Dana Chivvis
speaker
159 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 14 Sep
Dana Chivvis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah.
LesGetReal.com posted an apology to readers for publishing 19 articles Amina had supposedly written. Time to confront Tom. Liz reaches him on the phone. He's on vacation with his wife in Istanbul. And They're laughing a lot.
Other reporters had figured it out, too. Liz and Melissa decide to run with the story, that a gay girl in Damascus was actually Tom, a white dude living in Scotland. But before they can publish, Tom beats them to it. He confesses in a post on a gay girl.
It's less picky than a gay girl in Damascus.
Tom writes the quintessential non-apology apology, says that while the narrative voice might have been fictional, he was describing a very real situation on the ground in Damascus, and he doesn't think he harmed anyone. Maybe you saw the whole thing coming, internet scams being what they are these days. Maybe you're thinking, hey, this whole story is a scam.
I can't believe I paid no dollars for this. But calm down a second. There's more. Liz and her editor, Melissa, published their story on Sunday, six days after Amina was supposedly abducted. Their headline is, A Gay Girl in Damascus Comes Clean. After they post their article, Liz and Melissa are talking with a more senior editor. Everyone's pretty happy with the story.
But there's something still nagging at Liz, a detail she can't get out of her head. It has to do with that other lesbian she interviewed, Paula Brooks, from lesgetreal.com.
Liz had emailed with Paula Brooks. Paula had sent Liz a photo of her driver's license as proof of identity. But Liz had only ever spoken with Paula's dad.
So instead of celebrating a great scoop, outing Tom as Amina, Liz dove straight into investigating Paula Brooks.
Bill told Liz he'd had some lesbian friends who were mistreated and he wanted to help. He also wanted a platform where he could write in support of repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell. The real Paula Brooks, Bill explained, was his partner, who didn't know he'd been using her identity online to pose as a lesbian.
And having a flirtation with Amina.
For the uninitiated, a sock puppet hoax is when someone uses a false identity online. The day after they published their story about Tom being a Mina, Liz and Melissa published another one with the headline, Paula Brooks, editor of Les Get Real, also a man.
By the time Tom's little lie had rolled all the way downhill, it was a pretty sizable lie with real world consequences. The Syrian government used it to suggest that everyone in the West was lying about the Assad regime's murderous tactics against activists and bloggers. They used it to suggest that gay people in Syria were really just agents of the West.
In retrospect, Amina's writing, it's so bad. Like when her father supposedly says to the secret police, you know where we stood when Mohammed, peace be upon him, went to Medina. It's like the 1950s Hollywood version of how a Syrian man would talk. But what was good about Amina's writing, Tom's writing, is that it played for emotion.
It confirmed what we were all feeling here in the West, what excited us about the Arab Spring. Democracy was ascendant, the bad guys were going down, the lesbians were taking over, or whatever. Amina was the lie we all wanted. I reached out to Tom, Bill, and Britta for this story. Tom and Bill definitely did not want to talk to me. Britta didn't respond.
But the day after he was outed, Tom did some press. He said he had wanted to wind Amina down for a while, and he was going on vacation. So having her abducted was kind of his out-of-office message. Yeah, man, the internet, huh?
A lot's changed since then. The Washington Post, where Liz worked, is now owned by Jeff Bezos. Twitter is owned by Elon Musk. Instagram is owned by Facebook. Facebook has done away with fact-checking. And the president has his own social media platform, called Truth Social, where he regularly posts falsehoods and conspiracy theories.
Kind of makes you long for the good old days, when the internet wasn't dominated by the most powerful, and people still cared what was true and what wasn't. The truth. So retro. It's a whole new world now. Except over here on the dusty old radio, where I still can't say shit or piss or fuck or cunt or cocksucker or motherfucker or tits. Not even tits.
Because, of course, think of the chaos that would ensue if I did.
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