, what do I consider a reasonable expectation? What do I consider private?” Ohlin said. “Then it asks the objective question of, what does society believe is considered reasonableness, when talking about privacy?” 

Inside one’s home, the right to privacy is clear — and out in public, its absence is obvious. An outdoor backyard, however, becomes a grey area. Whether or not it is “reasonable” to expect privacy in that kind of space could change from case to case, Ohlin said. 

On top of that, prosecutors need to establish malicious intent of the person spreading the images and that the victim in the image was identifiable, among several other criteria.

Ohlin did not weigh in on the specifics of Culleiton’s case, but pointed out that there can be a gap in whether an action is morally wrong, and whether it is illegal. 

“I can assume that anybody who is in a state of nudity, that a photo is taken of them and then disseminated, certainly is going to feel like their privacy was violated,” he said. “But then you turn to that objective aspect of it. You look at the elements of the crime, you look at the exceptions.” 

As more and more homes adopt smart doorbells and other home surveillance systems, what constitutes a “reasonable expectation of privacy” may become a bigger factor in cases similar to Culleiton’s. In the wake of the alleged incident, she said she hasn’t felt as comfortable in her backyard. 

“We don't spend a lot of time out here anymore, until it's like, pitch black, if you have music going, those types of things,” Culleiton said. “We unfortunately had to resort to that.”