There’s an AP story that a model named Liskula Cohen is suing for libel over some unpleasant blog entries. The blog in question turns out to feature 5 posts total, all put up in a one hour period on August 21, 2008. The blog writer evidently doesn’t at this point in time like Ms. Cohen, as may be inferred from the first post, which ends:
How old is this skank? 40 something? She’s a psychotic, lying, whoring, still going to clubs at her age, skank.Yeah she may have been hot 10 years ago, but is it really attractive to watch this old hag straddle dudes in a nightclub or lounge? Desperation seeps from her soul, if she even has one.
One question immediately jumps to mind,
Why file a lawsuit and get national coverage over an obscure anti-fan blog about you?
followed by two more,
- Is this part of some personal vendetta/counter-vendetta scenario? For example, is the blog author a hostile former lover of Ms. Cohen’s, or merely somebody who wanted to have been a lover of hers and didn’t get the chance?
Or is the whole thing just a contrived publicity stunt from beginning to end?
The story is now all over the blogosphere. I got it from K. C. Jones at Infoworld, but a quick googling shows many other references as well. If the goal was simply to suppress unpleasant comments, it has quite backfired.
I’m not saying filing a well-publicized suit was a bad move. Perhaps the publicity is good for Ms. Cohen at this point in her career. Perhaps the blog author is a nogoodnik who needs to be smoked out for other reasons. I’m just saying that libel suits are a really bad strategy for suppressing online commentary about you. Or as I put it before, you can’t get bad stuff about you deleted from the Web.
Note: If the blog in question gets taken down, and the links above are correspondingly broken, that won’t invalidate my point at all. Even when you “win” a battle of that kind, you usually lose the war.
Edit: It turns out Ms. Cohen has had nasty problems with other kinds of attacks in the past. But while that could certainly explain any errors of judgment, I stand by my core point: If this whole thing isn’t just a publicity stunt (and I suspect that at least the lawsuit part is), then it is indeed a mistake.
