AUBURN – An employee at a local diner is suing a free monthly newspaper claiming a photograph it published with a balloon caption suggested a risqué double entendre.

A lawyer representing the insurance company for the newspaper said the photograph meets the standards of good taste and wasn’t intended to mean anything prurient.

The photograph featured in an April edition of Uncle Andy’s Digest showed Amanda Berube, who recently turned 18, holding two coffee mugs at chest height. A caption invited viewers to come to the Pop Shoppe Diner at 413 Main St. in Lewiston, where she was working. It said: “We’ve got the nicest mugs around.”

The suit was filed in September in Androscoggin County Superior Court against Maine Mountain Ocean Group, Inc., which owns the publication. The photograph circulated in the Midcoast/Lakes Region as well as the greater Lewiston-Auburn area.

Berube said she didn’t give the newspaper permission to publish the photograph with the caption balloon and text, the suit said. As a result of its publication, she was embarrassed and caused to “feel ridiculed and disrespected.”

By publicizing her private life, she has “suffered harm to her reputation” and “suffered emotional distress and personal humiliation” the suit said.

The newspaper knew or acted in reckless disregard “as to the falsity of the photograph” and caption balloon, the suit said.

Paul Douglass, an attorney for the newspaper’s insurance company, said Monday that the photograph and caption “certainly wasn’t intended to connote any improper interpretation.”

The newspaper didn’t mean to embarrass her, he said. “Our position is, it’s not distasteful.”

He said Berube was aware she was being photographed for the publication, but wasn’t posed for the shot.