Maybe Lord Voldemort was a Premier League footballer who performed one too many magic tricks, becoming the original "He Who Must Not Be Named".
But it is unlikely that even the Dark Lord has ever felt as cursed as a certain Welsh wizard who, for the last few months, had been hiding behind a UK court injunction that prevented the media from identifying him as the mystery footballer accused of an affair with a reality TV star.
By the time he was finally outed on Monday by Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming in Parliament, it was the world's worst-kept secret that the man involved was Manchester United's Ryan Giggs.
Many had discovered Giggs's identity as far back as early April. The injunction taken out by the footballer in a London court, which prohibited disclosure under the UK's strict privacy laws, was no more than a finger in the dyke.
But now, the effectiveness of the law itself, just like Giggs's goody-two shoes (Reeboks, if you're wondering) reputation, has been blown to pieces. When the footballer decided to sue Twitter last week, the dam finally burst, prompting thousands across social networking sites to post his name.
Predictably, the jokes spread faster than a tricky footballer flying down the wing. One clever card identified Giggs as the only person in the world who was not being named in the suit - therefore, he must be the mystery footballer in question. And therein lay Giggs's greatest folly.
What was just a juicy scandal suddenly turned into a legal and historic landmark, with the British PM David Cameron now under increasing pressure to stop the high court from granting injunctions that protect the privacy of celebrities. If there is an exact opposite to what Giggs hoped would happen, it has happened. Expect a few kicks from some unhappy defenders next time you're up against Chelsea, Ryan.
By attempting to sue Twitter, Giggs was naively demanding that individuals be banned or punished. But that was hardly going to prevent users from creating new accounts, even identities, and plugging back into the matrix. In fact, like The Matrix films, they're likely to get increasingly more insulting.
This wide open, unregulated frontier of the internet was further highlighted last week when US Senator Jay Rockefeller called Facebook "indefensible" after revelations that millions of children under 13 years of age illegally have accounts on the social network.
Witness the tweeter whose abuse provoked Wayne Rooney's brutal assault on the English language a few days ago ("I'll put you asleep"). Or the mockery, mostly from his own fans, that forced yet another of Giggs' teammates, Darren Gibson, to close down his Twitter account within hours of setting it up. And we haven't even mentioned Michael Owen yet.
And while slandering Manchester United players is almost a national pastime, the viciousness with which online commentators abuse journalists, bloggers and others knows no bounds - in a venue that has no boundaries in the first place.
"We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare," Robert Wilensky, a professor at UC Berkeley, said as far back as 1996, before deliciously adding: "Now, thanks to the internet, we know this is not true."
While Prof Wilensky's often-quoted words might seem a bit harsh for the millions of more intelligent internet users, they still accurately describe the less evolved among us. Existing privacy and internet laws stand no chance against the chaos that exists in the virtual world.
For now, celebrities, rightly or wrongly, should brace themselves for more abuse, especially if they happen to be footballers playing away from home. When it comes to vitriol, few can match the words of a football fan scorned.
And that, as Ryan Giggs and all of Twitterdom now know, is more evil than anything Lord Voldemort could shake a stick at.
