Sunday, March 18, 2007

OrthoMom Makes it Big

No, not her latkes or kugel.

Her anonymous public profile as a result of the lawsuit pressed against her.

The NY Sun has this report:

Secret Blogger Seeks Protection

An Orthodox Jewish blogger is asking a judge to protect her anonymity from a Long Island elected official who has gone to court to identity the blogger.

The elected official, Pamela Greenbaum, a member of the school board for Lawrence, L.I., asked a state judge last month to force Google to identify the writer behind a popular Web log for the orthodox community in the Five Towns area.

The blog, orthomom.blogspot.com, featured a posting in January critical of Ms. Greenbaum's position regarding the use by yeshiva students of public school facilities. In guest comments to the postings, Ms. Greenbaum has been called a "bigot."

A lawyer for the blogger says the speech on the blog is protected by the First Amendment, according to legal papers filed yesterday in state court in Manhattan.

"It doesn't seem to me that a school board member ought to be suing to find out the identity of her critics," the lawyer, Paul Levy of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, said. "Harry Truman said, ‘If you can't take the heat get out of the kitchen,' What ever happened to that?"

Ms. Greenbaum has suggested that she intends to file a defamation lawsuit against either the blogger or commentators on the blog.


Due to this suit, OM has 121,000 results at Google at this moment. Nice for a Jewish girl from the Five Towns (okay, so her neighborhood is a bit upscale). And to think, I was cross-blogging with her when she was just small-time (kidding, OM, just kidding).

Let me know when you hit the New York Times, okay?

P.S. Please come back to this post on others concerning OrthoMom a few times. I am only on the second Google page when you search for "OrthoMom". I'd like a ride on her coat-tails or whatever it's called in female fashion.

2 comments:

Soccer Dad said...

Actually OrthoMom was in the NY Times a year or two ago. It might have been in a local LI edition, but she was mentioned.

orthomom said...

Thanks for the mention. And Soccer Dad's right, I was mentioned in the regional edition of the NYT a few years ago. Nothing like opening up the paper in the morning and almost spitting your coffee all over it when you realize your name (or in my case, my alter ego's name) is mentioned in it...