Skanky Vamp
Sniffin' the Slayer
- Joined
- Aug 12, 2008
- Messages
- 26,460
It's a long read, but really interesting
From deadspin
For the last eight years, baseball fan-turned-writer Becca Schultz has presented herself online as Ryan Schultz, a false identity she assumed when she was 13 years old, duping and harassing women on Twitter along the way.
On Wednesday night, a woman named Erin tweeted a series of screenshots announcing that Schultz is not actually Ryan, a married father of two studying to become a pharmacist. Instead, Schultz is a 21-year-old college student in the Midwest, whose entire career as an aspiring baseball writer has been under a fraudulent byline.
Schultz began contributing to Baseball Prospectus’s local White Sox blog at the end of the 2016 season and wrote for BP South Side and BP Wrigleyville throughout the 2017 season. Additionally, Schultz wrote for the SB Nation sabermetrics site Beyond the Box Score throughout 2017.
People who knew Ryan Schultz online say that in retrospect, some of his behavior seemed odd, but no one expected that this moody White Sox fan from Missouri would actually be a teenage girl.
Schultz’s fraud was as true to the catfish genre as can be. She told the people who discovered she was not who she said she was that she assumed the identity because she felt as if she couldn’t write about baseball professionally as a woman, especially at the age of 13. As the deception went on, she couldn’t figure out how to get out of the middle of her web of lies.
Over time, Ryan formed serial relationships with women who use Twitter to talk about baseball and hockey. Some women told me that he would get drunk and berate them; others told me they felt emotionally abused and manipulated because he would imply that he’d hurt himself if they didn’t continue to talk to him. Ryan received nudes from at least two women I spoke with, one of whom said she did it because she was afraid he would hurt himself if she didn’t.
Schultz’s story is interesting for reasons far beyond its sheer shock value. 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.
Most of all, though, there are real women who have been genuinely hurt by their interactions with a woman who, as she tells the story, caught herself up in a lie she didn’t know how to untell, not least because it was bringing her what she wanted.
Last weekend, Ryan Schultz made some sort of misogynistic joke on Twitter that elicited a lot of anger and criticism, multiple women told me; Saturday night, the @rschultzy20 Twitter account was deleted. (It has since been restored, and again deactivated.) After this incident, women started talking about having been harassed by Ryan for years, and on Monday night, four writers began searching for the wife to whom he constantly referred to offer support to her and their two supposed children. They feared Ryan’s erratic and harmful behavior might be affecting his family most.
They couldn’t, though, find any evidence that his wife, Blair, even existed. Then they realized that the university Ryan said he was attending while working on his pharmaceutical degree didn’t have a pharmacology school. Finally, after looking at the Facebook pages of Ryan’s family members, they realized that he was not mentioned by any of them and wasn’t in photos with the children he had presented as his, and that another Schultz, Becca, seemed to have an awful lot in common with Ryan.
On Monday, women began reaching out to the editors at BP Wrigleyville, BP South Side, and BtBS with stories of being harassed by Ryan. The outlets immediately terminated their working relationships with him. (SB Nation sent a statement from a Vox Media spokesperson, who said, “We can confirm that Ryan Schultz no longer has publishing privileges with our site and is no longer affiliated with SB Nation in any way.”)
Erin and the other four people involved in the investigation confronted Ryan, who admitted that, yes, they had actually been talking to Becca for all of these years. Once she was in too deep with the persona, she explained, she realized she couldn’t simply begin presenting her real self to the people she knew online and still have them as friends.
After Erin tweeted about Ryan/Becca, a handful of other women began tweeting and talking about their experiences with Ryan. Many of them said Ryan had harassed them, and one told me she had been coerced into sending nude photos of herself under threat of Ryan hurting himself otherwise.
Ryan went on a podcast with RO in February of this year, a bold move for someone faking their entire identity. On the episode, Ryan’s voice is higher in tone, but again, no one thought too much of it.
In June of this year, Ryan got the opportunity to contribute to SB Nation’s Beyond the Box Score, a site similar to Baseball Prospectus, but without the proprietary statistics. You might find a piece on Dallas Keuchel painting the edges of the strike zone there, or a piece comparing new Phillies manager Gabe Kapler to Chip Kelly. Ryan wrote 18 pieces for BtBS; most of them were fairly straightforward, definitely good enough to pass muster.
People who worked with Ryan at all three outlets told me the same thing: He talked about his wife and kids pretty freely. His elaborate backstory—the family, the pharmacology school—didn’t raise an eyebrow in an ecosystem where dermatologists and so many attorneys can moonlight as some of the industry’s leading minds.
“I think another reason I held onto Ryan was so long was that it worked,” she had told me a few hours earlier. “It took some time, but I really was a writer. And at one point I was too selfish to let that go.”
From deadspin
For the last eight years, baseball fan-turned-writer Becca Schultz has presented herself online as Ryan Schultz, a false identity she assumed when she was 13 years old, duping and harassing women on Twitter along the way.
On Wednesday night, a woman named Erin tweeted a series of screenshots announcing that Schultz is not actually Ryan, a married father of two studying to become a pharmacist. Instead, Schultz is a 21-year-old college student in the Midwest, whose entire career as an aspiring baseball writer has been under a fraudulent byline.
Schultz began contributing to Baseball Prospectus’s local White Sox blog at the end of the 2016 season and wrote for BP South Side and BP Wrigleyville throughout the 2017 season. Additionally, Schultz wrote for the SB Nation sabermetrics site Beyond the Box Score throughout 2017.
People who knew Ryan Schultz online say that in retrospect, some of his behavior seemed odd, but no one expected that this moody White Sox fan from Missouri would actually be a teenage girl.
Schultz’s fraud was as true to the catfish genre as can be. She told the people who discovered she was not who she said she was that she assumed the identity because she felt as if she couldn’t write about baseball professionally as a woman, especially at the age of 13. As the deception went on, she couldn’t figure out how to get out of the middle of her web of lies.
Over time, Ryan formed serial relationships with women who use Twitter to talk about baseball and hockey. Some women told me that he would get drunk and berate them; others told me they felt emotionally abused and manipulated because he would imply that he’d hurt himself if they didn’t continue to talk to him. Ryan received nudes from at least two women I spoke with, one of whom said she did it because she was afraid he would hurt himself if she didn’t.
Schultz’s story is interesting for reasons far beyond its sheer shock value. 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.
Most of all, though, there are real women who have been genuinely hurt by their interactions with a woman who, as she tells the story, caught herself up in a lie she didn’t know how to untell, not least because it was bringing her what she wanted.
Last weekend, Ryan Schultz made some sort of misogynistic joke on Twitter that elicited a lot of anger and criticism, multiple women told me; Saturday night, the @rschultzy20 Twitter account was deleted. (It has since been restored, and again deactivated.) After this incident, women started talking about having been harassed by Ryan for years, and on Monday night, four writers began searching for the wife to whom he constantly referred to offer support to her and their two supposed children. They feared Ryan’s erratic and harmful behavior might be affecting his family most.
They couldn’t, though, find any evidence that his wife, Blair, even existed. Then they realized that the university Ryan said he was attending while working on his pharmaceutical degree didn’t have a pharmacology school. Finally, after looking at the Facebook pages of Ryan’s family members, they realized that he was not mentioned by any of them and wasn’t in photos with the children he had presented as his, and that another Schultz, Becca, seemed to have an awful lot in common with Ryan.
On Monday, women began reaching out to the editors at BP Wrigleyville, BP South Side, and BtBS with stories of being harassed by Ryan. The outlets immediately terminated their working relationships with him. (SB Nation sent a statement from a Vox Media spokesperson, who said, “We can confirm that Ryan Schultz no longer has publishing privileges with our site and is no longer affiliated with SB Nation in any way.”)
Erin and the other four people involved in the investigation confronted Ryan, who admitted that, yes, they had actually been talking to Becca for all of these years. Once she was in too deep with the persona, she explained, she realized she couldn’t simply begin presenting her real self to the people she knew online and still have them as friends.
After Erin tweeted about Ryan/Becca, a handful of other women began tweeting and talking about their experiences with Ryan. Many of them said Ryan had harassed them, and one told me she had been coerced into sending nude photos of herself under threat of Ryan hurting himself otherwise.
Ryan went on a podcast with RO in February of this year, a bold move for someone faking their entire identity. On the episode, Ryan’s voice is higher in tone, but again, no one thought too much of it.
In June of this year, Ryan got the opportunity to contribute to SB Nation’s Beyond the Box Score, a site similar to Baseball Prospectus, but without the proprietary statistics. You might find a piece on Dallas Keuchel painting the edges of the strike zone there, or a piece comparing new Phillies manager Gabe Kapler to Chip Kelly. Ryan wrote 18 pieces for BtBS; most of them were fairly straightforward, definitely good enough to pass muster.
People who worked with Ryan at all three outlets told me the same thing: He talked about his wife and kids pretty freely. His elaborate backstory—the family, the pharmacology school—didn’t raise an eyebrow in an ecosystem where dermatologists and so many attorneys can moonlight as some of the industry’s leading minds.
“I think another reason I held onto Ryan was so long was that it worked,” she had told me a few hours earlier. “It took some time, but I really was a writer. And at one point I was too selfish to let that go.”
