After a full day of deliberations, the jury said the stalker was responsible for 51 per cent of the blame and the two hotel companies would share the rest, which comes out to nearly $27 million.

Andrews, a Fox Sports reporter and co-host of the TV show Dancing with the Stars, wept as jurors announced the verdict. She hugged her attorneys and family, who have supported her in the courtroom throughout the emotional trial.

An FBI investigation revealed that Michael David Barrett shot videos in hotels in Nashville and Columbus, Ohio, and posted them online. The trial focused on the Nashville Marriott at Vanderbilt and video.

Judge Hamilton Gayden found Michael David Barrett at fault for shooting videos in hotels in Nashville and Columbus, Ohio. (Mark Humphrey-Pool/Getty Images)

On Friday in Davidson County Circuit Court, Judge Hamilton Gayden found Barrett at fault.

It was only up to jurors to decide if the hotel owner, West End Hotel Partners, and the former operator, Windsor Capital Group, should share in the blame. The hotel is a franchise and Marriott is not part of the trial.

Barrett was a Chicago-area insurance company executive who frequently travelled around the United States. He took the video of Andrews at the Nashville hotel in September 2008. He shot about 4 1/2 minutes of nude video of her while she was in a room that was in an alcove off a main hallway.

​Barrett pleaded guilty to stalking Andrews, altering hotel room peepholes and taking nude videos of her. He was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison.

He did not show up for the trial. In his videotaped deposition, he said that he alone was to blame.

Attorney Scott Carr, left, and Andrews appear in court on March 4 in Nashville. Andrews was staying in a hotel while covering a football game for ESPN in 2008 when a man took a nude video of her through her hotel room door peephole. (Mark Humphrey-Pool/Getty Images)

Barrett said he correctly guessed that she would be at the hotel — it was the closest one to the Vanderbilt football game Andrews was covering — by calling and pretending to be in a group with her and asking for confirmation of the reservations.

Barrett said he posted the recordings online after celebrity gossip website TMZ refused to buy them. He picked Andrews, he said, because she was popular and he saw that she was trending on Yahoo.

Attorneys for the companies argued that while what happened to Andrews was terrible, the convicted stalker should be solely to blame because he was a determined criminal. The attorneys also suggested that Andrews' rise in her career shows she did not suffer severe and permanent distress.

'This happens every day of my life'

Andrews has maintained that someone at the hotel gave her room number to Barrett and honoured his request to be placed near her. She said no one ever told her that he asked to be in an adjoining or connecting room. Had she known that, she said, she would've called police.

She said Barrett's arrest and imprisonment did not make the nightmare go away. Andrews broke down on the stand repeatedly, saying she continues to suffer because people are still watching the videos and taunting her about them.

pic.twitter.com/2qWWxgVo9U
— @ErinAndrews
"This happens every day of my life," Andrews said tearfully. "Either I get a tweet or somebody makes a comment in the paper or somebody sends me a still video to my Twitter or someone screams it at me in the stands and I'm right back to this. I feel so embarrassed and I am so ashamed."

Andrews' parents described for jurors the terror they and their daughter felt after learning of the video but not knowing who took it, where it was shot and if someone was still watching their daughter.

During closing arguments, one of Andrews' lawyers said Barrett tried to shoulder responsibility because he holds a grudge against her over his conviction and didn't want her to win any money.

The Associated Press, 2016