Male escort forgot pregnancy protection, scores data protection instead

A German woman who was impregnated by a male escort she apparently hired to liven up a stay in the East of the country has had her attempts to track him down trumped by the country’s rigid data protection laws.

The woman booked the professional priapist for a three night sojourn in a second floor room in a hotel in the town of Halle back in 2010, according to the BBC.

However, following the drei nacht liebefest, the woman found that while she might have left a little shopping money on the nightstand for her rent-a-friend, he’d left her something a little more personal - she was pregnant, and subsequently gave birth to a son, now aged seven.

The woman then sought to claim child support payments from the over-fertile lothario, but first of all faced the problem of identifying the man, who she knew only as Michael.

However, when she approached the hotel for help in identifying him, they refused - it turns out that in addition to her Michael, there were at least three other Michaels staying at the hotel that night.

The aggrieved client unsurprisingly took to the courts to unmask the herr-for-hire.

However, in doing so, she ran up against Germany’s stringent data protection laws.

Following an awful lot of to-ing and fro-ing, a court in Munich has now ruled that the gigolo’s right to privacy trumps the woman’s claim for child support.

The fact her only handle on her "then companion", the name “Michael”, meant personal data could be “released at random”, the BBC reports. (Which sort of sums up the whole problem)

Each of the four Michaels had the right to "control their own data and protect their own marriage and family".

And before you ask, yes, the court also raised the point that "Nor is it certain that the Christian name is indeed the name of the man in question.”

Details of the judgement are here. ®