Erykah Badu

A brainy beauty wants to expose the creep who slimed her as a "whore" on YouTube.

Carla Franklin, a former model with degrees from Duke and Columbia, is going after Google in an attempt to unmask the cyberbully who talked trash about her under three aliases on the company's wildly popular video-sharing site.

"People hide behind these shields and think they can just post anything," said David Fish, a lawyer for Franklin. "Hopefully, we can put a stop to this."

Franklin, a 2008 graduate of Columbia Business School who works as a consultant, was alerted to the slurs after her friends checked her out in a series of YouTube videos.

According to the suit filed in Manhattan Supreme Court, last year "JoeBloom08," JimmyJean008" and "greyspector09" posted "malicious and untrue" statements about Franklin on YouTube, along with unauthorized clips from a movie in which she appeared.

"This obviously was very upsetting to her," Fish said.

Franklin, who graduated from Duke in 1999 with degrees in biology and psychology, appeared in several YouTube videos put up by Columbia Business School that show her traveling to Africa and offering advice to incoming MBA students.

"Don't take things so seriously," she counsels in one clip in which she's wearing her graduation cap and gown.

Franklin is employing the same legal strategy used by model Liskula Cohen, who last year successfully got Google to unmask the rival who trashed the cover girl as a "skank" and an "old hag."

It's a tactic increasingly used by people offended by the Internet, including a New Jersey cop who was vilified by comments on a news site and a Louisiana official who didn't care for being labeled a "politician thug mobster" in the comments section of a newspaper's website.

Now Franklin has joined their ranks.

She seeks to have Google and YouTube turn over the names, addresses and phone numbers of whoever labeled her a "whore."

"She wants to make sure this doesn't happen to her anymore, or to anyone else," said Fish, adding that Franklin has a "pretty good idea" about the identity of her online tormentor.