Domestic violence: Hilarious, apparently

IF YOU HAVE an Internet connection, you've probably seen the leaked police picture of Rihanna's battered face after she allegedly was beaten by then-boyfriend Chris Brown on Feb. 8. And man - if that picture doesn't make people stop thinking domestic-violence jokes are ironic or cute, SatTatt doesn't know if there's hope for us as a species.

The photograph, which police say had been kept under very tight wraps, somehow meandered out of the LAPD files and onto TMZ.com at about 8:30 p.m. Thursday. Although Rihanna's publicist declined to comment, the LAPD and her father seem furious enough to confirm its veracity.

What's kind of disturbing, even for a hardened Internet veteran like SatTatt, are some of the comments on the post.

The post is very spare, consisting only of the leaked photo with a TMZ watermark and the sentence "TMZ has obtained a photo of Rihanna taken after Chris Brown allegedly beat her." There's no commentary from TMZ aside from that one sentence identifying the battered but still recognizable woman.

You'd think there wasn't much to discuss, but by 9 last night, less than a day after the picture went up, there were 3,746 comments. That's nine times the number on the next-most commented-on post, which is about Chris Brown.

Most of the comments are just "OMG," expressions of sympathy or people reaming TMZ for being this tacky, but about, oh, a tenth or so suggest, jokingly and not, that Rihanna deserved to be badly beaten for the following reasons, picked at random from a wide field:

* She was ugly to begin with;

* She thought he wouldn't hit back - girls always do that;

_ She was cheating on him;

_ Chris Brown would never be so stupid as to wreck his career like this (wasn't that Blagojevich's argument, too?);

_ Love makes you do crazy things sometimes;

_ "Umbrella" was annoying;

_ She laughed at Britney Spears at the MTV Video Music Awards and karma's a mother;

_ She's from Barbados, and everyone knows women from Barbados just flip out sometimes;

_ She gave him herpes/AIDS/ every STD you can think of;

_ She didn't leave him sooner.

And don't forget that age-old standard, spoken everywhere men can't hold their own among women verbally and mentally: "She probably deserved it."

Anonymity makes people stupid, it's acknowledged. SatTatt is nevertheless creeped out.

Domestic violence affects one in four women over the course of their lives; you almost certainly know at least one. And jokes that revolve around a "She deserved it"-type punchline makes you sound like an idiot. Always. Every time. Yes, you. Yes, even if it's meant ironically.

The Daily News isn't running the photo. That'd be tacky. *

Daily News wire services contributed to this report.