Image via iStockPhoto.

When a model posted a photo of a naked woman in her Los Angeles gym locker room in July 2016 with a bodyshaming caption, the condemnation was fierce: she was banned from all LA Fitness locations and charged with a misdemeanor count of invasion of privacy.

But while that case seems relatively cut-and-dry, local gyms are still trying to strike a balance between their patrons’ privacy and the ubiquity of cellphones and social media while people are exercising.

A person wrote into Popville with this query:

I’m on the hunt for a new gym after an incident at the Thomas Circle Balance. To make a long story short, a member was taking creep shots of me and posting them on a public Instagram with captions mocking me. Ed. Note: I saw the photos before they were switched to private and can confirm what OP says. The owners asked the member to move to a different location for a few weeks after I brought this to their attention, but now they’ve let the member back in the gym and are asking me to move my workouts to a different location instead if I’m still uncomfortable. The Instagram is still up; it’s just private now. Needless to say, I’m really upset about the lack of consequences so I’m looking for a new gym.

The Instagram account has been deleted since Popville published the post, but here’s a screenshot of what was publicly available earlier today:

The gymgoer reached out to DCist, agreeing to speak about the incident as long as we did not release any identifying details about them, including their gender.

They said they had been working out at the Thomas Circle Balance for about a year when they discovered the Instagram account through the suggested post feature in mid-July.

“I saw photos of a bunch of people’s butts, and then I saw a photo of me with the caption ‘This bitch,'” the gymgoer says. They used process of elimination to figure out the culprit. “Some of the photos were consensual, but I was not. I do not know these people. I’ve never spoken to them.”

The patron reached out to management, telling them about the situation. Management replied saying that the person the patron suspected had confessed to being behind the Instagram account. The gymgoer says management told them that the responsible party would not be invited back.

A little more than a month later, Balance Gym owner Mark Crick emailed the patron, saying the responsible party had been training at the Foggy Bottom location, and wanted to apologize and return to Thomas Circle.

The patron said they were not ready to speak to the person face-to-face. Crick asked the patron to reconsider over email, and the patron did not respond.

The next morning, the patron says, they went to the gym and saw the Instagram poster there. “I did not get a good training set in, to say the least,” they say. “There was never an email that was sent out gym-wide addressing the situation, never any communication saying it was unacceptable. She was brought back without any warning to any of the other members.”

Thomas Circle Balance released a statement on Tuesday afternoon, after the incident was publicized, saying that the facility does “not allow members to take photos of others without their permission, for any purpose. We are committed to protecting the privacy of every member who wishes not to be photographed or videoed.”

While that policy is part of the contract that members sign to join the gym, there is not any standard punishment for violating it. The statement says that the facility is developing a new policy, which will be distributed to members.

However, Thomas Circle Gym also cast blame on the person who is publicizing the incident in its statement. “The image posted was in response to a member who felt the other party was being disruptive and intimidating to herself and friends. The member should have brought this to our attention immediately but instead posted to what she thought was a private group, which obviously was not the case. While these details do not make the situation right, it was something that we took into consideration and we were hoping to come to an amicable solution for both parties.”

The gymgoer says this is the first they’re hearing about being “disruptive or intimidating.”

Other local gyms have a variety of policies regarding cellphone use, DCist has learned.

“Cellphone use is not permitted on our workout floor, so you can’t take pictures and things of that nature,” says Chanae Butler, general manager at the Chinatown location of Washington Sports Club. The walls of the gym and its locker room have signs telling people not to use their phones.

People determined to be in violation of the policy have to leave the gym, she says. “Depending on what they’re doing, some memberships can be suspended,” says Butler. “If they’re taking provocative pictures of other members, we will terminate their membership.”

But other gyms say that an outright ban of cellphones in the workout area is unrealistic.

“People use cellphones for so many things now, it’s hard for us to tell what they’re doing on their phone,” says Lisa Scalzo, fitness director for two D.C.-area locations of Sport and Health.

Many cellphone capabilities are directly tied to a person’s exercise, like listening to music, she adds. “We’ve got FitBits that are linked to them. Our trainers will use them to record clients so that we can show them the way that they’re moving,” says Scalzo. Patrons “are not very deliberate sometimes when they take pictures, and so sometimes it’s hard for us to police that.”

But she agrees that what allegedly happened to the Thomas Circle Balance “is not okay. I don’t agree with someone doing that, but we have to make sure that legally we are protecting ourselves as well—we don’t want to impede on someone’s right to speech.”

One way to find a happy medium, she says, could be to tell new members that “we ask that you do not take photos of people you do not come with, out of respect for your privacy and theirs,” when explaining the gym’s policies.

Marvin Booker, the membership consultant at Crunch Fitness Metro Center, says that the gym allows members to use their phones on the gym floor, but “we try to permit it to just music and not taking too much pictures, especially of other clients.”

Booker says that, if he were in charge of the gym one day and saw a patron taking photos of another customer, “I would walk up to the person and ask them a couple of different questions—Why are you taking pictures? What are they being used for?—just to make sure both parties are aware and comfortable while using the facility. That is not the official protocol of Crunch Fitness, but if that was a situation I was put into on the spot, that’s how I would handle it.”

The gymgoer from Thomas Circle Balance says that they don’t want a complete ban on cellphones. “If it’s fun, if it’s positive, if it’s consensual, that’s fine,” they say. “I think that when there’s a malicious intent to bully and harm, that’s when you need to have a conversation and remove someone from the gym. That’s what did not happen here.”

Updated with comment from the gymgoer and a statement from Thomas Circle Balance.