Liberties : Stung by the perfect sting

By MAUREEN DOWD

Posted: September 1, 2009 at 4:22 a.m.

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NEW YORK — If I read all the vile stuff about me on the Internet, I'd never come to work. I'd scamper off and live my dream of being a cocktail waitress in a militia bar in Wyoming.

If you're written about in a nasty way, it looms much larger for you than for anyone else.

Gossip goes in one ear and out the other unless you're the subject. Then, nobody's skin is thick enough.

"The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered," says Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic. "The Internet is like closing time at a blue-collar bar in Boston. Everyone's drunk and ugly and they're going to pass out in a few minutes."

Those are my people, I protested, but I knew what he meant. That's why I was interested in the Case of the Blond Model and the Malicious Blogger.

Sooner or later, this sort of suit will end up before the Supreme Court.

It began eight months ago when Liskula Cohen, a 37-yearold model and Australian Vogue cover girl, was surprised to find herself winning a "Skankiest in NYC" award from an anonymous blogger. The online tormentor put up noxious commentary on Google's blogger.

com, calling Cohen a "skank," a "ho" and an "old hag" who "may have been hot 10 years ago."

Cohen says she's "a lover, not a fighter." But the model had stood up for herself before. In 2007, at a New York club, she tried to stop a man named Samir Dervisevic who wanted to drink from the vodka bottle on her table. He hit her in the face with the bottle and gouged a hole "the size of a quarter," as she put it, requiring plastic surgery.

This time, she punched the virtual bully in the face filing adefamation suit to force Google to give up the blogger's e-mail.

And she won.

"The words 'skank,' 'skanky' and 'ho' carry a negative implication of sexual promiscuity," wrote Justice Joan Madden of the state Supreme Court in Manhattan, rejecting the Anonymous Blogger's assertion that blogs are a modern soapbox designed for opinions, rants and invective.

The judge cited a Virginia court decision that the Internet's "virtually unlimited, inexpensive and almost immediate means of communication" with the masses means "the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions."

Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide "behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights."

Once she had the e-mail address, Cohen discovered whence the smears: a cafe society acquaintance named Rosemary Port, a pretty 29-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology student.

Cohen called and forgave Port, but did not get an apology.

She had her lawyer, Steve Wagner, drop her defamation suit.

But now Port says she'll file a $15 million suit against Google for giving her up.

Port contends that if Cohen hadn't sued, hardly anyone would have seen the blog. (If a skank falls in the forest and no one hears it : ?)

But Cohen says the Internet is different than water-coolergossip. "It's there for the whole world to see," she told me.

"What happened to integrity?

Why go out of your way solely to upset somebody else? Why can't we all just be nice?"

She said she may become an activist, and has been e-mailing with Tina Meier, mother of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old who killed herself after getting cyberbullied by the mother of a classmate who pretended to be a teen suitor named "Josh."

"If that woman had started a MySpace page as herself, that little girl would still be in her mother's arms," Cohen said.

The Internet was supposed to be the prolix paradise where there would be no more gatekeepers and everyone would finally have their say. We would express ourselves freely at any level, high or low, with no inhibitions.

Yet in this infinite realm of truth-telling, many want to hide. Who are these people prepared to tell you what they think, but not who they are?

What is the mentality that lets them get in our face while wearing a mask? Shredding somebody's character before the entire world and not being held accountable seems like the perfect sting.

Pseudonyms have a noble history. Revolutionaries in France, American founding fathers and Soviet dissidents used them. The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.

As Hugo Black wrote in 1960, "It is plain that anonymity has sometimes been assumed for the most constructive purposes."

But on the Internet, it's often less about being constructive and more about being cowardly.◊◊ ◊

Maureen Dowd writes for The New York Times.

Opinion, Pages 3 on 09/01/2009

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