The model, Google, and ‘Skanks in NYC’

Model Liskula Cohen “is the victim of a vicious blog” attack, said Leisa Barnett in Vogue UK, and she’s fighting back. The blog “Skanks in NYC,” which is hosted by Google-owned platform Blogger.Com, posted photos of the former Australian Vogue cover model and called her a “skank" and a "ho." So Cohen is taking Google to court to force it to reveal the anonymous cyber-bully's name, so she can sue for libel.

Good luck, said John Timmer in Ars Technica. She’ll have to get past “Google and its army of lawyers.” And it's extremely hard to prove defamation in court, especially when you have to get a judge to unmask the blogger first. Bloggers face a “rough” enough of time of it as it is, regularly being arrested for their work—let this one go.

“A line has to be drawn somewhere,” said Robin Wauters in The Washington Post. People can't just trash others for no reason and damage their careers, just because they're doing it anonymously over the Internet. The blog “Skanks in NYC” is “targeting Cohen almost exclusively”—and the “attacks” are “rather personal and vicious.”

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Sign up

It's hard not to sympathize with Cohen, said Right Pundits. Her face was “disfigured in 2008 by a bottle-wielding hotel doorman,” a “violent event” that “reportedly ended her modeling career.” Whatever happens, the overnight fame of this blog, which has “precisely 5 posts in its history,” will be "the stuff of Internet fable.”