Catholic school graduate and college dropout Antonella Barba says she’s going to stay in LA for “a week or two” to see if she can quickly carve some sort of respectable career out of her failed American Idol bid. Barba should have realized that dirty personal pictures can work to your advantage if you’re careful about it, as is evidenced by Paris’ delicate balance between massive overexposure and do-nothing fame.

She claims she’s not going to take advantage of two very lucrative offers from different adult film companies. SugarDVD, which is like Netflix for porn, has offered her half a million to be their poster girl while Girls Gone Wild wants to pay a quarter million to have her host one of their drunken boob faux-lesbian makeout fests. She’s also not going to pose nude, despite the fact that we’ve already seen most of her.

It seems like she would be a natural to me, and who can turn down that kind of money for nothing? Barba can, and she wants you to know about it. That Catholic school guilt runs deep, but only deep enough to want to protect her public image, not the one all her friends and boyfriends know about.

Barba, 20, attended Roman Catholic grammar school in neighboring Point Pleasant Beach, and went to a Catholic high school in nearby Red Bank before enrolling in Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where she studied architecture.

She withdrew earlier this year to focus on the “Idol” competition, and has no plans to go back anytime soon.

“Right now, I’m going to stay in L.A. for a week or two,” she said. “I want to see what I can do with this for a career. I want to strike while the iron is hot.”

Barba, who played the violin as a youth and gave lessons to neighborhood children, said she would consider acting or modeling, but still wants a career in music above all else.

She said she will reject any prurient career offers that come her way. Nor, she added, would she pose nude, or in partial clothing, for any reason.

“That is not the way I want to present myself,” she said. “I keep getting told no publicity is bad publicity. Yes, it’s true my name is more well-known because of it. But I’m not known for the things I want to be known for. I’d rather present myself in a more classy way.”

Residents in Point Pleasant, a Jersey shore town of 18,000 about 60 miles north of Atlantic City, supported Barba when news of the photos threatened to overshadow her appearances on the show.

Signs sprouted around town wishing her well. By Friday morning, however, they were gone, replaced with messages advertising youth baseball sign-ups, and even the imminent arrival of spring.

She’s not going to be able to extend her fifteen minutes much longer. These “scandals” have a shelf life of up to two weeks, and hers is already getting sour. Maybe if she upped the ante a little bit by posing nude she could wheedle her way into the public’s long-term memory, but she’s already ruled that out.

Here are some pictures of Antonella I haven’t seen yet, from Gambling911.com.

And here are some of the pictures that kept Antonella on Idol too long:

Unlikely American Idol finalist Antonella Barba has been a boon to the blogs on the level of Britney Spears’ weeklong crotch-a-thon last year. There are countless photos of her in lots of well-worn slutty poses like hot schoolteacher, wet t-shirt, and bored housewife. The search phrases “antonella barba bathroom pics” and “antonella barba blow job” are the top ones leading people to the site, so who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?

Here are lots more high res pictures of the slutty American Idol, who remains in the competition despite a “pitchy” rendition of Celine Dion’s “Because You Love Me” this week. Barba even sort-of compared herself to much more talented Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson when Simon dissed her performance:

Antonella retorted that she would listen to Paula’s (nicer) criticism because “Simon was wrong about Jennifer Hudson, so…” Simon didn’t hesitate to respond, “Let me be absolutely clear. We put Jennifer Hudson on to “American Idol”. The American public voted her out, okay. I didn’t kick Jennifer Hudson out.”

Such arrogance and bad singing would normally be grounds for dismissal from Idol, but when you’ve got half-naked photos plastered all over the ‘net people are bound to vote you in. I wonder how long this chick will stay and if producers will pull her if she gets into the top 5 on slut factor alone.

Pictures [via]

Update: Along with the pictures in this post, accessible from the thumbnails below, we also have Lots more high res Antonella Barba half nude pics from a private photo collection.

The many photos of 20 year-old Idol contestant Antonella Barba in slutty poses in various stages of undress and drunkenness just prove why that douche Joe Francis is a multi-millionaire: there are always hot vain girls willing to take off their tops, grope their friends and pose for pictures for little or no encouragement.

I pretty much ignored this Antonella Barba sex pictures scandal until it reached a fever pitch and I saw it on Yahoo! this morning. Since I’m not in the states and am deprived of seeing Simon’s many styles of black t-shirts, Paula’s slurry enthusiasm, and Randy’s vascillation this season, Antonella Barba just doesn’t register for me. This seemed like something on the level of all the slutty beauty contestant photos that came out. Interesting, but not Britney vag caliber material.

When the blowjob pictures came out everyone was like “This chick is done for on Idol.” Idol contestants have certainly been booted for less this season, one for a misdemeanor pot bust and another for an arrest stemming from pouring sugar in an ex-boyfriend’s gas tank. That was in the first round, though, and Idol producers seem to indicate in recent statements that they’re standing by Barba, who must be getting a lot of votes after this scandal hit the net. She is now in the top 24, and Vote for the Worst, a site urging people to vote for the crappiest singers on Idol, is gunning for her.

She doesn’t seem like a great singer to me in the one video I watched on youtube. She can sing, but she’s doing a lot of “runs” or whatever you call them and the judges all call her “pitchy.” She’s not on the level of past contestants and I would expect her to get voted off soon if it wasn’t for all those pictures. It doesn’t seem like she would have been able to get this far on Idol if she wasn’t so hot.

Now her best friend, Amanda Coluccio, who was with her on Idol (link leads to YouTube video) but got voted off after they were in the Hollywood initial round together, says she’s certain the BJ pictures are fake, but that all the other pictures were like, only meant for one person despite the sheer volume and number of different poses she’s seen in.

Speculation was that maybe-bitter Amanda was behind the release of the photos after an idol producer said on Friday that “It’s sad, isn’t it, that your best friends are the ones that come forward with information that will go to Smoking Gun or put your photographs on the Web?”

Amanda denies leaking the photos and says that Antonella’s position on Idol is not in jeopardy and that producers are now, uh, reviewing the latest material. She says Antonella is “horrified” and has been crying a lot over the scandal.

At first I was thought the pictures were kind of innocent because she’s seen topless on a beach with her friends posing and stuff. The party pictures are a little more racy, but most of them are not that damning to me and just seem like regular college stuff that you can see on myspace. (Pseudo-lesbian poses just do not register as scandalous to me anymore, but I look at this shit all day.) She’s also pictured on the toilet, which is dumb to let someone take a picture of, but not such a big deal. The pictures she’s probably most ashamed of are a lot of slutty ones of her in various naughty outfits, including one of her as a sexy schoolteacher and another of her frolicking in a fountain in a wet see-through top and panties. If an ex leaked them she should sue the hell out of him. She’s seen in two different slutty lacy lingerie outfits at what looks like a party. As these pictures only show her or her and one other person, it’s unclear if she’s just with her boyfriend and drinking a champagne while wearing a New Year’s hat or if she’s really wearing lingerie and an incredibly slutty Halloween outfit at two different parties.

Barba was an architecture major at a Washington, DC Catholic University before she went on Idol. She is from Point Pleasant, New Jersey, where residents have put up signs to support her in this trying time.

Thanks to I Don’t Like You in That Way, The Bastardly, and AntonellaBarbaPix.com for all these pics of Barba, and the IDLYITW e-mail sleuths for figuring out the BJ pictures are of another woman.