Though Amanda Bonnen can’t be found on Facebook, the Friends of Amanda Bonnen can—a support group less concerned with the elusive Ms. Bonnen personally than with the constitutional principle they say she now represents. The Friends’ call to arms asserts:
Conservatives ridiculed Douglas for this blatant act of “judicial activism,” but when’s the last time you heard anybody maintain that privacy is not our due? The way Douglas saw it, privacy must have been an inalienable right just too darned hard for the founding fathers to define. The Friends of Amanda Bonnen, asserting broader penumbras and fresher emanations, aren’t making the definition any easier. If Bonnen’s privacy was breached, who breached it? Horizon, by dredging up something Bonnen thought she was saying online to a friend? Or Bonnen herself, by tweeting? Presumably she thought her tweet was between her and @JessB123, but it was also between her and the handful of other friends who followed her on Twitter, and between her and anyone else on Twitter who might stumble across it, as her account was set to the default public option. Her tweet, like a Paleolithic cave painting, was now up on the wall of the Internet, waiting to be discovered.
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Horizon Realty Group made no such pretense. It sued Bonnen for libel on July 27. When the Sun-Times‘s Lisa Donovan asked if Horizon had talked to Bonnen before suing her, attorney Jeffrey Michaels, whose family runs Horizon, answered, “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization.”
The uproar that followed Wang’s post elicited one PR maneuver from Horizon—a maladroit public statement issued July 28 “The following statement can be attributed to Jeff Michael,” it began, thereby all but admitting that Michael didn’t write it (not alone, at least), and inanely continued, “The response to our libel lawsuit has been tremendous.”
But we get to know a Bonnen who doesn’t fit the description because Horizon saw fit to attach what appears to be a transcript of her entire brief tweeting history. (Her Twitter page no longer exists.)
“Modern wing today. :)” May 20.
