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

Summary

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

Podcast: Chameleon
Host: Josh Dean (Campside Media, Audiochuck)
Episode Date: December 25, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the astonishing true story of the “Gay Girl in Damascus” hoax, a con that captivated and deceived global media, activists, and readers during the Arab Spring in 2011. Host Josh Dean guides listeners through the rise and dramatic unraveling of the persona “Amina Araf,” a supposedly queer Syrian blogger whose kidnapping shocked the world—until it all proved to be invented by an American man. The episode unpacks how the deception spread, how it was uncovered, and what the saga reveals about online identity, media gullibility, and the ethics of digital activism and representation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Viral Origin: "Amina Araf" and Her Blog

• Amina Araf: Presented as a 35-year-old Syrian American lesbian blogger in Damascus, passionately documenting her life, activism, and sexuality amid the Syrian uprising.
• Breakout Moment: The blog post, "My Father the Hero," allegedly recounts her father saving her from the Syrian secret police, went viral and catapulted Amina to international fame.
  • “That post was viewed in the six figures. It’s getting in front of reporters for the biggest media in the world... Suddenly Aminah is a celebrity.” – Josh Dean (05:03)
• Symbol of Hope and Resistance: To many, Amina became the Western media's symbol of hope, resistance, and queer bravery in the Middle East.
• Shocking Truth: “There’s just one problem. None of what you have just heard is true. These events never happened and Amina Araf doesn’t exist.” – Andrew Orr (05:31)

2. The Online Persona: Building an Authentic Fiction

• History of Posts: Amina's online presence was meticulously crafted, dating back to 2002–2003, with a believable mix of personal anecdotes, political commentary, and fictionalized details.
• Engagement with Activists: Real relationships were maintained, including a romantic one with "Sandra Begaria" in Canada—entirely by text, never in person or by voice.
  • “She would debate the value of different kinds of science fiction fandoms…As a Syrian American, her interest also gravitated toward the political realities of the Middle East.” – Josh Dean (08:32)
• Media Amplification: Major media outlets, activists, and bloggers like Liz Henry linked to Amina’s content, further spreading the story.

3. The Arab Spring Context & Escalation

• Uprisings Spark Interest: The wider context of the Arab Spring meant Western media and audiences were hungry for first-person activist stories from the region.
  • “Journalists have a source that seemed to be capturing the Zeitgeist of the Arab Spring...Amina is telling the story of Syria in a way that Americans…can see their own political story being retold.” – Josh Dean (13:40)
• Network Effect: "Amina" corresponded with an online cast of “family” and “friends,” including her “cousin” Rania who posts an update: Amina has been kidnapped by the secret police.
  • The kidnapping announcement triggers global outrage, #FreeAmina campaigns, news coverage, and diplomatic inquiries.

4. The Unraveling: Skepticism, Investigation & Exposure

• First Doubts: Liz Henry and others in the activist/blogger world grow suspicious as details don’t add up (geography, culture, interaction style).
  • “What I saw was indicative to me of a fabulist…The descriptions of what it was like to be a lesbian in Damascus…were not accurate in any way.” – Liz Henry (22:13)
• The Search Intensifies: As the story goes global, inconsistencies are probed—no US government records, no one knows Amina personally, mysterious radio silence from “family,” and “girlfriend” Sandra never having met Amina.
  • “Why investigate somebody for whom you see no immediate red flag and who is saying what you want to hear? But once it goes global…they’re going to be harder to fool.” – Josh Dean (18:34)
• Digital Detectives: A collective effort involves Liz Henry, Electronic Intifada, NPR, and others. They uncover that Amina’s photos were stolen from a London woman, and online sleuthing points to Tom MacMaster, an American PhD student in Scotland.
• Confirmation: “On June 12, 2011, Electronic Intifada made a statement to the media: Amina Araf was Tom McMaster, a student living in Edinburgh.” – Andrew Orr (33:57)

5. Aftermath, Motivation, and Consequences

• Confession and Justification: Tom MacMaster confesses, admitting to the hoax but maintains good intentions—to bring global attention to Syrian suffering and critique Western media.
  • “My intentions were good. I got carried away. I owe apologies to those I hurt… I only wanted to set forth real information through the use of artfully crafted fiction.” – Liz Henry quoting McMaster’s CNN apology (34:40)
• Lasting Harm: The real-world consequences—distrust of authentic voices from the Middle East, risk and endangerment to real queer people in Syria, emotional harm to those who cared about “Amina,” especially her online girlfriend Sandra.
  • “He put people’s lives in danger. The very people he was claiming to be one of.” – Josh Dean (35:51)
• Critique of Motivation: The story’s power lay in McMaster’s understanding of what Western progressives wanted to hear—he crafted “Amina” to please them, not actual Syrian voices.
  • “He was just imposing an Anglo American, progressive reality, making the real Syria vanish and a progressive theater of Assyria appear.” – Josh Dean (36:55)
  • “If you really want to amplify other people’s stories, you should find the people, get their consent and highlight their work...Let them speak for themselves.” – Liz Henry (36:33)
• Lingering Impact: The hoax is now a textbook example of media gullibility, dangers of online anonymity, and “sock puppetry.” It’s also a warning to both journalists and audiences: don’t conflate fiction and activism.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the seductive danger of plausible storytelling:

  “I think part of why people are still talking about the story is...it shows us that we want to believe the hoaxers because they know how to be plausible to us, the audience.”
  — Liz Henry (37:25)

• On the harm beyond the screen:

  “What he did was to put a target on the back of queer people throughout Syria and the Middle East...He put people's lives in danger—the very people who he was claiming to be one of.”
  — Josh Dean (35:51)

• On the real lesson:

  “The story of Amina Araf 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.”
  — Andrew Orr (43:59)

• On media vulnerability:

  “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…The landscape has changed.”
  — Liz Henry (42:56)

• On online fake identities:

  “People still do it all the time...There’s kind of a whole phenomenon of teenage girls who just go and play with different identities online...much like Tom may have been doing.”
  — Liz Henry (43:29)

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Key Segment Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment Description | | ------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | 01:17 | Story introduction: "Amina" in Damascus and the fateful blog post | | 05:31 | Revelation: None of it is real, Amina does not exist | | 11:25 | Liz Henry, early blogger, describes how the blog circulated in her circles | | 13:19 | The Arab Spring's viral uprisings: catalyzing Amina’s stardom | | 15:39 | The “kidnapping” is announced; #FreeAmina campaign takes off | | 22:13 | Liz Henry describes initial skepticism and hoax detection | | 27:29 | Discovery: Photos used were stolen from a London woman | | 30:08 | Breakthrough: Amina’s “Georgia address” leads to Tom MacMaster in Scotland | | 33:57 | Public confirmation: Amina is Tom MacMaster; confession follows | | 34:40 | McMaster’s (non-)apology on CNN | | 35:51 | Discussion of the risk and damage to real activists and queer Syrians | | 36:33 | Liz Henry on the ethics of storytelling and activism | | 43:59 | Final reflections: Trust, vigilance, and the digital age of deception |

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Final Thoughts

This episode of Chameleon unpacks not just the anatomy of a digital hoax, but also the psychological, political, and ethical fault lines it exposed. Through dramatic storytelling, expert interviews, and first-person accounts, it raises tough questions about activism, truth, media, and the powerful lure of stories that fit what we want to believe. The saga of the "Gay Girl in Damascus" remains a chilling parable for our information age.

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Summary by [Your AI Podcast Summarizer]
If you missed the episode, this guide gives you all the intrigue and insight without the ads or the noise.

Transcript

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It's a warm night in Syria's ancient capital in May of 2011. Damascus is still known as the City of Jasmine. And tonight, richly scented air drifts through the tight, winding alleyways of the old city. Amina Araf, a 35 year old Syrian American woman, is fast asleep in her family home.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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.

[Andrew Orr]

This is the historian Andrew Orr, who teaches military history at Kansas State University and who knows this story very well.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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.

[Andrew Orr]

Her father is surprised. Amina Lesso. She knows why the police are likely there. She's been writing a blog.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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.

[Andrew Orr]

Amina's father steps in. He's confused, he's angry. He demands to know what his daughter could have possibly done.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

And the secret police explained. They say she's been blogging and, and she's against the regime. She's is part of a Salafist plot, an Islamist radical movement against the regime. And her father says that's absurd. She doesn't even cover anymore. How can she be an Islamist? And if you've read her blog, you know she's calling for pluralism and tolerance.

[Andrew Orr]

The officers are not having it.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

They push back, confronting him with the reality that she's gay. And she talks in her blog about having sex with women.

[Andrew Orr]

At the time, same sex relationships were criminalized in Syria under vague morality laws.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

And if he were a real man, his daughter wouldn't do this. They threatened 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.

[Andrew Orr]

Amina's father isn't swayed. He stands firm.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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, you know, yes, she has 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 too.

[Andrew Orr]

Remarkably, it works. The officers back down, they apologize and leave.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

He had used radical acceptance of his daughter's identity as a lesbian woman to save her life and their family.

[Andrew Orr]

The story of this night, titled My Father the Hero and written by Aminah on her blog, Gay Girl in Damascus was Posted on. On May 7, 2011, it goes viral.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

That post was viewed in the six figures. It's getting in front of reporters for the biggest media in the world. CBS in the us, cnn, BBC, the Guardian in Britain. One French newspaper reprints that blog post in French verbatim on its website. And suddenly Aminah is a celebrity.

[Andrew Orr]

This newfound attention is a double edged sword. First, it spells actual danger. The blog post has put a spotlight on Aminah 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 regiment. And so to many people, Aminah 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 Araf doesn't exist. This is Chameleon, 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.

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[Andrew Orr]

Youm'Re listening to Chameleon, the weekly.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

Amina's social media presence on things like blogs, message boards went back to 2002 or 2003.

[Andrew Orr]

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 Araf. He's written a whole book on her. If you happened 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.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

She would debate the value of different kinds of science fiction fandoms. She would talk about her favorite stories.

[Andrew Orr]

As a Syrian American, her interest also naturally gravitated toward the political realities of the Middle East.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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.

[Andrew Orr]

Iraq, which, of course actually happened when George W. Bush did, in fact, order the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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 peoples without history.

[Andrew Orr]

The Austrian anthropologist Erich Wolff, 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.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

She became especially harsh against people she.

[Andrew Orr]

Accused of pink washing 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.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

And she challenged that, arguing that Islamism was a far more diverse and pluralistic philosophy than Westerners assumed it to be.

[Andrew Orr]

After graduating high school In Stone Mountain, Georgia, Aminah moved to Damascus in the fall of 2010. She said she had 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.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

She has long term relationships with some people at this point. Paula Brooks, the editor of let's Get Real, which at the time was the largest lesbian blogging and news site on the Internet, wanted Aminah to start a blog to talk about this unique experience of being a Syrian American American gay girl in Damascus.

[Andrew Orr]

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 forum.

[Liz Henry]

My feeling 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 comment on each other's blogs. The eye of Soren wasn't necessarily going to turn to you or the eye of Soren 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.

[Andrew Orr]

In 2011, Liz was working for a site called BlogHer, a network of women bloggers promoting women writers around the world.

[Liz Henry]

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.

[Andrew Orr]

Gay girl. And Damascus 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.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

It all began when a poor fruit vendor decided he just wasn't going to take it anymore.

[Andrew Orr]

Because in December 2010, more than 1,000 miles from Damascus, a young Tunisian named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire outside a government building. He was protesting police corruption and harassment, and his death sparked mass demonstrations across his country. Within weeks, Tunisia's longtime dictator had fled the country.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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.

[Andrew Orr]

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 then Syria.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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 protest. 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.

[Andrew Orr]

Amina now had a whole new audience of fans, activists and journalists to engage with.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

So Amina's communicating in all those ways and people are communicating about her because there are other people who are saying, yes, I've known Aminah for months, we've exchanged messages, she's commented on my blog, things like that.

[Andrew Orr]

In the midst of all this, Amina had struck up a romantic relationship with a woman in Canada called Sandra Begaria, someone she had met on a dating site.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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.

[Andrew Orr]

Rania was about to become important because on June 7, Amina's blog was updated and there's no way Amina could have done it herself.

[Liz Henry]

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, Aminah has been kidnapped. She's been detained by the secret police. Aminah 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 7, earlier in the morning, so there was already a hashtag, there was like a graphic that said free Amina with these wings. And that was already kind of going on.

[Andrew Orr]

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.

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Banks and serviced by Netcredit. Applications subject to review and approval. Learn [e-mail] partners. NetCredit credit to the people. Welcome back to Chameleon. Until her kidnapping, Amina Araf's Gay Girl in Damascus blog. This brave queer voice daring to speak out from the inside of one of the Arab Spring's most brutal regimes had a small but dedicated audience. But her kidnapping changed everything.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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.

[Andrew Orr]

Before this point, the odds that any one reader might go to the trouble of actually fact checking Amina's life and claims was pretty slim.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

Why 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 validate. They're going to be harder to fool. Also, 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.

[Andrew Orr]

The outcry 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, sure, 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. Maybe 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 Araf.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

They message Rania. Nothing. State Department reaches out to Amina's partner Sandra Begaria. She doesn't have any papers either. The State Department says nothing because they're responsible diplomats. They don't know what's happening. Their silence is the dog that didn't bark.

[Andrew Orr]

And that sets off some alarm bells.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

There's no one on TV talking about her from firsthand experience. She has family in the us. If 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. And 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?

[Liz Henry]

I was like rustled.

[Andrew Orr]

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'd 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.

[Liz Henry]

And what I saw was indicative to me of a fabulist. 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 US or 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 Damascus people just were like, this is not accurate in any way. It's not how anyone would live. By afternoon of June 7, I had decided that Amino 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, you know, 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.

[Andrew Orr]

The exercise brought her no joy. I would hate to have my existence doubted and I'm finding it painful to continue doubting Amina. She wrote, if she is real, I am 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.

[Liz Henry]

And from that moment on, I was sucked into the investigation to track down the source of the hoax.

[Andrew Orr]

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 had npr.

[Liz Henry]

So we were all chatting on different channels, some email, some, you know, texting, working together in different Google Docs and that 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. You 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, you know, and we'll be mentioned on the BBC. And that's great.

[Andrew Orr]

Do you remember the editor of Les Get Real, A woman named Paula Brooks who ran the news site that had published some of Amina's early writing.

[Liz Henry]

She was a deaf mother of twins and I think an adopted deaf boy from Belize. She lived in the Outer Banks of North Carolina and she had a dog called Sammy the surf dog. Sammy loved 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.

[Andrew Orr]

Still, Liz felt like she should speak with Paula. She reached out and asked for a call.

[Liz Henry]

She explained that she couldn't talk on the phone because of being deaf and instead you would talk to her father, the major. And 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.

[Andrew Orr]

As I expect you've guessed, 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.

[Liz Henry]

And in a fabulous twist, it came out that Paula Brooks and Amina had been sexting each other.

[Andrew Orr]

Okay. Anyway, Paula, sorry, Bill didn't seem to be in on the Amina scam. He had argued a lot of reasons why Amina would be real, but also he did provide some useful information for the investigation.

[Liz Henry]

Paula engaged both ways. Yeah, why not both? Paula was the night I'm getting lots of attention and the Washington Post is talking to me kind of position.

[Andrew Orr]

Next on the list was Sandra Begaria, Amina's friend in Canada, who didn't just know Amina, she was in a romantic relationship with her.

[Liz Henry]

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.

[Andrew Orr]

Among other things, Liz learned that Sandra had never actually met Amina leading up to the detention.

[Liz Henry]

They had plans to meet in person in, I think, Italy. So those pressures, as they start to squeeze the hooks are they usually fake a death or something like that. They have to keep, like, inventing reasons they can't meet you in person.

[Andrew Orr]

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.

[Liz Henry]

It was the photo they sent to Sandra to catfish her. That is, the photo came out because of Sandra providing the photo.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

That's a picture of an Eastern European woman living in London who wakes up one morning to find friends and family saying, 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 in Damascus. Those are pictures of me impair us.

[Andrew Orr]

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 Liz and the other investigators. They just went deeper into the rabbit hole.

[Liz Henry]

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 arguing with them might also be them.

[Andrew Orr]

It's a way to elevate their profile.

[Liz Henry]

They pay attention to themselves with all their different socks on, their different hands.

[Andrew Orr]

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 blogging 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?

[Liz Henry]

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.

[Andrew Orr]

But the Smoking gun came from a guy named Scott Parker. He'd been a regular on one of the lists Aminah liked to be part of.

[Liz Henry]

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.

[Andrew Orr]

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.

[Liz Henry]

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 Intifada who really nailed it down.

[Andrew Orr]

Ben Daugherty, 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.

[Liz Henry]

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.

[Andrew Orr]

Very shortly after contacting Tom McMaster, a new voice joined the online conversation. A woman named Amy Young.

[Liz Henry]

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 going to damage them psychologically to have the spotlight turned on them and that as a gender queer and queer person, I should feel solidarity and act in 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 terrain to navigate.

[Andrew Orr]

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.

[Liz Henry]

It sounded like it could have been a trans woman or a man speaking in a higher register.

[Andrew Orr]

And for the record, Tom McMaster is not a trans woman, although you might.

[Liz Henry]

Say if Tom were leaning that way or exploring a trans identity, this might have driven them right firmly into the, you know, into the closet.

[Andrew Orr]

None of this felt very comfortable to Liz.

[Liz Henry]

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 are like, you know, queer and living in the Middle East.

[Andrew Orr]

On June 12, 2011, Electronic Intifada made a statement to the media saying what they all believed to be true. Amina araf was Tom McMaster, a student living in Edinburgh. He immediately denied it, but the evidence.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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 Aroff. It's my blog. I'm the hoaxer.

[Andrew Orr]

Here's McMaster's written response being read out on CNN.

[Liz Henry]

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.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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's 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.

[Liz Henry]

My theory about the origin of was that he felt that his voice wasn't given enough credibility, and so he invented this Persona to speak as a bina. 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.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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. The very people who he was claiming to be one of the to what he was saying.

[Andrew Orr]

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 Aminas, if you really want.

[Liz Henry]

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 to write fiction, fine, write fiction. But, yeah, to actually speak as that person, it's deeply harmful.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

He wasn't even just, you know, 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 Assyria appear.

[Liz Henry]

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.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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. 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, Newt Gingrich supporters. He wasn't some sort of shadowy figure who knew he was engaged in an influence operation, 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.

[Andrew Orr]

On June 13, Tom McMaster came out of the shadows. He gave an interview to Esther adley of the UK's Guardian newspaper over Skype.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

I don't feel incredibly happy with myself, you know, I wish, you know, in retrospect, I would have done things very, very differently.

[Andrew Orr]

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.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

I was expecting to get 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.

[Andrew Orr]

But he stopped short of a full apology.

[Liz Henry]

Do you regret the creation of the blog altogether?

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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.

[Andrew Orr]

There's no way Tom McMaster could have predicted just how far this would go, that his writing would 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.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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 a human being and reduced her to nothing but, like, your personal amusement and a prop in your political theater.

[Andrew Orr]

In that interview with the Guardian, Tom denied he was playing any other characters.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

All my online playing has come to an end, so.

[Andrew Orr]

But neither Liz nor Andrew is convinced by this.

[Liz Henry]

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.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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.

[Andrew Orr]

It's something Liz Henry says that's just a lot more common than we think.

[Liz Henry]

People still do it all the time. I think now the landscape, maybe it's resonant. 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 sold the Internet is full.

[Andrew Orr]

Of people pretending to be who they're not, and for all kinds of reasons.

[Liz Henry]

It's now common for, you know, 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. Reddit and, you know, tell a complicated drama and they're practicing their fiction skills, much like Tom may have been doing.

[Andrew Orr]

The story of Amina Araf 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. Chameleon is a production of Campside 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 design and mix by Tiffany Dimac. Theme music by Ewan Leitrimuin and Mark McAdam. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Grigoriadis, Matt Scher, 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 Chameleon 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 [e-mail] 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.

[Liz Henry]

I think Chuck would approve.

[Narrator/Host (Josh Dean)]

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