The mother of Natalee Holloway — the Alabama teen who vanished in Aruba over 12 years ago — is seeking $35 million from a TV network that produced what she calls a fake series on her daughter’s disappearance.
In a lawsuit filed in Birmingham on Friday, Beth Holloway says Oxygen’s six-part documentary “The Disappearance of Natalee Holloway” was bogus from the start and subjected her to “agonizing weeks” of uncertainty that “completely and utterly destroyed her.”
Holloway claims she also was tricked into providing her DNA to match against what producers claimed were her long-lost daughter’s remains.
She says the show was a “scripted, pre-planned farce calculated to give the impression of real time events.”
The Alabama schoolteacher said she has desperately searched for her daughter since she vanished on the last night of her senior class trip in Aruba in 2005.
Her body was never found but a man suspected in her death, Joran van der Sloot, is now serving a 28-year sentence in a Peru prison for the slaying of another young woman in 2010.
The series claimed to have found remains at what could be Natalee’s gravesite and wanted to test them.
But the mom said producers knew the bone fragments weren’t linked to Natalee before they were tested.
Natalee’s father, Dave Holloway, participated in the series and contacted Beth asking for a DNA sample to use for testing, according to the suit.
The teen’s dad had said the discovered bone fragments were the most credible lead he’d chased since his daughter’s disappearance.
He is not listed in the lawsuit but Holloway is seeking $10 million in compensation and $25 million in punitive damages against Oxygen Media, an arm of NBC Universal and Los Angeles-based production company Brian Graden Media.
An Oxygen spokesperson said they were disappointed to learn of the complaint and what they said was an “inaccurate depiction of how the series was produced.”
Oxygen said the series was produced in collaboration with Dave Holloway.
“We had hoped, along with Mr. Holloway, that the information was going to provide closure,” the spokesperson said.
With Post Wires