Live In a Blissful Bubble For Your Own Safety

December 10, 2017 4:47 PM

A 13-year-old girl managed to become a writer for on-line sports publications. She pretended to be a man and kept up the masquerade for eight years.

During this time she harassed and insulted women on line, even getting nude photos from a few before being exposed.
This Twitter stream is interesting and is the place from which the title to this piece is taken.
This piece has some background on Baseball Prospectus, the major site that Schultz wrote for.

posted by CCBC (51 comments total)

“If you’re going to make up an entire false identity, why would you make yourself into a shitty person?”

Successful role models?
posted by chavenet at 4:57 PM on December 10, 2017 [41 favorites]

Damn. I don't know her background but it reinforces the notion that the abuse and manipulation that she inflicted on others was not sexual but about obtaining power and control over others.
posted by fizzix at 5:14 PM on December 10, 2017 [6 favorites]

The post-script is in keeping with the rest of this tale:

Update: “Schultz” has returned to Twitter to post an apology:

pic.twitter.com/JFsq7HAQtE
— . (@rschultzy20) November 9, 2017

The very model of a modern public apology.
posted by bunbury at 5:19 PM on December 10, 2017 [2 favorites]

I remember reading this story about a month ago. Wild. This part jumped out at me:

It’s entirely reasonable that at the time she created the Ryan persona, she might not have thought she could easily have a career writing about baseball as a woman. She’s also drawn a big red arrow sign pointing toward the exploitative ecosystem of online sportswriting, which created the conditions for her to get her enviable opportunities without much interrogation from editors who have a lot to do and few resources with which to do it.

I mean, sure, it's undoubtedly easier to get hired as a sportswriter as a man than as a woman. I can see a 13 year old masquerading as a man on the internet. But the solicitation of nudes? The threats of self harm? There is much more to it than simple plain old sexism in hiring practices.

I do wonder about the hiring practices too. On the one hand I sympathize with overworked editors to some extent, but was an I-9 form not required? Do employers like BP not routinely do background checks? I guess maybe she wasn't an employee just an independent contractor or suchlike?

Most of all I'm just floored that nobody figured anything out sooner. The girl (and later, woman) did not do a very good job of making up a false identity. It seems like anyone with 10 minutes and some decent google fu could start poking some holes in the fake background. At some point Becca must have recognized that this couldn't go on forever, that eventually she'd be found out.
posted by axiom at 5:21 PM on December 10, 2017 [6 favorites]

I can’t imagine how violating it must feel to be catfished like this. I have no doubt that Schultz could have been suicidal, but threatening suicide to get nude photos is textbook abuse, and it’s no less disgusting that it came from a false identity.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 5:29 PM on December 10, 2017 [9 favorites]

Technology has enabled 13 year olds of today to pull off and sustain things without adult intervention that would have been impossible when I was a difficult teenager. I agree she's behaved very badly but also think that some mercy is appropriate.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 5:48 PM on December 10, 2017 [15 favorites]

Damn. I don't know her background but it reinforces the notion that the abuse and manipulation that she inflicted on others was not sexual but about obtaining power and control over others.

That may be so, but I don't see how it follows from this dark, (yet oddly hilarious) chain of events.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:56 PM on December 10, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'm simultaneously appalled and deeply impressed.
posted by roolya_boolya at 6:02 PM on December 10, 2017 [29 favorites]

After her formative years of school and of media, what has a thirteen-year-old girl learned about men that is true? They harass. They insult. They are cruel for no reason. They use sex against women. I knew it when I was her age, just as millions of other girls did and do. Surely she knows that there are men who do not do these things, but she has also observed that the men that other men think best of do it all the time.
posted by Countess Elena at 6:06 PM on December 10, 2017 [77 favorites]

That may be so, but I don't see how it follows from this dark, (yet oddly hilarious) chain of events.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:56 PM on December 10 [1 favorite]

I'm simultaneously appalled and deeply impressed.
posted by roolya_boolya at 6:02 PM on December 10

Um, we are talking about someone who abused women’s trust by starting friendships under a false persona as a married father, harassed them if they started dating someone, manipulated them into sending nude photos out of fear that “Ryan” would commit suicide otherwise, and did this to multiple people until someone exposed her. That’s not “oddly hilarious” or “impressive.” It’s abuse. She doesn’t lose personal responsibility for her actions because of the circumstances surrounding this.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 6:08 PM on December 10, 2017 [25 favorites]

I hope she receives help and appropriate mental health treatment because that is some very disturbing behaviour. It's a very sad chain of events that allowed this to happen. It feels like a very ugly situation all around.
posted by Fizz at 6:11 PM on December 10, 2017 [4 favorites]

I think it's more the '13-year-old girl successfully poses as a married man and holds down a job as a sport writer' that is the impressive part. I don't think anyone is impressed about a 13-year-old girl abusing others.
posted by Merus at 6:12 PM on December 10, 2017 [32 favorites]

Damn. I don't know her background but it reinforces the notion that the abuse and manipulation that she inflicted on others was not sexual but about obtaining power and control over others.

you mean in the same way harassing women for nudes and getting them to disclose intimate things with threats is not sexual when adults do it? because sure, it's about power and control, it always is. but teens have either as much sexual motivation for their awful behavior as everyone else, or more, depending on the teen. certainly not less.

I hope she doesn't think people will buy the explanation that she was just trying to make a really realistic male character and got carried away. although the idea that a cartoon abusive misogynist is a thirteen-year-old's idea of plausible adult manhood is ridiculously likely and maybe even true, it's like they say, there isn't any distinction between pretending to be a misogynistic stalker and actually being one.

re: mercy, sure, some, for everything she did up until she was 18. but that was some time ago.

I understand fake identities are always good stories but the abusive behavior would still have been abusive if all the demographic details had been true as claimed. if only everyone who wondered why a girl would do such a thing wondered just as hard when boys and men do it.
posted by queenofbithynia at 6:17 PM on December 10, 2017 [13 favorites]

I think it's more the '13-year-old girl successfully poses as a married man and holds down a job as a sport writer' that is the impressive part. I don't think anyone is impressed about a 13-year-old girl abusing others.

She doesn’t lose personal responsibility for her actions because of the circumstances surrounding this.

Indeed. That's what the appalled part of my sentence referred to.
posted by roolya_boolya at 6:22 PM on December 10, 2017 [1 favorite]

The Importance of Being Earnest (About Baseball)
posted by deadaluspark at 6:24 PM on December 10, 2017

Bear in mind that it looks like the harassment took place when she was over 18, much of it in the past couple of years. It's not that this woman doesn't need therapy, but women - straight or queer - can harass and abuse other women.
posted by Frowner at 6:24 PM on December 10, 2017 [26 favorites]

It makes me wonder whether or not she's a psychopath, in the way that, say, the English teenager who poisoned people out of curiosity was, and if so, whether she was inherently psychopathic or whether these tendencies were brought out by the depersonalising nature of the disintermediated net. If that is the case, there may be a significant number of latent pre-psychopaths who, were it not for specific circumstances, would remain harmless, and whether the design of systems such as Twitter makes these circumstances considerably less uncommon.
posted by acb at 6:24 PM on December 10, 2017 [9 favorites]

This sort of sociopathic behavior runs rampant on Tumblr, especially in the Simblr and Overwatch communities. Appalling.
posted by Hermione Granger at 6:27 PM on December 10, 2017 [3 favorites]

especially in the Simblr and Overwatch communities.

As a player of online video games, this is abso-lutely why I avoid taking part in any forums related to said online games at all cost.

It's bad enough that I have to disable every in-game chat option (when it's even available to disable) just so I don't have to listen/read people be horrible to each other the whole time.

I honestly don't have much to say about this article in particular because I can't even process it currently it's so disturbing. Sorry for the aside.
posted by deadaluspark at 6:30 PM on December 10, 2017 [2 favorites]

Bear in mind that it looks like the harassment took place when she was over 18, much of it in the past couple of years.

That's oddly relieving to me as one thing I was immediately worried about was that someone was going to get in legal trouble for sending sexually explicit pictures to a minor.

Like the Kaycee thing, this is gruesomely fascinating. I just wish it was fiction I was reading and that no one had been hurt.
posted by ODiV at 6:45 PM on December 10, 2017 [5 favorites]

Jesus, that Twitter thread. All sorts of garbage responses. How do you leave it open so that anyone affected can chime in or people can be supportive, but also keep out shit like what's happening? I guess just start banning people? Bleh.
posted by ODiV at 6:51 PM on December 10, 2017 [1 favorite]

I was surprised that, in the Twitter thread, people who asked "Why would you send nude photos to someone you don't know?" or "How can you assume that this person is who you think they are?" or "Don't you know this is the Internet?" were trashed. One guy was accused of living in a "blissful bubble". I thought, by now, knowledge of catfishing was more widespread.
posted by CCBC at 7:05 PM on December 10, 2017

> Update: “Schultz” has returned to Twitter to post an apology:

Sorry, that page doesn't exist!
posted by I-Write-Essays at 7:06 PM on December 10, 2017 [2 favorites]

I think it's more the '13-year-old girl successfully poses as a married man and holds down a job as a sport writer' that is the impressive part.

Yeah, sorry, you’re right. It was seeing it right after a comment calling the situation “oddly hilarious” that set me off. Because seriously, what is “oddly funny” about abusing women with a fake identity?
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 7:07 PM on December 10, 2017 [1 favorite]

Why would you be surprised people blaming victims of harassment would be trashed, CCBC?
posted by ODiV at 7:10 PM on December 10, 2017 [2 favorites]

the idea that a cartoon abusive misogynist is a thirteen-year-old's idea of plausible adult manhood is ridiculously likely and maybe even true

I suspect this had almost nothing to do with her acting the way she thought a man was "supposed to" act. Maybe part of the reason she claimed an aggro male identity was to help her career as a sportswriter, but I strongly doubt that was the only reason. To me this really sounds like a teen wrestling with gender identity and sexuality issues, genuinely desiring and resenting women and lashing out at them the same way some guys do. If I'm reading this right it sounds like her harassing behavior started when she was in her early teens and got more angry and twisted as time passed.

I hesitate to get into all this because it feels invasive and icky and it gives me flashbacks to stupid stuff I did when I was a confused trans kid. (No, I never harassed anybody, but I put myself in danger and did all sorts of dopey, humiliating things.) I read this story when it was new and all I could see was a kid who was very lonely, ashamed and isolated. I mean, she was a middle school girl posting misogynist troll memes. Think about the self-loathing it takes to get there. Now, I'll admit I may be wrong about all that, maybe she's not trans at all and this all came from some other place. But so many things about it pinged my trans radar.

It's a fascinating story, a complete inversion of the usual narrative about some misogynist bullyboy who has a secret life online as a teenage girl. But the whole thing is so cringe-y, I hate that I even know about it. I feel badly for the women she harassed, but I can't help feeling badly for her too. These were not the acts of a kid who felt like she had somebody to turn to. I hope now she'll get the help she obviously needs.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 7:11 PM on December 10, 2017 [32 favorites]

What does it say about male culture these days, that a 13 year old girl thought that behaving in the most disgusting misogynistic way possible was the most believable way she could pass as a man? Even sadder was that it worked. This is what she's learnt that men are.
posted by Jubey at 7:12 PM on December 10, 2017 [6 favorites]

ODiV: Why would you be surprised people blaming victims of harassment would be trashed, CCBC?

Sorry. I shouldn't thread sit.
posted by CCBC at 7:19 PM on December 10, 2017

Even when she wasn't thirteen at the time--if anything, in the last few years, it has become more plainly obvious that this is "normal" in the sense of being common behavior for men in positions of even a tiny amount of fame or prestige. As a roleplaying experiment, this was entirely accurate. Not any less awful to have gone through with it for all that, but I think what it suggests is really all pretty obvious: It isn't chromosomes or hormones or even anybody's idea of gender identity that makes them behave awfully. It's social roles. Someone who identifies as a woman but takes on a social role heavily determined by toxic masculinity is going to be tempted to exploit it, because in the absence of empathy, it feels good. Women don't show more empathy because of something innate about being women, it comes by virtue of the roles we adopt in social situations and the social rewards and punishments that come from the way we behave.
posted by Sequence at 7:22 PM on December 10, 2017 [33 favorites]

I don't really get the sense that this was some performative roleplay experiment. They just sound like an abusive shitty person.
posted by Ferreous at 8:01 PM on December 10, 2017 [13 favorites]

: "The post-script is in keeping with the rest of this tale:

Update: “Schultz” has returned to Twitter to post an apology:

pic.twitter.com/JFsq7HAQtE
— . (@rschultzy20) November 9, 2017

The very model of a modern public apology."

If you know, that link either worked or still existed.
posted by Samizdata at 9:47 PM on December 10, 2017 [2 favorites]

All I can say is "Man, like I could stick with ANYTHING for more than 3 months when I was 13..."
posted by Samizdata at 9:49 PM on December 10, 2017 [2 favorites]

I'm in the "read a month ago" camp also. This is one case especially where I'd encourage everyone to rtfa, as they say - I *get* the "well, the best way to imitate a dude is to be a shithead to women online" angle but there's at least also a lot of other stuff going on too.

The whole thing is very strange and very sad if for no other reason than if she'd just stuck to the writing she could have gotten away with it for god knows how long, and the eventually reveal might have been more positively received, I don't know. Maybe not?
posted by ominous_paws at 11:51 PM on December 10, 2017 [3 favorites]

On the one hand I sympathize with overworked editors to some extent, but was an I-9 form not required?

One source, however, said Ryan was a paid contributor to BP, which raises a question: What did Becca Schultz do with the checks made out to a fraudulent name? Are those checks just sitting in a drawer somewhere uncashed?

When I asked Becca about this, she said that she did not get paid for her posts at Beyond the Box Score, but she had given BP her actual social security number, and because the tax info was legitimate and Becca and Ryan shared a last name, her bank cashed the checks for her.

(Stephen Reichert, VP and general counsel at Baseball Prospectus, did not get back to me by the time of publication.)

posted by XMLicious at 12:01 AM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

RTFAing, I think perhaps, according to her own statements (again, as per TFA), that was her interpretation of a guy, and, given she is 13, she's rather inexperienced in life. I see it as how, when someone pretends to be Aussie, it's all Mate this, and G-day that, and SO MANY shrimps on the barbie. When you don't know how to play a role very well, you tend to fall into stereotypes. Depending on her upbringing, she either knows some real asshats, or, she has been misinformed by someone that had a bad asshat experience. Not making any excuses for her here, just trying to grok in fullness... And, once again, being 13, if she can get adults to dance to her tune, she's going to. It's part of learning that you have some ability to exert yourself and have an impact on the world around you.
posted by Samizdata at 12:33 AM on December 11, 2017 [3 favorites]

She's 21, though. She started writing when she was 13, but it sounds like the horrible abuse didn't start for at least a few years.
posted by shapes that haunt the dusk at 12:38 AM on December 11, 2017

shapes that haunt the dusk: "She's 21, though. She started writing when she was 13, but it sounds like the horrible abuse didn't start for at least a few years."

Yeah, but you often tend to build your, for lack of a better term, life templates, when you are a teenage.
posted by Samizdata at 1:07 AM on December 11, 2017

I think it's more the '13-year-old girl successfully poses as a married man and holds down a job as a sport writer' that is the impressive part.

I think it says more about how crap a lot of men are that their capabilities are easily mimicked by a tween. It is also not surprising that a young girl could pull it off because the current society we live in requires females to grow up way faster than males.
posted by srboisvert at 3:28 AM on December 11, 2017 [3 favorites]

I think it takes some pretty serious confirmation bias to look at this story about the behavior of a disturbed teenage girl who pretended to be a toxic male troll and conclude that it serves as an indictment of men in general.

This was one kid doing creepy stuff in her bedroom, for reasons we can't know and which she may not have entirely understood herself, and she got caught. The whole thing is so squirmy and sad, instead of trying to draw conclusions about what this says about gender relations in 2017 maybe we should just look away and try to forget what we've seen.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:35 AM on December 11, 2017 [23 favorites]

When I was in 7th grade I started a blog on xanga for someone who wasn't me, but was basically who I aspired to be. She was much more interesting than me, she had a protective big brother, she lived in Maine on the coast and worked in a used book store part time. I used to like writing fake historical diaries, and this scratched the same itch but it was contemporary and a place for me to work through all the different social options and dramas of 13-year old girls in a place where it did not matter. I would fill out those preference quizzes for her, I had a whole family tree and town, and it was a really cool creative writing exercise.

Then people started following me, and thought that she was real. I felt exploitative and got scared and stopped after about a year of internetting as this person. It was amazing how easy it was to build fake relationships with real, trusting people. I don't think I did any real harm, except maybe making people concerned about the stormy emotions of a teenager who wasn't real, but it was also kind of fun to be Not Me and have people see me as Not Me. It was so much easier to control how they saw me and reacted to me than it was in real life.

I obviously don't condone this, but having been a pretend person on the internet as a 13-year old girl, I see the appeal. Especially if you're pretending to be a guy. Nobody to send you vulgar messages or all sexually explicit questions - especially in baseball chat rooms, that's got to be great.
posted by ChuraChura at 4:48 AM on December 11, 2017 [13 favorites]

I don‘t think anyone is particularly surprised about the „pretended to be someone else on the internet but it got out of hand“ aspect of it.

But what the hell is up with the abuse and the soliciting of naked pics? Surely thus goes way beyond?
posted by Omnomnom at 4:55 AM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

I suspect this had almost nothing to do with her acting the way she thought a man was "supposed to" act.

I don't think this is an all-or-nothing thing. I think it's entirely likely that there was some combination of being somewhat abusive by nature (perhaps no more than the typical 13-year-old, even - very few of us are as kind as we could be at that age) combined with internalized misogyny/patriarchy combined with a sense of how men act in general. And that's just at the start.

I also think it's a mistake to ignore that, given how much of this took place in the public eye, there was certainly a role played by societal patriarchy in reinforcing certain behaviors as she and her online persona matured. Do you think she could have maintained such a public persona as a woman online and gotten the same amount of fear from women and (I have to imagine, though I'm glad the feed no longer exists for me to research the toxicity) support/cajoling from men? I don't.
posted by solotoro at 7:26 AM on December 11, 2017 [6 favorites]

As far getting away with it for so long, I feel like nothing surprises me these days.

This story still isn't even half as wild as the recent controversy over on Tumblr where this 18-year old white girl created the persona of a Chinese-Pakistani sex-trafficking victim living with HIV and ran a popular HIV education blog for years solely for the purpose of justifying/promoting her HIV-themed Hamilton fan fiction.
posted by adso at 7:50 AM on December 11, 2017 [7 favorites]

wait
what
was this the same thing as the cannibal mermaid Hamilton fanfic, or
welp
God spare Lin the knowledge of this
posted by Countess Elena at 7:58 AM on December 11, 2017 [3 favorites]

was this the same thing as the cannibal mermaid Hamilton fanfic

Well. Were the mermaids HIV-positive?
posted by thelonius at 8:02 AM on December 11, 2017 [1 favorite]

There is indeed a connection!

However, an investigation by Tumblr user pure[9] into the drama uncovered that digoxin-purpurea exposed allolesbean because digoxin-purpurea once wrote a Hamilton fanfiction about the creator Lin-Manuel Miranda and involved mermaid cannibalism. According to pure, “Digoxin’s expose of Allolesbean is an extension of them getting back at Allolesbean and her friends for turbo cyberbullying them into deleting that cannibal mermaid hamilton fanfiction about Lin Manuel Miranda.”
posted by thelonius at 8:06 AM on December 11, 2017 [4 favorites]

i was not expecting 'hamilton-themed mermaid cannibal fic revenge expose' to be the thing that pushed me over the edge, for good and for all
but it was always going to end like this, really, i know that now
today is the day i can honestly say 'the internet was a mistake'
posted by halation at 10:02 AM on December 11, 2017 [15 favorites]

: "i was not expecting 'hamilton-themed mermaid cannibal fic revenge expose' to be the thing that pushed me over the edge, for good and for all
but it was always going to end like this, really, i know that now
today is the day i can honestly say 'the internet unmoderrated Tumblr was a mistake'"

FTFY.
posted by Samizdata at 10:28 AM on December 11, 2017

Just an FYI, people. If you are going to cite anything like a volatile situation on a medium that actually respects account termination/removal procedures, you need to grab screenshots, not links. Try GreenShot or LightShot. This way we can STILL see the posts in question, despite the possible guilt or attempts to appear innocent as events transpire.
posted by Samizdata at 10:31 AM on December 11, 2017

“If you’re going to make up an entire false identity, why would you make yourself into a shitty person?”

Yep, that was my question initially. Then again, the intent behind this catfishing incident may be a mixture of having an abusive nature, dealing with sexuality issues, and making a statement about men getting what they want without hurdles of being discriminated against or being the recipient of harassment. One can never really know I guess.

What I find even more appalling is that, regardless of whether "making a statement" was part of the intent behind all this, the actual outcome (the girl posing as a man getting the job as a sportswriter despite the terribly abusive interactions with other women) still does go to show how terrible the vetting process is, and how easily men can get away with such behavior and not have it count against them in their professional life. Maybe this field of work is different in that regard, but hey, apparently electing the president of America had the same standards. I got the sense that what is hurting this girl's reputation more is the fact that she had this fake identity, more so than the abusive nature of her interactions before there was knowledge of this fake identity. Maybe I'm wrong, as I don't have info on when these women came out about these incidents, before of after the knowledge of the fake identity. If they came out about it beforehand, but to no avail, that would really go to show how pathetic the professional standards are for men.

Of course, I don't condone the whole catfishing thing either, and "getting too carried away in this identity" is not really an excuse for this behavior, but it is also sad how someone so young was conditioned to think that 1) this is how a man on the internet might act and 2) she can't make it in her field as a woman. There may be some harsh truths behind those lines of thinking, which really goes to show how much needs to change in society's attitude towards these issues.
posted by cocoaviolet at 11:13 AM on December 11, 2017 [3 favorites]

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." - Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Mother Night
posted by Meatbomb at 7:03 PM on December 11, 2017 [9 favorites]