Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
case) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomsecrets2017-10-28 03:26 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2017-10-28 03:26 pm
[ SECRET POST #3951 ]
⌈ Secret Post #3951 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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(The Shape Of Water)
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 60 secrets from Secret Submission Post #566.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
Re: Hamilton Tumblr Drama
(Anonymous) 2017-10-28 11:48 pm (UTC)(link)Re: Hamilton Tumblr Drama
(Anonymous) 2017-10-29 12:07 am (UTC)(link)Re: Hamilton Tumblr Drama
(Anonymous) 2017-10-29 01:00 am (UTC)(link)Naj allolesbean does not exist.
Israa blueskysapphic does not exist.
They are sockpuppets of the same person.
“Israa,” in the guise of the tumblr user blueskysapphic and ao3 user iluzjonista, spent most of late 2015 and 2016 collecting fans for their HIV-centric Hamilton high school AU. They claimed to be an HIV-positive Chinese-Pakistani trafficking survivor, living in India with their Catholic Somali-American wife. They claimed to be nonbinary. They claimed at one point that they had been pregnant, and then that they miscarried.
I knew Israa was lying about their location several months ago, when secondhand gossip got to me that she was an American student. However, the person who originated that gossip was a younger person and former target of Israa’s wrath. They were very, very afraid of being attacked by Israa again and told me they did not want to talk about it in public. I respected that, even though I was totally, totally disgusted by this. If she lied about living in India, then obviously she had lied about her status, and used those lies about her status to give advice she shouldn’t have been giving and to ask for donations. But there wasn’t any evidence, I didn’t think, without this person, who was so terrified.
Fast forward a few months.
I clicked through a couple of blogs that had been talking with the blueskysapphic. I found an instagram attached to a particular university. I found the cash.me link. I checked some timestamps and figured out that cash.me cashtag wouldn’t have been functional. She couldn’t have lived in India, therefore -
I messaged hivliving with my concerns.
Message text:
"Hi Naj. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt with regard to your existence and say that I hope you pass this message on to Israa.
Israa, you have claimed consistently to be based in India - and yet you’ve several times asked for donations via a cash.me cashtag. Cash.me cashtags may receive money from international cards, but they must be registered with United States accounts. Cash.me payments cannot be processed when the holder of the app is outside of the United States - it can’t even be used in Puerto Rico or the US Virgin Islands. Square business accounts, which you do not have, can only be used in the US, Australia, Canada, and Japan.
You did say once that a friend set this account up for you. However, it is prohibitively difficult and expensive to transfer money from US accounts to overseas accounts, such that small donations would be lost in the fees. I am personally aware of this, given that I do not live in the US anymore. There are microtransaction apps available in India, which makes your use of squarecash doubly odd. Either you were collecting money that you couldn’t use for your medical bills, or you don’t live in India, even though you told people for years that you were living in India. This calls into question a lot of your other claims about your life and situation. I shouldn’t need to list those.
I am going to swallow my disgust about the appropriateness of those claims in general and this blog in particular for the moment. I am truly not interested in making a public spectacle of this. I get the feeling that you are very young. I understand young people make some very stupid mistakes. I just want you to refund any money people donated to you - to THEM, not to a charity - and I’d like you to prove it. If that’s not possible right now, I want you to promise them you will do so in the future - and prove that you’ve promised them as well. I’d also like you to delete your presence from the hivliving blog. You seem to be working on this already.
Please let me know within the next 3 days (it’s currently 8:34 PM October 24th in UTC/my time zone, fwiw) that you’ve received this message. I have no interest in doxxing you or finding out your “real” details or your “real” name. Absolutely none. My only interest is that you apologize to those you took advantage of. Please, please, please, don’t do this again. If you are struggling with money or mental health, there are places that can help you out, and I can help you out with money in a pinch, but neither your financial issues nor your mental health struggles make what you have done in any way appropriate. "
Screencaps here (I made a mistake, I actually messaged her on the 23rd). https://imgur.com/a/ZKrDA
They messaged back, still pretending to be Naj.
We started a conversation.
I had their university from the instagram link. I looked at my statcounter (cardiotoxin, my main, force redirects to this blog) and saw that a person from that particular university had arrived at this blog within minutes of her messaging me back.
It took a pretty long time to get her to admit that she lied, but she did. Sort of. Confession #1:
the truth is: i’m not naj. naj isn’t real, but alix is a real person, who i do actually live with. israa is a real person too (although her name is spelled differently). i met alix in our freshman year of high school in field hockey and now we are suitemates (we share a bathroom but not a room) in college. alix confided in me so much, and we spent multiple summers working together at a sleepaway camp. she shared a lot about her life, especially about this girl israa who is one of her best friends, and now lives in india. i just got so fascinated by all of it the more i found out. they are both HIV+ in real life and they really do skype once a week. they really did meet at an international CTY program. i made blogs and other accounts imitating them based on their real social media and what i learned from their skype calls/what alix told me about. i’ve had to embellish some details but for the most part, things i’ve posted is stuff that i’ve heard directly from them or stuff that i’ve taken from their facebooks. the donation was real too - alix mentioned that israa had really bad medical debt bc of HIV meds and i asked if she would take donations. the money went to the israa who was struggling, not my fake version of her. i’m guessing the real alix and the real israa have no idea what i’m doing w/ their names, faces, identities, etc.
Screencaps here. https://imgur.com/a/K8wHC
All of this is a lie, of course.
She deleted several of the blogs attached to this persona before I could stop her. She deleted her archiveofourown.
So, she claimed Israa was real, sort of: she stole her life story, and her roommate’s, to use in this deception. They both existed, she said. She claimed she had been using her roommate’s social media to look legitimate. She claimed this roommate was congenitally HIV-positive, which is why Naj/allolesbean’s blog claimed the same. She claimed that she borrowed her roommate’s story. She was very concerned that her roommate not be doxxed or wrapped up in this. I asked her to send me an email via her university account so I could confirm she was a person separate from “the roommate’s” social media I had found earlier.
Confession #2, which is not actually a confession because I had to catch her in a lie:
cardiotoxin [linkedin with picture] Is this you
hivliving please tell me why youre asking im starting to get scared
cardiotoxin Because I hate to break it to you, Alix [screencap of her twitter profile picture] But that’s you
Screencaps. https://imgur.com/a/61jf6
Confession #3:
cardiotoxin Israa doesn’t exist, does she. The person you based Israa on
hivliving the person based loosely on her does exist. no one named israa with that life and story exists though.
cardiotoxin No, say it out loud Does Israa exist?
hivliving israa does not exist in the capacity the identity was utilized on tumblr/other socials
cardiotoxin You’re really not getting what I’m asking, are you. You are completely unable to identify your lie as a lie.
cardiotoxin Add sobercommunist to the list of people you need to apologize to.
hivliving it’s a lie. and i will. he definitely deserves one even from our very brief interaction.
Screencaps. https://imgur.com/a/ivm0t
IN SUMMARY
1. Naj didn’t exist.
2. Israa didn’t exist.
3. The roommate with congenital HIV didn’t exist.
4. The person she claimed to have based Israa on didn’t exist.
5. The catfisher behind this is an 18-year-old white American university student named Alix. She started the blueskysapphic/iluzjonista persona in what I believe was her senior year of high school, when she was either 16 or 17.
WHY WAS THIS TAGGED HAMILTON?
Because she created this persona to excuse an HIV-themed Hamilton fic she wrote. She gained her credibility as a person living with HIV/AIDS via Hamilton fandom. She started her deceptions in Hamilton fandom.
And because she maintained this persona to attack writers in Hamilton fandom for ostensibly justice-related but completely spurious reasons. And when I say attack, she and her friends harassed other people, made them recount their sexual abuse in public, threatened them with doxxing, etc.
For what it’s worth, I believe another person in that crew knew about this deception.
She tagged the post Hamilton so many people would see it. She wanted to sign it as Naj, which is incredible.
SO THIS IS A FANDOM GRUDGE THING?
No. She operated within fandom, that’s all. I didn’t mention fandom to her until she couldn’t explain why she did this. In the post I had set to publish if she didn’t contact me, I did not mention fandom. I do not want to deemphasize the horror of what she had done with the hivliving blog by connecting it with fandom.
WHY WERE YOU BEING SO NICE TO HER IN SOME OF THOSE MESSAGES?
To get her to talk.
WHAT ABOUT THE MONEY?
I am waiting for confirmation that she refunded a “donation.” She claims there was only the one. Please let me know if there are others.
WHAT HAPPENS NOW?
Depends on the money situation and what her victims want. I have her identity so authorities can be involved if her victims want. Remember, the reason this didn’t come out months ago was because the person who had the information about her was, nearly a year after the great Hamilton Fandom dumpster fire, terrified of her and her crew. And that terror was not, frankly, unwarranted.
I want to make it clear: I was not a specific victim of hers. However, friends of mine were victims, and they were very badly affected.
She hurt way, way more people than she knows.
Everyone please go be nice to each other for once.