Liz Flock
Appearances
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
This was happening a lot at this point that activists were getting kind of hauled off the streets. But this was a person that I felt intimately connected to. Like I knew her whole story at this point. Like I'd read her whole blog.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
And so it was really scary. And obviously as a gay woman and a woman speaking out against the regime, like you're thinking that this person's dead. Yeah.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
So all of a sudden doubts start popping up about Amina. It really all started very quickly. Like on the same day that she wrote that she was kidnapped or detained by security forces or that the cousin writes that, Andy Carvin, who's NPR's Twitter senior strategist and had this huge following, basically asks Amina, Has anyone met Amina?
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Yes. I remember Andy asking that question on Twitter. And I remember thinking, wow, if this person isn't real, I have interviewed them saying that she is and given them a platform and caused this blog to probably increase in popularity. And yeah, that's a really scary moment as a super young journalist.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
I don't know if you remember this New Yorker cartoon from 1993 where it says on the internet, no one knows you're a dog, and it has this dog at the computer. So obviously people were thinking about this all the way back to the 90s, but I know I wasn't. It's not that I was trusting everything I read online, but I think I just didn't expect this gay Syrian woman activist...
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
who was blogging like a lot of other Syrian activists, they were all totally legitimate to be someone so different and Yeah, I mean, as the story progressed, it got creepier and creepier.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Britta was studying Syrian economic development. She had written about Syria for a Quaker group that she was the head of. and she had even posted photos of her visiting Syria with her husband. And she had posted this photo on the photo website Picasa showing a billboard of a smiling Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, with the slogan, Syria believes in you.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
I mean, it's not a photo that exists like thousands of times on the Internet. It is only in these two places. And we're like, oh, my God, this is the exact same photo.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
We explained the whole situation to her. I remember thinking this is so bizarre. Like, I'm sorry, but I think that your daughter is this person posting on this blog, pretending to be a lesbian woman in Syria. And to her credit, she was not like... Please leave me alone. She basically said, wow, this is so interesting. And I don't think it's Britta. I think it's Tom. Tom. Britta's husband.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Tom McMaster. And she was like, he's so involved emotionally with Syria. Yeah. He, you know, his interest has evolved from there. And she even said Britta complains about him spending his whole day on the computer. Aha.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
We find that Tom's cat is named Meowmar J. Gaddafi, which is basically the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's name. It's just getting, like, ridiculous at this point, to be honest. And then we find one more thing. And that is we find that Amina gave a five-star review to Tom's ESL school that he has in Atlanta. I know. I know.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
And this is when it starts to just feel like, oh, my God, this guy is absurd. So as Amina A., Amina writes, great school, great teachers. This is probably the best value for anyone who wants to learn English in Atlanta.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
So Amina is super active online, and part of that is flirting with women.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
And Amina... She's also flirting and writing on the blog of this person, Paula Brooks, who has a very popular blog. website about being lesbian called Les Get Real. Nice.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Paula and Amina spoke all the time online and even were engaging in like a relationship that it wasn't clear how flirty it was slash sexual it was. I think it seems like it was definitely romantic slash sexual.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
This is all online, like email and blog posts and, you know, corresponding about the blog posts.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Paula was outraged that this person was pretending to be a lesbian.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Like, they basically, they laugh off the idea that either of one of them could be Amina. And Tom is kind of like sarcastically laughing at me. And he's saying, he says something like, look. If I'm the genius who pulled this off, like, I would just say, yes, it's me. And I would write a book. Genius. Genius. Yeah.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
And then I went through all the connections we had, which at this point were like 15 different connections. And I think we called him a second day in the row. And then he started to get aggressive with us. And he said, like, thanks a lot for tracking us down and hung up on me.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
And the title of the blog is changed from a gay girl in Damascus to, let me find it, a hoax that got way out of hand. I never meant to hurt anyone.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Yeah. Well, actually, he retitles it A Hoax. Oh, OK. And then there's that subtitle.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
She says to her editors, So I interviewed Paula, but I actually didn't interview Paula because she's deaf. And I talked to her father because she's deaf. And he said she can't speak on the phone. And her father, like, weirdly knew a lot about the story. And basically now I'm doubting that everyone is real. Do you guys think that Paula Brooks is also not real?
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
It's the exact same thing as with Amina. Like, I can't talk on the phone, so I'll have to do it in this alternate way. But in this case, I'm deaf. And, you know, I didn't want to doubt Paula being deaf. Right. The dad was so weird. Right. And now I'm basically like, is every single person on the internet actually just a white dude pretending to be someone else?
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
So I call back the dad and I basically say, I know you're Paula Brooks. Oh, wow. You just went straight for it. I think we just went straight for it. Maybe we said, are you Paula Brooks? And he basically just said yes. Oh, what? My name is Bill Graber. Yep. He said, I'm Bill Graber. Then I said, like, who are you? Bill Graber.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
And it turned out he was like a retired construction worker who lived in Ohio.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Basically, Bill said that by running Les Get Real, he was surfacing issues for the lesbian community and helping in that way.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Yes. I mean, I would have loved to get those chats between Amina and Paula, a.k.a. Tom and Bill, two white men flirting with themselves, each thinking the other one is a lesbian. But I never got those chats. So we'll have to let our imaginations run wild on that one. But he, yeah. And Bill, you know what's funny? I still remember this.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
I was like, Bill, how does it feel to know that you were flirting with another dude thinking it was a lesbian? And he was definitely like put off by that. And he said this thing to me. He was just like, it was a major sock puppet hoax. Crash into another major sock puppet hoax.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
I mean, to the point. At this point, you can tell by how plugged in everyone is because we don't even need to explain more than that because everyone knows what's going on and is like glued to their computer's I mean, some people and Syrian activists in particular were like really upset by the whole situation, especially about Gay Girl in Damascus because it was taking like needed.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
It was like Boy Who Cried Wolf situation, which is like who's going to trust Syrian activists posting about this after this situation?
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
The internet. I mean, it's, oh, God, I know. And it was, like, so fun for just a short period of time where everyone was just like, is this thing on? Can I tell you about what I ate? Yeah.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Is this thing on? Can I tell you about what I ate?
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Very original. And what was happening at that time was the Arab Spring. So I was writing about protests in countries all over the Middle East every day for months on end.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
And I was writing about all these really complicated topics and I was really scared every day writing about them. Scared of what? Um, just that the responsibility that I had, the tremendous responsibility to write accurately and quickly about all of these really important subjects.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Yeah, it was me and my editor, Melissa. And we were kind of, we're actually the number one traffic driver for the Washington Post for a while. So we would get about 3 million page views a month. And we were encouraged to keep that up. So we posted as much as we could.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
She writes about her complex identity of being an out lesbian in conservative Syria, having grown up in the U.S. And on the blog, she writes poetry, she writes history. She writes what are basically like foreign policy op-eds.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
She sometimes writes more sexy poetry, I would say. I forgot about this, but I went back to it. And there was one piece called Testimony of Jasmine. And she writes, my sex to your sex, grinding in time with sounds of the city stretched out below. And it goes on and on.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
So the second I read her post, My Father, My Hero, I immediately reach out to her for an interview. I mean, we were interviewing lots of activists, but she's like the dream interview because she's so interesting.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
I am checking the blogs and social media, and I see that on Gay Girl in Damascus, there's a post not by Amina, and it says, Dear Friends of Amina, I'm Amina's cousin, and I have the following information to share. Earlier today at approximately 6 p.m. Damascus time, Amina was walking the area of this bus station.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
and they hustled her into a red Dacia Logan with a window sticker of Bashar al-Assad. The men are presumed to be members of the security services. Amina's present location is unknown.