Cohen described being caught in a kind of ideological tag team as early speculation by right-wing QAnon followers that that he was Q evolved into left-wing obsession with proving that he was the fraudster behind the postings, in order to demonstrate the moral bankruptcy of a top Trump administration official.
The rumors eventually began to seep into his real-life world. He recalls being approached at a pre-Covid cocktail party in D.C. “Someone came up to me and said, whispering, ‘Are you QAnon?’” he said, calling the incident disturbing.
Online, Cohen faced a slew of social media accounts falsely purporting to be him, tweeting out cryptic messages to QAnon followers. He said Twitter was slow to address the problem.“Twitter did a horrible job of responding to this,” Cohen said. “Twitter is getting very aggressive about the QAnon stuff now. But for a very long time they allowed this to fester. And it’s not like they didn’t know about it — we reported it to them.”
Cohen became so concerned about the proliferation of accounts suggesting links to him that he hired Washington-based lawyer Mark Zaid to investigate and push social media sites to shut them down.
While the first accounts explicitly impersonated Cohen, the next wave were more subtle, set up under vague names like @YourFriendlyE. While those accounts never directly claimed to be Cohen, they would quickly be identified, falsely, as Cohen by other QAnon-focused accounts.
“It was a cat-and-mouse game,” he recalled. “Every time we had an account get shut down, they would re-form and re-gain up to 20,000 followers and even higher within hours. And there would be this chorus of people online saying, ‘This is the new account.’” accounts would then send cryptic, ominous messages that allegedly came from Cohen. “It is only at the precipice that true and lasting change will occur,” one tweet said. “In order to fully expose the ‘Invisible Enemy,’ we had to bait them into a very contentious, bright light.”
This is like a Philip Roth novel in real life