“Will Google Out ‘Skanks’ Blogger Who Burned Liksula Cohen?” asked ChannelWeb after Cohen won the right to learn the identity of the blogger who called her a skank and other choice epithets on a now-vanished web site. They worried about the First Amendment implications.
We don’t know how the Bill of Rights will come out of this, but Cohen has emerged with the beaming countenance of the proverbial canary-eating cat. The Post tells us today that, using the blogger’s email address, which was all her legal exertions had won her thus far, Cohen learned that the blogger was a “female acquaintance.” (And we’d been presuming it was a man! We’re so sexist. Time for another diversity seminar.) And though yesterday Cohen said, “I really hope it’s not somebody I know,” she seems delighted with the revelation that it in fact is somebody she knows. “[I] called everybody and my mother and said ‘Thank God it’s her,'” she told Diane Sawyer on Good Morning America.
For someone of a certain turn of mind, what could be better than to win a significant, legal victory over your enemy, then engage her on her own turf and — forgive her? And we don’t mean the namby-pamby kind of forgiveness, but the kind that allows you to take a superior attitude to your vanquished foe, and to talk about her shortcomings as if you were just trying to understand her. Well played, former Vogue model; well played.