Outed Over Online Rants, Blogger Threatens to Sue Google for IDing Her
After someone started ranting online against Liskula Cohen, the model complained of defamation and managed to get a court order requiring Google to identify the once-anonymous blogger.
Allegedly, the individual who had described the 37-year-old on a Blogger site as a “skank” and a “psychotic, lying whore,” as well as an “old hag,” was a former friend, Rosemary Port, a 29-year-old student at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
Now Port has lined up a well-known lawyer and is threatening to sue Google for $15 million in federal court over being outed, according to the New York Daily News and PC World.
The search engine giant violated its fiduciary duty to her by violating her privacy rights, Port tells the Daily News. She also blames Cohen for publicizing a website that, Port says, would have been virtually unread if Cohen hadn’t pursued the defamation issue.
“I’m ready to take this all the way to the Supreme Court,” her lawyer, Salvatore Strazzullo, tells the tabloid newspaper. “Our Founding Fathers wrote ‘The Federalist Papers’ under pseudonyms. Inherent in the First Amendment is the right to speak anonymously. Shouldn’t that right extend to the new public square of the Internet?”
Cohen’s lawyer, Steven Wagner, says she is ready to drop her $3 million libel suit against Port in order to put the entire situation behind her and would have thought twice about pursuing it in the first place if she had anticipated that it would result in more headlines.
On her side Port planned to apologize on national television, but changed her mind after hearing that a mea culpa might not be a plus factor in defending a defamation suit, reports the New York Daily News in another article.
Hat tip: BoingBoing.
Updated on Aug. 27 to include information from second New York Daily News article.
