Weasel of the Week: Yael Rothschild

You've probably heard about this on the news. After Novak Djokovic won the Australian Open tennis tournament last weekend, he threw his shirt into the crowd, intended for a 14 year old fan, Melissa Cook. This week's Weasel, Yael Rothschild, intercepted, thinking it was open season on the shirt. She ignored Ms. Cook, and the other fans around them.

Since then, according to a Yahoo! article, Mrs. Rothschild has been besieged. Someone on Facebook gave out her address, and the Rothschilds have had to deal with----wait for it----death threats. She put the shirt up for auction, instead of doing the right thing and giving the shirt outright to Ms. Cook, whose mother put up the winning bid for the shirt, the proceeds going to a anti-bullying charity.

So what's wrong with this picture?

1. Mrs. Rothschild made the first mistake by snatching the shirt away from Ms. Cook. She didn't know that it was Djokovic's intention to give the teenager the shirt.

2. Someone decided to embarass Mrs. Rothschild by announcing her address online. We don't know who this idiot is, otherwise, he/she would also get a set of weasel ears.

3. Other morons decided to make pointless threats toward Mrs. Rothschild. This is similar, though not the same as the threats issued to football players in Baltimore & San Francisco after their teams lost their conference championship games nearly 2 weeks ago.

4. Mrs. Rothschild, instead of trying to contact the Cook family, puts the shirt up for charity auction. This says she didn't want to profit from the incident, and chose the charity as a means of making amends. While that's understandable, there's also the old fashioned means of using a phone book to locate the Cooks and call them personally to arrange a delivery and a major mea culpa. Going the auction route only exacerbated the entire scenario.

5. Mrs. Cook was forced to spend nearly $6,000 to pay for a shirt that was meant to be a souvenir for her daughter, making her even more of a victim.

Bottom line: Mrs. Yael Rothschild's selfish act, followed by a questionable attempt at charity, gets her a pair of weasel ears. Free of charge, of course.