Obscenities Fly In "Skank" Hearing

Joshua Plaut slumped in the back of Manhattan's Supreme Court today, waiting for the judge and seemingly willing this whole affair to go away quietly. He hailed from the New York powerhouse law firm Wilson Sonsini, and Google was paying him top dollar to do as little as possible. The search giant, whose founders cling to their "Don't be evil" motto like guns and religion, had found itself in the middle of a tabloid frenzy, a courtroom drama pitting a statuesque Vogue model against an anonymous blogger who had decided the world needed to know she was nothing but a dried-up strumpet. For a company that prides itself on ennobling the world in between bouts of record-breaking quarterly profits, this was grief Google didn't need.

Last August, someone set up a Google blogger account and used it to create the blog Skanks in NYC, complete with photographs of New York model Liskula Cohen partying with her friends, as well as a few captioned observations about her sex life, age, and mental state. A horrified Cohen promptly got herself a lawyer and sued Google, seeking to force the company to divulge all identifying information the blogger provided when he or she registered the blog. The anonymous defamer's attorneys challenged the suit, insisting that federal law protects their client's online speech. Today, both sides met in court to duke it out.

The courtroom scene was Google's worst nightmare. On the one hand, the company has come under fire for collecting personal information from its users and storing it for months; if Google gave up the blogger too eagerly, its worst critics would have another barb with which to accuse it of playing fast and loose with its customers' privacy. On the other hand, who wants to be seen protecting some nasty, small-minded, cowardly gossip?

Reporters from the BBC, the Associated Press, and New York's most lurid tabloids packed the room, while cameramen waited to catch the players on the steps outside. Cohen sat quietly to the side, topping 6 feet in high heels and a black overcoat, tapping out text messages while waiting for Justice Joan Madden to arrive. Her lawyer consulted his brief by her side, and the blogger's legal army bivouacked on the opposite end of the court. Joshua Plaut was surrounded by a legal and media circus on all sides, doing his best to keep Google's role in this affair as small as possible. When Madden called the lawyers to the bench, Plaut took the first opportunity he had to declare, "Google will comply with the court's determination," sit down, and shut up.

Unfortunately, the show went on just fine without him. As Cohen leaned forward, her lawyer Steven Wagner argued that the blog's slurs were defamatory and actionable. Madden asked which slurs he was referring to, and Wagner had no choice but to read them aloud to the room:

"Nothing like opening wide to take that thing into my mouth AGAIN," he read, referring to a photograph of Cohen's face near a man's groin.