The Princess Anna Chakvetadze Picture

Beautiful princess

Anna Chakvetadze of Russia serves to Sania Mirza of India during their JB Group Classic tennis tournament in Hong Kong January 7, 2009.

nastasiya Myskina, the French Open champion, accused GQ magazine in a federal lawsuit yesterday of failing to prevent a photographer it had hired to take photos of her for a profile from reselling two topless pictures from the same photo shoot to a Russian magazine.

Some of the photographs taken by Mark Seliger appeared in the October 2002 issue of GQ. But this year's July/August issue of the Russian magazine Medved includes a topless shot of her, wearing jeans, on the cover, and three other photographs inside, including another topless one, according to the lawsuit.

Myskina, who is seeking at least $8 million in damages, said that the defendants - GQ; its owner, Condé Nast Publications; and Seliger - had agreed that the photographs would appear only in GQ and could not be resold.

Her lawyers said in the lawsuit that the photos in Medved "are highly embarrassing and have caused Ms. Myskina great emotional distress and economic harm."

The suit, filed in United States District Court in Manhattan, accuses Seliger of profiting from her rise to prominence and it says that GQ and Condé Nast should have known that Seliger and his studio had sold the pictures to Medved without Myskina's permission - and "had a duty to prevent" the sale.

Maury Perl, a Condé Nast spokeswoman, declined to comment, and a call to Seliger's studio seeking a response was not returned.

"It's not a question of being photographed nude," Alexander Berkovich, Myskina's lawyer, said in a telephone interview from his New York office. "It's about a decision that others made without her permission."

The topless photographs, he said, were not supposed to be published.

"It was a total surprise to Anastasiya and to me," Berkovich said.

Berkovich said that by selling the topless photograph to Medved, the defendants were showing that they "want to capitalize on her status. Those photographs didn't show up for two years."

Myskina, 23, is the fourth-ranked women's tennis player in the world.