Gay Girl in Damascus: A Viral Kidnapping And An Internet Fantasy

Every case file, interview, and archive tells a piece of the truth. I'm Kylie Lo and on my podcast, Dark Down East, original reporting is at the heart of every case I cover. I don't just retail crime stories, I investigate them. I'm speaking with families, searching court records, and piecing together the facts that have been overlooked and forgotten with time. The result? True crime storytelling that digs as deeply into a case as you do. You can listen to Dark Down East wherever you get your podcasts. Camside media. Hello? What is this? What do you want me to say? It's just a chameleon. Chameleon weekly. Oh. It's a warm night in serious ancient capital in May of 2011. Damascus is still known as the city of Jasmine, and tonight, Richley is sent to the air drifts through the tight winding alleyways of the old city. Amina Arraf, a 35-year-old Syrian American woman, is fast asleep in her family home. There's a knock on the door of her family's compound, because they don't just have a house or an apartment. They have a medieval mansion. And because it's an ancient family that traces its roots all the way back to the caliph who conquered Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire. This is the historian Andrew Oar, who teaches military history at Kansas State University, and who knows this story very well. The secret police have shown up. Her father is hauled out of bed to face them, and they demand he turn his daughter Amina over. Her father is surprised. Amina Lesso. She knows why the police are likely there. She's been writing a blog. She's talked about meeting with leaders of the protest movement, always a little bit shaded exactly what her role was, but the blog has clearly placed her in the middle of protest defense, and she's been calling for the end of the regime. She gets dressed, she goes down to the courtyard to face her fate with the secret police. Amina's father steps in. He's confused. He's angry. He demands to know what his daughter could have possibly done. And the secret police explain. They say she's been blogging, and she's against the regime. She's part of a salafis plot, an islamist radical movement against the regime. And her father says that's absurd. She doesn't even cover any more. How can she be an islamist? And if you've read her blog, you know she's calling for pluralism and tolerance. The officers are not having it. They push back, confronting him, with the reality that she's gay, and she talks in her blog about having sex with women. At the time, same sex relationships were criminalized in Syria under vague morality laws. And if he were a real man, his daughter wouldn't do this. They threaten to rape her in front of him. They'll show her what real men are, and basically that will cure her of being a lesbian, and you can watch is what they're implying. Amina's father isn't suede. He stands firm. How can you talk like this? What would your parents say? What would your grandparents say? He recognizes who they're related to, demands that they justify their actions again, saying that yes, she is done and said things I would not have. But basically she is who she is, and she is my daughter, and finishes by declaring, and if you are going to take her, you have to take me to. Remarkably, it works. The officers back down. They apologize and leave. She had used radical acceptance of his daughter's identity as a lesbian woman to save her life and their family. The story of this night titled, My Father the Hero and Written by Amina on her blog, Gay Girl in Damascus, was posted on May 7, 2011. It goes viral. That post was viewed in the six figures. It's getting in front of reporters for the biggest media in the world. CBS and the US, CNN, BBC, the Guardian in Britain, one French newspaper reprints that blog post in French, verbatim on its website. And suddenly Amina is a celebrity. This newfound attention is a double edged sword. First, it spells actual danger. The blog post is put a spotlight on Amina and her family at a time of growing crackdowns by the Syrian authorities. But it's also drawing international attention to Syrian dictator Bashar Al Assad's oppressive regime. And so, to many people, Amina is a hero, a symbol of hope and of resistance. There's just one problem. None of what you have just heard is true. These events never happen. And Amina Rauf doesn't exist. This is Camillean, a show about people who pretend to be something or someone they aren't. And I'm Josh Dean. This week, an internet hoax that got out of hand and held up a mirror to the West. That's after the break. Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers and on my podcast The Deck, I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice. As these stories deserve to be heard and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers, are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to The Deck now, wherever you get your podcasts. Rural Britain, is there any greater value out there than Gigaclear Fiber from only 19 pounds a month? It's out of this world, speed and reliability. Fast upload and downloadiness right here in rural tranquility. Satter dreams. Is that a bull? Gigaclear, faster broadband for rural Britain. From only 19 pounds a month, season sees apply. 18 month contract, prices may rise during contract. Check availability at Gigaclear.com. You're listening to Camillean the weekly. Amina's social media presence on things like blogs, message boards went back to 2002 or 2003. Andrew Orr is the chair of the history department at Kansas State. He mostly writes about empires and international relations. But he's also an expert in Amina Arraf. He's written a whole book on her. If you happen upon Amina back in her earliest days of puttering around online, you would have found what you might expect of a teenager growing up in the US in the early 2000s. Some foreign posts, a few dating profiles, even some early attempts at a clunky novel. This was a young girl experimenting and making the most of what the internet had to offer. She was finding her people online. She was clearly a science fiction fan. She would debate the value of different kinds of science fiction fandoms. She would talk about her favorite stories. As a Syrian American, her interest also naturally gravitated toward the political realities of the Middle East. She would leverage her background to try and make her arguments make more sense and penetrate into the minds of supporters of the Bush administration's desire to invade Iraq. Which of course actually happened when George W. Bush did in fact order the invasion of Iraq in 2003. She believed that Westerners were projecting their own politics onto the Middle East that they were treating Middle Easterners, especially Palestinians, but Arabs more generally and Muslims more generally than that, as less than human beings. That they tended to view them as problems, one historian infamously called people without history. The Austrian anthropologist Eric Wolf, if you're interested, who published the book of that name in 1985. And Wolf wasn't saying that these people didn't have history. He meant that people in the West often assumed they didn't. She became especially harsh against people she accused of pinkwashing. Because Amina was gay, and one thing she really didn't like was a tendency for liberals in the West to oppose Islamic rule on the basis that it was going to be worse for people like her. And she challenged that, arguing that Islamism was a far more diverse and pluralistic philosophy than Westerners assumed it to be. After graduating high school in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Amina moved to Damascus in the fall of 2010. She said she wanted to return to her roots and to reconnect with her Syrian heritage. She was teaching English and starting to hang out in activist circles. As a politically progressive gay, Western educated Syrian woman, Amina had a unique perspective that was very interesting to some of the friends she'd made on the internet. She has long-term relationships with some people at this point. She called up Brooks, the editor of Ledgeth Real, which at the time was the largest lesbian blogging and news site on the internet. Wanted Amina to start a blog to talk about this unique experience of being a Syrian American gay girl in Damascus. And so Amina does. This is the birth of the blog that would make her at least for a time internet famous. Gay girl in Damascus. One person who came across the blog around this time was Liz Henry, a fairly well-known and respected web developer in the Bay Area, who's been blogging since the early days of the form. My feeling in blogging was security through obscurity. I was like, wow, cool. There's people who come and check my blog, you know, and I go read theirs and we come into each other's blogs. The IFSOREN wasn't necessarily going to turn to you, where the IFSOREN is like the harsh gaze of the actual international news media. You could just live your life in the blogging shire for your whole life. In 2011, Liz was working for a site called BlogHer, a network of women bloggers promoting women writers around the world. People sent me Amina's blog as an interesting possibility for us to reach out to her and maybe syndicate her work. People flagged it for me because of the my father, the hero post, where she tells the story of her father standing up to the secret police. We linked to it from BlogHer and said, hey, look at this interesting blog post. It seemed like maybe a positive sign, like someone is daring to do this. Gagoron to Maskis got a fair amount of coverage and support, at least within a tight-knit community of bloggers and activists, especially those who focused on women's and gay rights. But human rights in the Middle East were also quite suddenly a subject of massive interest around the world. It all began when a poor fruit vendor decided he just wasn't going to take it anymore. Because in December 2010, more than 1,000 miles from Damascus, a young Tunisian named Muhammad Bouazizi set himself on fire outside of government building. He was protesting police corruption in her asment, and his death sparked mass demonstrations across his country. Within weeks, Tunisian's longtime dictator had fled the country. In one of the most astonishing episodes of our time, he was overthrown by a popular uprising sparked by the desperate act of one simple man. What happened next would become known as the Arab Spring, a wave of anti-government uprisings that swept across North Africa and the Middle East. It was being broadcast in real time on Facebook, Twitter, and on blogs. Democracy was going viral, sweeping from Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria. Now journalists have a source which seemed to be capturing the zeitgeist of the Arab Spring. It's all text because Amina explains that she doesn't have secure telecommunications in Syria. It's hard to get a signal. Also I don't trust that the secret police can't listen in or use the video to trace where I am, things like that. She's been at major protests. She never quite says I'm a leader, but she implies it. And she has privileged access to leaders who aren't saying what their strategy is in public for good reasons. But Amina is telling the story of Syria in a way that Americans who supported Obama can see their own political story being retold. And there are versions of this in every Western country. Amina now had a whole new audience of fans, activists, and journalists to engage with. So Amina is communicating in all those ways and people are communicating about her. Because there are other people who are saying yes, I've known Amina for months. We've exchanged messages. She's commented on my blog, things like that. In the midst of all this, Amina had struck up a romantic relationship with a woman in Canada called Sandra Vagaria. Someone she had met on a dating site. So she has this whole ecosystem of friends, of colleagues, of family members, especially her cousin, Rania, and who at one point in the middle of the blog was established as having access to the blog that she would be able to post even if Amina couldn't. Amina was about to become important. Because in June 7th, Amina's blog was updated. And there's no way Amina could have done it herself. So I was going into my office in Silicon Valley and I think the instant I got to work, I started getting all these texts, emails, maybe even a call. People were contacting me to say, oh my god, Amina has been kidnapped. He's been detained by the secret police. Amina needs your help. This was coming to me because people knew that my partner was working for the committee to protect journalists at the time and was in fact working on expanding the concept of journalism in that organization to include bloggers like Amina. You know, I'm waking up to it in California, but it had been kind of rolling for a while on June 7th earlier in the morning. So there was already a hashtag, there was like a graphic that said, free of you know, these wings and that was already kind of going on. The truth about Amina was about to come crashing down. And the reality of who was really writing that blog was about to come out. And it would all only take a few days. That's after the break. Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers and on my podcast The Deck, I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons, designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice. Because these stories deserve to be heard and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers. Are you ready to be dealt in? Come to The Deck now, wherever you get your podcasts. A rural Britain, you'll suffer too long. Your days of sluggish broadband are over. We're connecting rural homes to full fiber with thousands more joining every month. Team minus five. The gig of versus expanding before my very eyes. Gigaclear, faster broadband for rural Britain from only 19 pounds per month. We have lived off. These in season five, 18 months contract prices may rise to ring contract. Check availability at giggerclear.com. Welcome back to Camille. Until our kidnapping, Amina Arrofs, gay girl and Damascus blog, this brave queer voice daring to speak out from the inside of one of the Arab Springs. Most brutal regimes had a small but dedicated audience. But our kidnapping changed everything. The fact that I'm sitting there in Paris in an apartment, seeing a friend talk about it on Facebook and reading about it in the BBC means that the audience has just grown exponentially. And so it is far harder now to sustain the fraud. Before this point, the odds that anyone reader might go to the trouble of actually fact checking Amina's life and claims was pretty slim. So I investigate somebody for whom you see no immediate red flag and who is saying what you want to hear. But once it goes global, now you have a much more diverse audience. And so they're much more skeptical about claims that rely on Amina's political identity to self-fality. They're going to be harder to fool. So you now have created a political problem because this famous enough blogger, she's being talked about is kidnapped. She's an American citizen. The US government will be expected to help. The Al Cry was immediate and loud. Readers of the blog, and many others who only heard about it after the kidnapping, were in fact demanding that the US government step in. Behind the scenes, they were already on the case. It's hard to help someone who's essentially a ghost, just a name and some words on a screen. To actually help Amina, you'd need some proof of her existence, documents, share, but also friends and family members to connect with. Interestingly, there is no public database of who is a US citizen, but there is a list of people with American passports. Amina wasn't on it. Do she was using a pseudonym on her blog? State Department investigators checked the courthouse in Georgia, where Amina had claimed to come from. They could find no one who even slightly matched the background of the person writing under the name Amina Aroff. They message Rania. Nothing. State Department reaches out to Amina's partner, Sandra Bagaria. She doesn't have any papers either. The State Department says nothing because their responsible diplomats, they don't know what's happening. Their silence is the dog that didn't bark. And that sets off some alarm bells. There's no one on TV talking about her from firsthand experience. She has family in the US, but her mother's not in Damascus. Why isn't she on CNN? Sandra's her girlfriend, but Sandra, who everyone can tell is real, has never met her, has never spoken to her on the phone. It's all been text. The lack of that ecosystem speaking to camera at a moment when her life is at stake makes a lot of people nervous. Now you have a lot of people who need to dig. Now the whole thing is a different kind of story. Now it's not what happened to Amina. It's who is this person? I was like rustled. Liz Henry had been thinking about online identity for a long time. She'd even been involved in uncovering some previous digital hoaxes. When she first saw the news about Amina's kidnapping, she was captivated. Because many of the activists she's worked with and respected online were up in arms. She signed some petitions, sent many messages, even wrote to her senator. But Liz also didn't just accept the story. She did her due diligence and found that the reporting about the incident pointed to one source in particular, Amina's blog, which she began to devour and analyze. What I saw was indicative to me of a fabulous. It sounded much more like fiction. It sounded more like someone experimenting with a persona. And a lot of people who are not from the Western world and have a gay lesbian identity spotted it and called it much earlier. The descriptions of what it was like to be a lesbian to mask us, people just were like, this is not accurate in any way. It's not how anyone would live. By afternoon of June 7th, I had decided that Amina was not real and was a hoax. And I blogged about it on my blog to say, I'm so sorry. This is like a painful thing to say in case I'm doubting the existence of a real person because you sound like a unicorn. And I'm a unicorn. So I feel that you might be like, oh, yeah, a purple haired, queer trans wheelchair user in San Francisco sounds fake. The exercise brought her no joy. I would hate to have my existence doubted and I'm finding it painful to continue doubting Amina as she wrote. If she is real, I'm very sorry and will apologize and continue to work for her release and support. It was quite a journey. Within a half day, Liz's POV had shifted from extreme worry about this poor woman half a world away to extreme focus on solving the mystery of what sure seemed to be a fiction. And from that moment on, I was sucked into the investigation to track down the source of the hoax. Liz quickly joined forces with a number of other skeptics online and the eventual hunt for Amina's true origins ended up pulling in a lot of different people. For instance, a group called Electric Intifada, which had begun its own investigation, as an NPR. So we were all chatting on different channels, some email, some texting, working together in different Google docs and kind of thing. I was down the rabbit hole and I was talking to the media and my work people were like, we see what's happening. We just have a few days to just like obsess on this. It's fine. You don't have to do your normal job. Go for it. Just mention us once in a while and we'll be mentioned on the BBC and that's great. Do you remember the editor of Les Get Real? A woman named Paula Brooks who ran the new site that had published some of Amina's early writing? She was a death mother of twins and I think an adopted death boy from Belize. She lived in the outer banks of North Carolina and she had a dog called Sammy the Surf Dog. We love to surf on a surfboard and they would report on weather conditions in the outer banks and she would write about her life. And when I looked at Paula's blog, something seemed off. Still, Les felt like she should speak with Paula. She reached out and asked for a call. She explained that she couldn't talk on the phone because of being deaf and instead you would talk to her father, the major. The idea that this woman couldn't talk to you on the phone, I was like, I know deaf people and they communicate the way that they communicate but it's not by having their 65 year old dad talk to you for them. So for me as a disabled person, it rang super untrue and it fit that pattern of, I've got to come up with a reason why I can't talk to you. As I expected guest, the real reason Paula couldn't talk was because she wasn't actually Paula. She was a man named Bill Graber, a straight married man in his 50s from Ohio who had been operating Les get real all along. And in a fabulous twist, it came out that Paula Brooks and Amina had been sexting each other. Okay. Anyway, Paula, sorry, Bill didn't seem to be in on the Amina scam. He argued a lot of reasons why Amina would be real but also he did provide some useful information for the investigation. Paula engaged both ways. Yeah. Why not both. Paula was in a, I'm getting lots of attention. The Washington Post is talking to me, kind of position. Next on the list was Sandra Bagaria, Amina's friend in Canada who didn't just know Amina. She was in a romantic relationship with her. I had to do a video meeting just to make sure we, I was talking to a person and not the hoaxer. I quickly decided she wasn't just from talking with her. She seemed authentic to me. Among other things, Liz learned that Sandra had never actually met Amina. Leading up to the detention, they had plans to meet in person in I think Italy. So those pressures, as they start to squeeze the hoaxer, they usually fake a death or something like that. They have to keep like inventing reasons they can't meet you in person. The real breakthrough came the next day when a woman in London named Yelena came forward to say that the picture of Amina that had been splashed all over the internet was in fact her. It had been scraped from her Facebook. It was the photo they sent to Sandra to capture. That is, the photo came out because of Sandra providing the photo. That's a picture of an Eastern European woman living in London who wakes up one morning to find friends and family saying, um, when did you become a Syrian lesbian activist? And she's like, yes, those are my pictures. No, I'm not a Syrian woman. No, those aren't pictures of me and Damascus. Those are pictures of me in Paris. And yet, despite the rising tide of evidence, people were still defending Amina's authenticity. They suggested that she was using a pseudonym or was simply hiding her identity behind fake pictures because she was in so much peril. None of it slowed lives in the other investigators. They just went deeper into the rabbit hole. When you start suspecting somebody, say you're online, you're reading, I don't know, Reddit or something. You're reading on Facebook and there's somebody with a controversial stance and then there's somebody who agrees with them and someone who argues with them. And then it goes back and forth and it piles up. Both the person who agree with them and the person argue with them might also be them. It's a way to elevate their profile. They pay attention to themselves with all their different socks on their different hands. This is why the phenomenon of operating multiple fake online personas is known as sock puppeting. Liz and the others went deep to look into Amina's community back in her early blocking days to root around for clues. Could any of the people she'd been interacting with in those early days when virtually no one was paying attention have actually been the hoaxer? There were likely candidates that were all sort of, I don't know, there was like lesbian, poet, teenagers all in Virginia who all were sleeping with each other or had some kind of drama. But the smoking gun came from a guy named Scott Parker. He'd been a regular on one of the lists Amina liked to be part of. So we thoroughly doxed this poor guy from the alternate history mailing list. And Scott was like well I sent Amina a Christmas card once and he found the address he had for Amina that he had sent the Christmas card to years ago. It pointed to an address in Stone Mountain, Georgia, which is precisely where Amina said she'd grown up. But there was no record of Amina ever living at that address. Instead it was the home of a man named Tom McMaster who was at this time pursuing a postdoc in Middle Eastern studies in Edinburgh, Scotland, which pricked everyone's ears because someone ultimately traced the IP addresses of Amina's posts and many of them had originated in Scotland. Also, Tom was a frequent Engager with Amina on that long ago forum or mailing list. Tom and Amina would have whole discussions. I think several of us had come up with him as a strong possibility and I'm pretty sure it was Ben from Electronic in Defada who really mailed it down. Ben Dorety, she means, and he, like Liz, takes the subject of online investigations very seriously. They needed to be sure and to give proper warning before actually doxing a suspect. We were like we're gonna tell the media who this is and we need to just like at least give him, you know, an hour heads up that this is happening, you know, because we felt compassion for him even so on some level. Very shortly after contacting Tom McMaster, a new voice joined the online conversation. A woman named Amy Young. There was a point just after Ben contacted Tom, Amy then called me on the phone to beg me not to reveal the identity of the hoaxer because what if they were actually a trans woman and it was gonna damage them psychologically to have the spotlight turned on them and that as a gender career and queer person, I should feel solidarity and acting solidarity with that trans woman. There were real trans women that we found in the investigation who were not hoaxing anybody but who didn't want to be looked at very closely. So people have real reasons to not want to be looked at closely. They didn't want to be outed and it was tricky to re-intenavigate. A clever tactic but it felt like a classic misdirect. Liz was pretty sure this was just a trick to try and stop the investigators from revealing the hoaxer's identity. She was pretty sure it was Tom McMaster she was speaking to although Tom has denied this. It sounded like it could have been a trans woman or a man speaking in a higher register. And for the record, Tom McMaster is not a trans woman. Although you might say if Tom were leaning that way or exploring a trans identity, this might have driven them right firmly into the closet. None of this felt very comfortable to Liz. No matter their identity, they had perpetrated some harm that needed to be brought to light and that I wanted Amy herself. And or I mean I assumed they were the same person and I spoke that way. Tom that they would get the support and help that they needed and be safe. It's not like I wished harm on this person. I did feel a complex compassion and worry for that person but I felt kind of a deeper worry for like the extended community that was people I didn't know and would never know who were actually on the ground who were like you know queer and living in the Middle East. On June 12, 2011, Electronic Intifada made a statement to the media saying what they all believe to be true. Amina Arath was Tom McMaster, a student living in Edinburgh. He immediately denied it. But the evidence has reached a point that it's going to break even if they deny it and eventually they're in a position where somebody has to say it's me and Tom admits I'm Amina Arath, it's my blog. I'm the hoaxer. Here's McMaster's written response being read out on CNN. He said my intentions were good. I got carried away. I owe apologies to those I hurt and will do all in my power to make things right. I only wanted to set forth real information through the use of artfully crafted fiction. I was too successful and I was too caught up and what I was doing I ignored the consequences of my actions. He seemed to imply that his motives were pure that he was just trying to get attention for the people of Syria and their cause and attack the media as a coverage of the Middle East as racist and denying Middle Easterners their voice, which is an amazing apology coming from a man who had just done what he'd been doing. My theory about the origin was that he felt that his voice wasn't given enough credibility and so he invented this persona to speak as Amina and then people paid more attention to what he had to say. I was unimpressed with what he had to say and didn't think he ever really apologized or took it to heart. Last I heard he still tries to justify that he was my least favorite phrase ever a voice for the voiceless. What he did was to put a target on the back of queer people throughout Syria and the Middle East. People who are extremely vulnerable in the middle of a burgeoning civil war. People are tortured because they're gay in Syria during the revolution. People are sexually assaulted. People are killed. He put people's lives in danger to very people who he was claiming to be one of through what he was saying. Tom's blog had railed against the West for silencing authentic Middle Eastern voices. But in pretending to be a Syrian lesbian he'd very likely done actual harm to that cause, to future aminus. If you really want to amplify other people's stories you should find the people get their consent and highlight their work and bring them whatever attention they want to bring to their story but let them speak for themselves. It's just terrible. If you want a right fiction fine, right fiction but yeah to actually speak is that person. It's deeply harmful. He wasn't even just recycling people's autobiographies and repackaging them. He was just making it up and making it up based on things that validated what he wanted to be true. He was just imposing an Anglo-American progressive reality, making the real Syria vanish and a progressive theater of a Syria appear. I think part of why people are still talking about the story is that like many of these literary hoaxes it shows us that we want to believe the hoaxers because they know how to be plausible to us the audience. And us the audience is white people who are a bit naive about this intersectional identity. So we're like in the US, we're in the West. We want to hear a story of someone who has a marginalized identity and who wants to come and tell their story to us. People just like him, that's who this hoax worked with. People who shared his values and so he knew how to talk to them in ways they would respond to. This blog is not designed to get conservatives to agree with McMaster. It's designed to get liberals and progressives to agree with McMaster. He'd have needed to design Amina differently to talk to like Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, you know, Newt Gingrich supporters. Yeah, he wasn't some sort of you know, shadowy figure who knew he was engaged in an influence operation, right? Some KGB operative who's faking in an atrocity story or something. He believed that's what Syria was going to be like. He believed that's what the revolution would be. He didn't have great evidence and he should have known better, but he thought he was telling the truth. He was actually just telling his truth. On June 13th, Tom McMaster came out of the shadows. He gave an interview to Esther Adley of the UK's Guardian newspaper Overskip. I don't feel incredibly happy with myself. You know, I wish you know, in retrospect, I would have done things very, very differently. He expressed some regrets, particularly for the people he had directly misled, including Sandra. Who'd fallen in love with his make-believe blogger. He agreed that this project, whatever it was, had gotten out of hand. I was expecting to get um, 5, 10, maybe as many as 20 hits. I looked at it earlier today and I had 740,000 and that is something just massively beyond any expectation. But he stopped short of a full apology. Do you regret the creation of the blog altogether? Yes and no. I regret that, you know, a lot of people feel that I led them on. I regret that, you know, quite a number of people are seeing my hoax as distracting from real news, real stories about Syria and real concerns of real actual on the ground bloggers where people will doubt their veracity. What I don't regret is the fact that I did hopefully bring a good bit of attention to real human rights abuses in Syria, the real situation that real people are facing, even if through a fictional voice. There's no way Tom McMaster could have predicted just how far this would go, that is writing what end up in the hands of the State Department and become one of the defining stories of the Arab Spring. But in telling what he claimed to believe was a greater truth, Tom put real people in danger and hurt others. And I think it's hard for him to admit it because he is a human being and admitting it comes at a huge emotional cost. You have to admit the damage you did, you have to admit you were lying to people and not admitting it might also make it easier to try and explain the architecture of relationships that he created. If it was a noble enterprise, it's a lot easier to try and explain to yourself why you created an entire romantic relationship with the human being and reduced her to nothing but like your personal amusement and a prop in your political theater. And that interview with the Guardian, Tom denied he was playing any other characters. All my online playing has come to an end, so. But neither Liz nor Andrew was convinced by this. I would be surprised if he doesn't still do this. You know, someone who does this and creates a lot of personas and identities and sock puppets is probably not going to stop doing it. I don't know, but I think for a while he was trying to connect to my social media. I got some Twitter account or something that happened to have like the actual name of a science fiction writer that McMaster loves who wrote under a pen name trying to like connect to my social media. I don't know if it was Tom, but I just probably was. It's something Liz Henry says that's just a lot more common than we think. People still do it all the time. I mean, now the landscape may be its resident, but now if someone said, oh, there's a blogger detained in Syria, I don't think that the international news media would be jumping on it. In fact, it's possible the only reason they jumped on it then was, well, a, the Arab Spring going on in the background, but the lesbian angle was interesting to people because it sold. The internet is full of people pretending to be who they're not, and for all kinds of reasons. It's now common for teenagers and I think it's usually teenage girls. So I don't want to put it on men pretending to be women. There's kind of a whole phenomenon of teenage girls who just go and play with different identities online and fake a whole story and go on, you know, am I overreacting or whatever read it and, you know, tell a complicated drama and they're practicing their fiction skills much like Tom may have been doing. The story of Amina Arraf is often remembered as a bizarre internet hoax. A cautionary tale that reminds us to actually ask questions and especially to pay attention to who we're listening to. But we also need to pay attention to who's listening by which I mean ourselves because it's just so easy to believe the things we want to hear. Stay vigilant out there folks. Communion is a production of campsite media and audio chuck. This episode was written by me Josh Dean and Joe Barrett and produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Siminoff, sound designed and mixed by Tiffany Dimack, theme music by Ewan Lightramu and Mark McAdams. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriatis, Matt Cher and me Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow and review Camillean on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help. And if you have any feedback tips or story ideas, you can email us at CamilleanPod at campsitemedia.com or leave us a message at a special number we've set up. 201-743-8368. Dial plus one from outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. To 100% full fiber, giga clear, faster broadband for rural Britain from only 19 pounds a month. Price may rise during contract. Tasons to use a fly. Check availability at giga clear.com. Hi everyone, Josh Dean here. On our show Camillean, we dig into real world deceptions that are just plain mind-boggling. Cons, cover-ups, and the people who stop it nothing to hide the truth. But sometimes, certain events simply defy explanation. If you're drawn to stories that go beyond the explainable, check out So Supernatural. Each week hosts and sisters, Russia and Avent, explore strange encounters, larger than life legends, and stories that defy logic. And then, unravel every possibility along the way. If you're ready to dive into the unknown, listen to So Supernatural wherever you get your podcasts.