Google "Skank" Model Wins

While Google's (GOOG) epic battles with Microsoft (MSFT), Apple (AAPL), the federal government, and librarians around the world may change the course of human history, we know you really just want to know more about people who use Google to call models nymphomaniacal prostitutes. And today we are proud to say we can deliver!

This time last year, some nefarious gossip monger decided he or she really didn't like Liskula Cohen, a New York City fashion model who has appeared in Vogue and other glossy pubs. So he or she got a Google Blogger account and set up "Skanks in NYC," a blog dedicated to posting risque pictures of Cohen and sharing such observations as, "She's a psychotic, lying, whoring, still going to clubs at her age, skank."

Needless to say, Cohen didn't care for that kind of language, and she decided to sue the perpetrator for defamation. But first she needed to discover his or her identity, which was protected under Google's anonymous blogging policy. So she filed a court action against Google, seeking to force the company to give up the name. Google didn't like being in the middle of this one bit, so the company took the first opportunity it had to declare it would comply with any decision the court made. But the anonymous blogger's lawyers didn't see it that way and fought it to the end.

The end came yesterday, when Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Joan Madden ordered Google to give up the name of the gruesome gossiper. According to the New York Post, Madden dismissed the blogger's lawyer's argument that the site was merely nasty opinion and hyperbole, and ruled that the blog's characterization of Cohen constituted statements of fact that Cohen had the legal right to challenge.

And so, Cohen could learn the identity of her persecutor as soon as today. "I really hope it's not somebody I know," she told the Post.