We could not make this up.
Where do MacMaster’s and Graber’s actions belong on the continuum of authenticity? Just to the left of “a little taller, a littler richer”?
Or on another spectrum entirely?
How neatly they fit into a long line of people who aren’t who they seem — people who aren’t people at all — online.
Kaycee Nicole was a high school basketball star whose brave battle with leukemia enthralled her thousands of blog readers back in the early 2000s, up until the day she died, when followers learned that she had never existed at all. Kaycee was the alter ego of a suburban mom.
A few months ago, the Web was alight with sympathy for Paula Bonhomme, a Colorado woman who learned that her firefighter fiance hadn’t died unexpectedly of liver cancer. He wasn’t real — just a creation of another woman who got carried away.
And, in a story that reeled in everyone from Keith Olbermann to Mr. Rogers back in the 1990s, Anthony Godby Johnson was a young boy with AIDS who was really a very disturbed woman in New Jersey, spinning a telephone and online lie that got increasingly out of control.
The psychiatric community has even come up with a term to describe this sort of behavior: Munchausen by Internet.
In each of these instances, the lie got too big. The fake personality became too interesting to the real readers. In the case of Paula Bonhomme, she wanted to meet the man she had agreed to marry. In the case of Anthony Godby Johnson, his fans wanted to meet the boy they had counseled and championed.
In the case of Amina, her fans cared more deeply than MacMaster probably thought they would when he told them that she had disappeared — the plot twist that prompted legions to investigate.
He had been looking for an out. He told The Washington Post, “I had been struggling for a way to let things up.” He said that he’d seen the Amina persona as a way to stretch his creative-writing muscles.
Where does creativity begin to bleed into conning? Is it the moment when strangers become emotionally invested? Is it the moment when famous journalist strangers become emotionally invested? (Andrew Sullivan and Peter Beinart, both well-known writers, were vocal supporters of “A Gay Girl in Damascus.”)
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