Dana Chivvis
Appearances
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Homosexuality was, and still is, illegal in Syria. Liz writes a post about Amina's disappearance. So does The Washington Post's Syria correspondent, and The New York Times, and The Guardian, and others. Liz calls the State Department. They tell her they're looking into it. A Twitter campaign gets going, hashtag Free Amina, and multiple Facebook groups, which get over 10,000 followers overnight.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Has anyone actually met Amina in person? Not just on the internet? It's a good question. In fact, when Liz emailed Amina asking for an interview, Amina had responded that for her own safety, she couldn't talk on the phone. So Liz had sent her questions by email. Do you remember the oh fuck moment that you had when you realized people were doubting her identity? Yeah.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
The Wall Street Journal reported that the photo of Amina on a gay girl in Damascus was actually a photo of a woman named Jelena Lecic, who is of Croatian descent and was living in London at the time. So Liz and her editor, Melissa Bell, start trying to figure out who Amina actually is. They look up the IP address of the gay girl blog. It leads back to Scotland, to the University of Edinburgh.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
And they get a mailing address for Amina from one of her online friends. It's a house in Georgia, the state, not the country, owned by an American couple who are studying in Scotland. They narrow in on the wife, a woman named Britta.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Syria believes in you. It's the same photo from Amina's blog post titled Irony.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
That's a smoking gun. Like, you never get that clear of an answer. Totally. Totally. Yeah. So they got to call Britta, but they can't find Britta's phone number. But they do find Britta's mom's phone number. They call her up.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
One of those husbands. What they learned about Tom. He's 40 years old, a Middle East fanatic, obsessed with the Israeli-Palestine conflict. He's getting his master's degree at the University of Edinburgh. There's more.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Okay, one last important detail about Tom's extracurricular activities.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
She's not just writing lesbian erotica. She's on dating sites. She's had an online girlfriend in Canada for the last six months. The girlfriend started one of the Facebook campaigns to free Amina.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
LesGetReal.com, for those of you who don't remember the sapphic offerings of the internet in the year 2011, was a website where a variety of writers blogged about lesbianism and the lesbian news of the day. Amina had written a bunch on LesGetReal.com, and the founder, Paula Brooks, had encouraged her to start a gay girl in Damascus that winter. And, Paula told Liz, they'd had a little online fling.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Liz explained to Paula what was going on with Amina.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
LesGetReal.com posted an apology to readers for publishing 19 articles Amina had supposedly written. Time to confront Tom. Liz reaches him on the phone. He's on vacation with his wife in Istanbul. And They're laughing a lot.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Other reporters had figured it out, too. Liz and Melissa decide to run with the story, that a gay girl in Damascus was actually Tom, a white dude living in Scotland. But before they can publish, Tom beats them to it. He confesses in a post on a gay girl.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
It's less picky than a gay girl in Damascus.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Tom writes the quintessential non-apology apology, says that while the narrative voice might have been fictional, he was describing a very real situation on the ground in Damascus, and he doesn't think he harmed anyone. Maybe you saw the whole thing coming, internet scams being what they are these days. Maybe you're thinking, hey, this whole story is a scam.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
I can't believe I paid no dollars for this. But calm down a second. There's more. Liz and her editor, Melissa, published their story on Sunday, six days after Amina was supposedly abducted. Their headline is, A Gay Girl in Damascus Comes Clean. After they post their article, Liz and Melissa are talking with a more senior editor. Everyone's pretty happy with the story.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
But there's something still nagging at Liz, a detail she can't get out of her head. It has to do with that other lesbian she interviewed, Paula Brooks, from lesgetreal.com.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Liz had emailed with Paula Brooks. Paula had sent Liz a photo of her driver's license as proof of identity. But Liz had only ever spoken with Paula's dad.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
So instead of celebrating a great scoop, outing Tom as Amina, Liz dove straight into investigating Paula Brooks.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Bill told Liz he'd had some lesbian friends who were mistreated and he wanted to help. He also wanted a platform where he could write in support of repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The real Paula Brooks, Bill explained, was his partner, who didn't know he'd been using her identity online to pose as a lesbian.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
For the uninitiated, a sock puppet hoax is when someone uses a false identity online. The day after they published their story about Tom being a Mina, Liz and Melissa published another one with the headline, Paula Brooks, editor of Les Get Real, also a man.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
By the time Tom's little lie had rolled all the way downhill, it was a pretty sizable lie with real world consequences. The Syrian government used it to suggest that everyone in the West was lying about the Assad regime's murderous tactics against activists and bloggers. They used it to suggest that gay people in Syria were really just agents of the West.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
In retrospect, Amina's writing, it's so bad. Like when her father supposedly says to the secret police, you know where we stood when Mohammed, peace be upon him, went to Medina. It's like the 1950s Hollywood version of how a Syrian man would talk. But what was good about Amina's writing, Tom's writing, is that it played for emotion.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
It confirmed what we were all feeling here in the West, what excited us about the Arab Spring. Democracy was ascendant, the bad guys were going down, the lesbians were taking over, or whatever. Amina was the lie we all wanted. I reached out to Tom, Bill, and Britta for this story. Tom and Bill definitely did not want to talk to me. Britta didn't respond.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
But the day after he was outed, Tom did some press. He said he had wanted to wind Amina down for a while, and he was going on vacation. So having her abducted was kind of his out-of-office message. Yeah, man, the internet, huh?
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
A lot's changed since then. The Washington Post, where Liz worked, is now owned by Jeff Bezos. Twitter is owned by Elon Musk. Instagram is owned by Facebook. Facebook has done away with fact-checking. And the president has his own social media platform, called Truth Social, where he regularly posts falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Kind of makes you long for the good old days, when the internet wasn't dominated by the most powerful, and people still cared what was true and what wasn't. The truth. So retro. It's a whole new world now. Except over here on the dusty old radio, where I still can't say shit or piss or fuck or cunt or cocksucker or motherfucker or tits. Not even tits.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Because, of course, think of the chaos that would ensue if I did.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Liz Flock was just starting out as a reporter in 2011, living in D.C., working at The Washington Post. This was the golden age of blogging and social media. Instagram was just a year old, basically a toddler. Twitter was five. And news outlets realized they could use these blossoming tools of the Internet to do a hybrid version of reporting. They called it the Breaking News Blog.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Liz was a reporter at The Washington Post's Breaking News Blog.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
The job was a combination of actual reporting and aggregation, basically reading other reporters' stories and various social media accounts and repackaging it all. I was doing a similar job around this time at AOL News. Our blog was called Surge Desk because we were supposed to create a surge of traffic for the website. Only I worked at AOL News, not the Washington Post.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
So I was reporting on Groundhog Day in Staten Island and writing posts about how solar flares are kind of like the sun is farting. Liz was writing about the Arab Spring.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Yeah. And it's just you and one editor. Is that right?
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
To keep up with all this from her desk in D.C., she followed a bunch of social media accounts and blogs. The Arab Spring, you might remember, was one of the first big social movements to use these online tools to organize. Rightly or wrongly, it was called the Facebook Revolution.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
One of the blogs Liz followed was written by a 35-year-old Syrian-American woman named Amina Araf, who had recently moved back to Damascus from the U.S. Her blog was called A Gay Girl in Damascus.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
She's openly critical of the Bashar al-Assad regime at a time when the regime was arresting, torturing, and murdering critics and activists. In one post, titled Irony, there's a photo she's taken of a billboard. On it, Assad's smiling face and the head-scratcher of a tagline, Syria believes in you. Below the photo, Amina writes, sure, in all caps and multiple exclamation points. She's provocative.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Legally, I can't let her read you the rest of this poem. FCC rules. So, a young, pretty, Syrian-American lesbian taunting the brutal Assad regime. It's not much surprise when the secret police show up at her house one day. On April 26th, Amina publishes a post titled, My Father the Hero. She describes a harrowing scene.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
It was the middle of the night, and these two young, muscly guys in leather jackets rang the doorbell of her family's home. They've come for Amina. They know about her blog, know that she's a lesbian. They threaten to rape her. But Amina's father argues with them, chides them. He knows them, knows their families. He says to them, quote, Do you know what is our family name? You do?
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Then you know where we stood when Mohammed, peace be upon him, went to Medina. You know who it was who liberated Al-Quds. You know too, maybe, that my father fought to save this country from the foreigners." He tells them to leave, and they do. Amina's post goes viral. Back in D.C., Liz decides to write about it.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Amina emails her back. And the next day, Liz publishes a post. Serial blogger says she faced arrest but remains defiant. In the article, Amina tells Liz, quote, Six weeks later, Liz goes into the office.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
The post says Amina was abducted by three government agents.