LONDON (AP) - A 40-year-old American man living in Scotland said Monday he’s sorry for posing as a Syrian lesbian blogger who offered vivid accounts of life amid revolt and repression in Damascus, a hoax that has exposed the difficulty of sifting truth from fiction online.
Tom MacMaster said he created the fictional persona of Amina Arraf and the “Gay Girl in Damascus” blog to draw attention to conditions in a Middle East convulsed by change.
“I never meant to hurt anyone,” he wrote Monday in a long apology on the blog.
But gay rights activists and bloggers say MacMaster has endangered real people who are trying to tell their stories in authoritarian societies.
“He completely stole the limelight of real LGBT bloggers and activists in the Middle East and diverted it in a negative way,” said Dan Littauer of the website Gay Middle East.
Daniel Nassar, the pseudonym of a Syrian man affiliated with Gay Middle East, said MacMaster had put all gay Syrians in danger.
“If I was living in a country where I could sue this person because he has damaged me and damaged my cause … then I would,” he said.
The blogs about life as a Syrian-American lesbian grabbed international attention soon after they began in February. Alongside video clips and erotic poems, the writer wrote about a childhood in Virginia, daily life as a gay woman in Damascus, the growing protest movement and hopes for a future Syria freed from “dictators and rule by strong men.”
For readers hungry for news of the uprisings sweeping the Arab world, it was gold dust _ a gripping, firsthand account of a country from which most foreign journalists are excluded.
A reporter for The Associated Press, who maintained a monthlong email correspondence with someone claiming to be Arraf, found the persona persuasive. The writer spoke about friends in Damascus, and outlined worries about her father and hopes for the future of her country, and seemed very much like a woman in the midst of the violent change gripping Syria.
In the emails, the person acknowledged fudging some details to protect herself and her family, and painted a harrowing picture of fleeing her home.
An email sent to the blogger’s address Monday was not immediately returned.
On June 6, a post on the Arraf site, ostensibly by a cousin, said she’d been abducted by armed men in a Damascus street. The Internet erupted with alarm. A “Free Amina Arraf” Facebook page drew 14,000 supporters. The U.S. State Department said it was making inquiries to establish her identity.
But other bloggers began to go public with their growing doubts about Arraf’s authenticity.
Some thought an April 26 post describing how two plainclothes security agents came to her home to detain her and were persuaded to leaving by her father sounded extremely implausible. Syria’s hardline security services are not known as being easily dissuaded.
Reporters in Virginia, where Arraf claimed to have grown up, could find no trace of her or her family.
Journalists could find no one who had ever met her _ not even Sandra Bagaria, a Montreal woman who was having an online relationship with her and had exchanged hundreds of emails with “Amina.”
Online sleuths _ including Andy Carvin of National Public Radio and blogger Liz Henry _ found that an IP address used by Arraf was based at Edinburgh University and uncovered links between the blogger and an address in Stone Mountain, Georgia owned by MacMaster, a married American man currently studying for a master’s degree at the University of Edinburgh.
Then a woman in Britain, Jelena Lecic, came forward to say the photos of “Amina” on the blogger’s Facebook page were actually of her. She had been unaware of the theft until she saw her own picture illustrating a British newspaper article about the blogger.
Faced with the mounting evidence, MacMaster first denied it, then confessed, posting an “apology to readers” Sunday on Amina’s blog.
MacMaster _ tracked down by Turkish media to a hotel in Istanbul, where he is on vacation _ insists his intentions were good.
In Monday’s blog post, he called it “a hoax that got way out of hand.”
He told the BBC that he hadn’t expected the blog to be so popular and “didn’t think anyone would notice” that he had taken Lecic’s photos.
“Now that this is out I think the really important thing is that people should stop focusing on the hoaxer,” he said, “and really be focusing on the most important people, who are the real people suffering in Syria and throughout the broader Middle East.”
MacMaster said he had not meant to hurt anyone _ but his fake persona has left a trail of angry people.
Bagaria, Amina’s Canadian online girlfriend, tweeted that she felt “deeply hurt.”
Paula Brooks of lesbian news website Lezgetreal.com, which encouraged Amina and republished her blog entries, said she feels like a “patsy.”
Joe Stork, deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa division at Human Rights watch, said the whole episode should serve as a warning to media and rights groups trying to cover the region’s uprisings.
“It underscores the age-old principle that you have to know your sources,” he said. “You have to know who is feeding you this information.”
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Diaa Hadid in Beirut contributed to this report. Jill Lawless can be reached at https://twitter.com/JillLawless.
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