Nobody Should Believe Me - The Warrior Eli Hoax Part 1 with Taryn Wright

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

In the early 2010s, a heartbreaking story circulated widely online: a family documenting their young son Eli’s battle with cancer, following the sudden death of his mother. When investigative writer Taryn Wright came across the story, what began as casual curiosity quickly led to a shocking series of revelations about a story thousands of strangers had become deeply invested in. In this episode, Andrea talks with Taryn about how the Warrior Eli hoax unraveled and the very real impact it had on the people who believed it. The conversation explores why these stories resonate so deeply and what happens when deception is exposed. * * * Try out Andrea’s Podcaster Coaching App: https://studio.com/apps/andrea/podcaster Order Andrea’s book The Mother Next Door: Medicine, Deception, and Munchausen by Proxy.  Click here to view our sponsors. Remember that using our codes helps advertisers know you’re listening and helps us keep making the show!   Subscribe on YouTube where we have full episodes and lots of bonus content.  Follow Andrea on Instagram: @andreadunlop Buy Andrea's books here.  For more information and resources on Munchausen by Proxy, please visit MunchausenSupport.com The American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children’s MBP Practice Guidelines can be downloaded here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

True Story Media Hello, it's Andrea, and we're back today with a brand new episode, our very first of 2026. I hope your new year is off to a good start. I know things remain chaotic in the world to say the least. But we've got a great episode for you today with someone I have been wanting to have on the show for a while, and I think some of you will be familiar with her work. Today, we are talking to hoax hunter and writer Terran Harper Wright, who broke a number of stories about Munchausen by internet back in the 2010s, including the warrior Eli hoax, which we're digging into today. In the meantime, we're hard at work on season seven, which is coming to very soon.

As almost always happens, there were some surprises along the way that moved our timeline a bit, but that's the show, and we think the end result will be well worth the wait. And while we are working on that. We've got a lot of ground to cover week by week here in our case files episodes. And we have a really special guest coming up. We love to hear from you. So as always, if you have feedback on something you'd like us to cover, you can send us an email at hello at nobody should believe me.com. In the meantime, if you want to support the show, the best way to do that is to subscribe on Patreon or Apple Podcasts. You will get bonus episodes each month. And when we launch season seven, you will get the whole thing every single episode of the season, all at once,

ready to binge. And if monetary support isn't an option, no worries, you are supporting the show just by listening. And if you want to take a moment to share the show with someone who you think should hear it, or rate and review us on Apple, those things also help a great deal. We are an independent show. There is no show without you, and we are so grateful for your support. We will be right back with Terran Harper Wright. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Because Progressive offers discounts for paying in full, owning a home, and more.

Plus, you can count on their great customer service to help when you need it so your dollar goes a long way. Visit Progressive.com to see if you could save on car insurance. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates, potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations. Hey, it's Andrea. It's come to my attention that some of you have been served programmatic ads for ICE on my show. Now, podcasters don't get a lot of control over which individual ads play and for whom on our shows, but please know that we are trying everything we can to get rid of these by tightening our filters. And if you do continue to hear them, please do let us know. In the meantime, I want it to be known that I do not. support ICE. I am the daughter of an immigrant. I stand with immigrants. Immigrants make this country great. So, Taryn, it's so lovely to meet you. I've been familiar with your work for a while.

There are many adjacencies and crossovers. And I'm really excited to dig in. If you could just start by telling us who you are and what you do in the context of what we're talking about today, which is the warrior Eli hoax and munchausen by internet um so 12 years ago i kind of stumbled into this weird world of munchausen by internet um i had kind of been interested in it for a while um i had always sort of like if something came up on aOL i mean i'm old to like ask jeeves and stuff if it popped up and it was like some big hoax that somebody had like been exposed to i was always sort of interested in it um but i really never thought that i would sort of find one or, you know, be writing about it. I completely stumbled into this entire thing.

So I had a hip injury that was pretty severe and I ended up on bed rest for almost two years. So I was so bored. And one night I was on Facebook and it was Mother's Day and I was on Facebook, just kind of flipping around. And one of my friends had written, you know, everyone should be counting their blessings. You know, I've heard women complain about the gifts their children gave them for Mother's Day and this poor family just lost their mother and she gave birth after her death and not only that they have a child who has cancer. So I'm as nosy as they come. So I was like, okay, I'm going to start Googling this. And I found like a Facebook prayer group. I found a caring bridge site, all kinds of websites that were updating on this poor little guys battle

with cancer. So they had had 11 children. When I first noticed, was that I'm from a big family. I have like 31 cousins on one side. And our prize pictures are just the pictures of us all together because it looks like a crazy cult or something like that, you know, like all these tiny little toddlers. And this family had no pictures of all their children together.

So I thought, well, that's kind of strange. So I just sort of started Googling the family name. They had a gigantic internet history where they had a Zanga journal. I mean, we're really going to go back there. A live journal. journals, I mean, like stuff that they had written about bands and things that they had been in. The one thing that I did not find during my Google search was any kind of record of a home that they bought, any kind of job website. I mean, their entire internet search history was just things that they had written themselves.

So I was like, well, that's kind of weird, you know, but it's Canada. Who knows? Like, it's, I know Chicago. I don't know Canada. But I thought, okay, well. And this was, you know, this was like the 2010s, too. So we were, we were online, but maybe not to the degree that, you know, for our younger listeners that we are in the 2020s where, you know, there's just a record of everything. Right. And this was the age of blogs, which was amazing for me. I'm much more a reader than I am a video watcher when it comes to like information.

So I don't think I would have ever been able to do what I ended up doing with hoax stuff if it was just like watching two hour videos. I mean, like, I just, I arrived at that sweet spot where people were, like, uploading everything about their lives, but not video. So anyway, I Googled thinking, okay, this is Mother's Day, like, no matter what country, this is going to be a big story that this poor woman who's a trauma surgeon had been in a head-on crash, but was brought to the hospital that she worked at, gave birth to a baby after her death, and her Canadian Mountie husband arrived with her child that had cancer. I mean, that would be a news story. nothing absolutely nothing so i thought well that's also very strange uh and then i thought oh my gosh what if this is you know a big gigantic hoax i started putting pictures through google image search again like i am the nosiest human um i started putting pictures through google image search and that's when i realized that they were taken from other places on the internet um from bloggers in different

countries and um that first day of the hoax i was really adamant to find out where the pictures came from. Like, to me, that seemed like the real victim, people who had the pictures of their child with cancer stolen, you know, to use for this blog. Later on, I realized that other people were affected much more, more heavily than that. But that's kind of how it started. So I was going to, again, like the pictures were my important thing at the time. So I started emailing the people whose pictures had been taken. And it was kind of a pain in the butt to have to retype the same thing over and over again. So I just made a WordPress site just to send to people who I found their pictures. And it went viral overnight. I mean, people were, this family had, I mean,

they had 6,000 followers of their Facebook prayer page. They were raising money for Alex's lemonade stand after this woman's death. So they had a really big footprint in the childhood cancer community. And so to back up just a minute, you know, so as you kind of get like this, you know, feeling some things up and you started digging in. But this family had been, you know, they were very active online. They had a community online. They had a history online. So what did the world understand about the dear family and about Dana and Eli and the father? You know, what was the story as most people who were following it understood it at the time that you got involved. So obviously this post-chronicling Dana's untimely death was the thing that brought it to your

attention, but they had quite a history. So what did the world understand these folks to be before you started on this debunking journey? They did. They had a long history on the internet, and especially in the childhood cancer community. Their little boy, Eli, who I believe was like eight, maybe seven. He had been struggling with cancer for two years. And they chronicled this little guys struggles, you know, all his treatment plans and like pictures of him undergoing chemotherapy and radiation and surgeries. They were asking for, you know, prayers and support, actually not prayers, just support really, on their Facebook page. And they had a community of several thousand people that kind of followed everything that they said. The husband was

J.S. and he was a Canadian Mountie. And the wife was Dana and she was a trauma surgeon at a hospital in Saskatchewan, but they had interacted with so many parents and family members of kids with cancer, who is this big gigantic support network that they used, had on Facebook where they held each other's hand through these procedures and things like that, talked on the phone, texted, stuff like that, and it had been going on for years and years. So they had quite a community that they had put together of people that believed everywhere that was written. And this was not the family's first tragedy. So you mentioned that obviously their son had been struggling with cancer. Were there other sort of unusual tragedies that this family had been through?

Well, again, as I started kind of digging in, and like what I want to really say, it sounds so goofy when I put it all out there that it, this family had this and this happened. But keep in mind this, these journals and things like that were going on for 11 years. So it wasn't like Like every single day there was this gigantic tragedy. But so people, you know, like I've had people that kind of say, who could have fallen for this? I mean, this is the craziest story. But if you know somebody day to day, people have crazy things happen in their lives. Like, and again, if it's spread out over a long period of years, I don't think that people are idiots for believing it.

That being said, JS's twin brother was murdered because he came out as gay and somebody didn't like that. um i'm trying to think of what else happened i mean it was j s had um he was a single father when he met dana so he had three or four mothers of his children um who had either like succumb to drug abuse or they had just kind of abandoned their children very conveniently so this gigantic family could kind of exist um he had i mean there there really were a lot there's always twins i've noticed um so there i think they had two sets of twins in their family um there was a car accident involving the twins wins where they posted very graphic pictures of a eva car that was smashed by a semi. Just things like that. Like just always a lot of drama happening. Yeah. So when you started reaching out to, and I, and I think, you know, something that's interesting about this story being, you know, I'm 43. And so it's like I lived through these evolutions of the internet. And this is a very like 2010 story, you know, because I think this is an era where we were quite a lot more naive and innocent about the idea that the things we put online were safe to share, right?

And like the idea, I think the idea back then that someone would like steal your photos of your children for various purposes, which I think is like pretty accepted among parents now. I mean, like, I don't put any pictures of my kids anywhere. Spar, sorry, square. Like, would, was more shocking then. And so what was the reaction from the people, you know, these sort of unsuspecting victims from whom these photos had been pillaged? What was their reaction when you reached out to them? I mean, just completely stunned, especially one of, one set of twins belonged to a South African blogger. And she was just shocked that somebody across, you know, the world had claimed her children as their own. The mother of the actual

cancer patient who doesn't want her name used or anything like that, but she was super concerned because there were so many pictures taken of her little son that she was worried that it would lead to a custody battle between her and her ex-husband, just because it seemed like an unsafe thing to do all of a sudden, you know, like to document your kids' cancer battle. So it had effects send people. I mean, I think people were, um, some people were completely not bothered. Other people, it was just kind of funny to them that, I mean, especially J.S. was like a financial bro in his like 20s or something. I mean, he was just like, okay. And, you know, like somebody took my pictures. But, um, you know, like I think that it, again, like the poor mother whose child actually had cancer was the

most stunned of all. Yeah. I mean, and that's just, you can imagine what a horrible violation that would feel like. So you were talking about you put together this blog really for the purposes of sort of not having to, you know, recreate the same email over and over again. And then that people started getting involved. So tell us about this community that formed around the warrior Eli hoax the blog. So for the first hoax that I wrote about the warrior Eli won, I had thrown everything on WordPress. I included an email address for people to send me information as that, as it came to them. So the person, the family sent out care packages or packages of plastic bracelets like the Livestrong bracelets that said Warrior Eli on them. They sent out pictures, like printed pictures of their kids. They sent out coloring book pages and drawings that the cancer patient Eli had done. And they sent this to tons and tons and tons of people all over the world at great expense. And so people started sending me pictures and things like that of these care packages and other information. I mean, just people that were like, okay, I was in a relationship with

JS that Dana didn't know about that was online only. I mean, like this, there were long, long, long, long, tendrils that this family had had on the internet for years and years. And I just kind of heard about all of them through this email, this email account. And then after the heat died down over the Warrior Eli thing. I made a Facebook group of all the people that had kind of helped me find information. And at first, we just were just any like group on the internet that were just like joking around and making memes out of stuff. But then as people continue to send me different blogs and things to look at, we started kind of investigating them together. Okay. Yeah. And so I want to get a little bit more into that community and what it became.

But before we get there, what did you discover about who was behind the dear family? As you obviously, you know, the fact that these photos belong to people throughout the world and are not actually photos of the people they're claiming. So obviously we know that this is, that this is a hoax. Yeah, spoiler alert. What did you discover? Yeah, to the shock of, I'm sure no one listening. But what did you discover about the person who is behind all of this?

Well, it was apparently because J.S. had a top secret Mountie job with the Canadian Royal Police, as it happens. I mean, they apparently could not send out care packages on their own. So they had their, J.S. had his sister in Ohio send out the care packages. And it turned out that this person was behind the entire hoax. Again, spoiler alert, sorry, everybody, J.S. and Dana and Eli and the twins and the twin brother, nobody really exists. existed. It was all something that this woman, Emily Deere, had come up with and had been working on for 11 years since she was a very young child, really, like a preteen. Wow. That's so extraordinary. And so it sounds like you traced this through these care packages that were going out. Yes. And did you get a chance to speak to Emily? I did. I emailed her and I didn't want to. I mean, the whole, again, like I was kind of making up rules for myself as I went along and I was very hesitant. to expose somebody. I mean, if you knew me and real life, I am like the least dramatic human. Like, the fact that I was at the center of all this is kind of like, okay. And I had to come out of the closet again as like this nosy, nosy human.

All my friends were like, okay, Terran, like how many hours? I was up the first day, like, 36 hours, you know, like working on this thing. And now everyone I went to high school with knows it. And it's just like, oh, gosh. But anyway. I mean, listen, I'm a true crime podcaster. So, like, I find this highly relatable. but yeah. You get it. I mean, like, you're one of us. Exactly. I do. I really do. But it was like, I mean, and that was a concern. The first couple of hours, I was like, this is going to be, you know, like, I didn't know what was going to happen with it. Obviously, I just thought that like somebody on my Facebook feed would undoubtedly find out about this. And just because so many people were looking. I had put it like a tracker. I think I had 175,000 hits like the first evening, which is crazy. And also, again, in 2013, like that is, I mean, that's massive numbers. Yes.

I mean, on like a WordPress blog. This is not like a, you know, this is not in the current ecosystem. Sorry, we had these things called hits that were, it's like, there is things have really changed. I mean, it is crazy to think of that it, and you look at my blog. I mean, like, I have the default like WordPress background. I mean, I did like no work on this other than the writing whatsoever because I don't have any kind of skill with any of that. But anyway, oh yeah, we got back to did I talk to her? So I was like, well, before I exposed.

this person or like right about who it is. I want to talk to them. You know, like I want to find out what's going on. I wanted to make sure I was like 100% right. So I emailed Emily and I was like, oh, actually I wrote on the blog, can E.D. or something of Youngstown, Ohio, please email me at this address. And it took a couple of hours. And then I got this email that was like, what is going on? My brother, who is a Mountie, told me that he used pictures of other children that were around his children's age because he didn't want to use pictures of his real children on the blog. And he's grieving right now. His wife died and his son is going to die any minute. And I was like, no, you know, like I. Okay, was there, I have to ask, was there any part of you that when

you got that email was like, oh, what if I'm wrong? Or you were just like, no, this person's covered? Like, you were so sure at that point. I was pretty sure. I mean, again, like, my nightmare from hell would be, especially later on, I mean, writing about other hoaxes and things like that, my nightmare from hell would be I wrote about somebody and it wasn't true. I mean, like, eventually I would like have a process I went through to kind of verify things and anything that I wrote, I wanted to have like five or six different ways to prove it was the person, you know, just so I could like reassure myself. I mean, I don't want to like ruin someone's life. But yeah, at that point, at that point it was very obvious that there was no Canadian Mountie named J.S. Deere and no trauma surgeon who had tragically died on Mother's Day. So yeah, I didn't believe her. I asked her if we could talk on the phone. Or no, actually, she asked me if we could talk on the phone. And I was, I mean, like, my brother lived with me at the time. And I was like, oh, my God, this woman wants to talk on the phone. My brother was like, don't call. I mean, it was just such a strange. Like, that. was the time on the internet where you didn't use your real name in places, you know, just like there was nothing, like, Facebook was weird at the time because people like were out there

with their real name. Like AOL, they told you like never use your real name on your chat account or something like this. So it was strange to like get a phone call from somebody I didn't know on the internet at that time. But she called and she had like a story that she had made it up. She had a story of why she made it up that she was going through a hard time. She had just had a miscarriage, her mother had cancer, I believe. I mean, like, another kind of sob story explaining why she did it. And I believed every word at that point, which again, like, the funny thing is, like, I've written about all this stuff, and yet I'm so naive and so many, like, I tend to just believe people. And then it's just like, why? Why don't you believe this person?

But yeah, I found out later that all of that was not true. But yeah, she admitted that she did it. And I, right away, again, like, I should say, no psychological training, nothing like that. So right away, I was like, she sounds very flat, sounded. I mean, her voice sounded flat, emotionless. I struggled with depression in my 20s. So I was like, oh, she has depression. So I kind of said to her, do you have depression? And she's like, yes, yes, I have depression.

So she wrote a, I'm sorry email, and I posted it thinking that was the end of it, you know, thinking that what else can this person do other than say that they're sorry? And how old was she when you talked to her? She was a medical student, which was concerning for sure. I believe she was 25. And so she'd started this when she was 14 or 15? I think so, yeah. It had been going on for 11 years.

It started just like as a creative writing. I mean, the funny thing is, like, I am an actual writer, and her output was, like, amazing compared to mine in that time. So I said to her, you should write novels or something. Like, you should write something with these characters, or sorry, cat in the background. And she was very offended that I said that she should, like, write fiction. So, and I've had that experience with several other hoaxers where, like, fiction isn't... Interesting. It doesn't hit the same, like, nerve that they want, you know, like the part of their brain that they want.

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things happen and that's why I did it. I mean, that's something that's come up a lot on the show. Did you get at any points you said you were kind of talking about some of her mental health issues, did you get more of a sense eventually of what had maybe inspired her to create this entire, you know, alternate reality online? I did not. Honestly, that was the only time that she and I talked. And I think that she, I mean, like, again, it just got so big, so quickly. And I think she probably had people that were telling her not to talk to anyone. And I think that that probably was a smart idea on her part. Just because, again, like, who knew that it was

going to blow up the way it did? So I've heard from people that know her and that were, like, stunned that she had done something like this. And, um, you know, I'm sure she had something going on, but like, I don't know specifically what it was. Yeah. And so you'd mentioned that they had been doing some fundraising, but was it personal fundraising or was it fundraising on behalf of an organization in this case? It was on behalf of Alex's lemonade stand. Um, and I think that purposely they made sure. And that's, what is, what is Alex's lemonade? Oh, it's a childhood cancer charity, um, that is, is really well known. Um, it, uh, it raises. Um, uh, it raises money for families that are going through pediatric cancer treatment with their kids.

And it's gigantic now. Even at Aldi, they have a fundraiser for, I'm a gigantic Aldi fan. They have a fundraiser for Alex's Lemonade Stand. So that was my first time hearing about it, but it is a great, very legitimate charity. I felt bad. Again, like, you couldn't know what was going to happen, but I felt bad kind of dragging them into it because they ended up having to like refund donations and things like that. So, yeah, that was rough.

But I'm trying to think, what was the question you asked? I'm sorry, Andrea. Oh, yeah. No, I just wanted to sort of back up about the, yeah, about the fundraising piece because, of course, something that we hear a lot about. And I know some of the stories that you've covered have involved fraudulent fundraising that was just via something like a go fund me, where it was just going directly to the person. Right. So that sort of struck me as a different element that, yes, she's doing fraudulent fundraising, but at least it sort of was being directed towards legitimate organization. And she wasn't. pocketing the money. Right. And that's what makes it so interesting to me is that it, the hoaxers that I really enjoyed writing about or that I found most interesting were the ones that weren't doing any kind of fraudulent fundraising, um, that were kind of, I mean, like anybody can kind of use the computer and the internet and go fund me as like a tool. A bank robbery is a gun, you know, like it's something similar to that. But the fact that she just created, she had, she had 81 fake Facebook profiles. Um,

and when you think of that, I mean, that's 80. fake email accounts, keeping track of the passwords, you know, like she had, her Facebook profile was the one thing that made me, or not hers, the dears. I'm sorry, the pronouns get so confusing when I'm talking about this thing. The Deer family had, they were way more active on Facebook than I had ever been. I mean, like cross, you know, like one person would comment and then other people would comment too, and it turned out that they were all fake. So it was just wild. I mean, like, it still kind of blows my mind. This is an elaborate web. Yeah. And just the time that had to be spent on that and medical

school. I mean, it's, it's crazy to think about. And she was legitimately a medical student? She was. She had dropped out several weeks before this whole thing happened. But she definitely legitimately was a medical student while she was doing this, this blog, which is not my, my, I had another one that was very similar that had to leave medical school because she was perpetuating a rob like this. A lot of nurses. I mean, it's kind of crazy. People go for those jobs. Yeah, no, that's really, I mean, that comes up a lot in the show. So, so you spoke to Emily, and then she, you posted on the blog this apology letter. And what did she say in her apology and how do people react? I can't remember the exact wording, but it was something to the effect of.

She was raising awareness of childhood cancer when she was doing it, and that she was very sorry one woman had sent her a blanket, like a hand-knit blanket, and she did return that. But I think that that was the only actual, like, gift that she had taken from anyone. So she said, you know, I was raising awareness of childhood cancer. I was really young when it started. I'm very sorry. And I thought, well, that's it. I mean, what more could people want?

Again, so naive, man. The common section exploded where people wanted to chop off her head. and put it on a hike and carry it around, you know, I mean, I didn't realize at that point the anger that was out there for somebody that would do something like this. And I didn't realize how many people she had interacted with who had kids with cancer. Yeah, so what came to light about how many people got pulled into this story and you were talking earlier about how, you know, your sort of impression in the beginning about who got hurt was the idea of like, oh, she stole these photos from these people, you know, one of whom is a parent of a child that legitimately has

cancer. That's obviously a huge violation. That was kind of the victim here. What did you learn as this progressed about who else had gotten pulled into this web? Well, she had very much represented herself as an advocate for families that were going through the same thing that their family was going through with the child with cancer. She had like befriended tons and tons of parents who had kids with cancer. One parent told me that she had left the deathbed of her child to console Jay Esther about bad news that they had about a scan about Eli. And she'll never get that time back. I mean, like, that kind of hit me in a way that I didn't get it before. But it was crazy to see, again, like, I just, I mean, like it, I don't use the internet like a lot of people did back

then, which was like Facebook for a lot of people was just, I follow 2,000 prayer pages for kids with cancer and like I offer support and things like that. I mean, I ended up having to delete my Facebook just because it was getting, I had so many people that had cancer or children of cancer had like friended me that it was super duper depressing to like open Facebook. So I couldn't do it. But some people are very much nicer and kinder than I am and they just kind of use Facebook to like show support to people. I really underestimated how much people, would grieve J.S. and Dana and Eli, even though they didn't exist. I mean, like, their brains still went through a grief process that they had been close to this family and now they were gone. And plus

the anger that they felt towards Emily who had perpetuated the whole thing. It was intense. I mean, like, people were very, very upset that they had, you know, comforted this family, that they had taken advice, medical advice from this family. It really, did open a lot of wounds. It is really intense. And that must have been intense for you to sort of unexpectedly find yourself at the epicenter of it. It was. I mean, I'm very, I should say at that time, I didn't know anybody close to me that had cancer. And I think that that was a huge reason that I was able to kind of be in the middle. You know, like I didn't really take aside one way or the other. Like I think the people I wrote about did something terrible. At the same time, I don't think that they

should have to suffer for it for the rest of their lives. You know, like, I think that people make mistakes, and I don't think anybody in a happy part of their life, you know, like living a life that they enjoy goes home and pretends to be a mother of a kid that's dying of cancer. Like, that just to me suggests that there's something going on either mentally or psychologically, like, who knows. But I will say that now I've had somebody very close to me that had cancer and I went through it with them. And I can understand the anger a lot more now, like a lot more. So again, like, I was naive to think that this was like, okay, this woman said she did it. Like, let's move on. I was naive to think that there wouldn't be, you know, like bruises and things like that left

behind. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting, you know, something you just said about the idea of people being very online and specifically following the cancer journeys of children they don't know. And, you know, you sort of framed that as, oh, like, that's someone who's really empathetic and caring. And I think my response to that is maybe or maybe something else. Yes. And indeed, as this community developed around the hoax hunting part of this, right? As you said, you sort of gathered all of the people who were involved in this onto a Facebook group, and it was, you know, kind of an affinity group. And, you know, you had a sort of collective moment of people helping you get to the bottom of this. So tell us a

little bit about what happened with that group. Yeah. And what sort of became of, what became of that project once you moved on from this initial sort of bomb about Emily Deere? Well, it's super gross. warning um so again i had started this group that with people that had provided me information and some other people kind of joined it all together there ended up being about a hundred members like i think maybe facebook was suggesting it for a while for groups to join um so i had 100 members and again like we started out just kind of like goofing around making memes and things like that um there was one i got several people in the group that messaged me and said um several people in the group messaged me and said, hey, what's going on with this father James Purrier,

Priya? I wonder how you pronounce that, Priya. So I looked at their profile and definitely like a young, younger guy, I thought that they were a trans person. Like, I just thought that this was a trans man. And then I thought, oh, these women, you know, like, I'm so happy that I live in such a progressive city because these women obviously, like, have never run into a trans person before and they think this person is faking, and in reality, they're just living their lives and, like, oh, aren't I lucky? Pat on the back, wonderful person that I am. And was James a member of the group?

Yes. James was a member of the group and had helped with the second hoax that I worked on, which I think was like a person that said that they lost a baby in a car accident and they did not. Yeah, there's a lot of sad stories involved. Well, luckily, they are all fake, so that's a good thing. but anyway he had helped with um that and one day we all decided to do like an intro post just kind of like introducing ourselves and like i forget what it was like what's your favorite color what something stupid and several people went it was just very silly and then um james went and it was i am james i'm a 16 year old single father of twins and i was raped 17 times and i was kidnapped

as a child i mean just like the absolute what we were were looking at from the Munchausen by internet people that we were talking about, I was looking at it with this person. So I messaged him privately and I was like, I don't believe that you are who you say you are. He was like, yes, I am. And I said, could you send me a picture of you and your boys together? He sent me a picture of the back of like two people's heads with like two children in Halloween costumes. And I said, oh, I'm so sorry I'm going to have to kick you out of the group, you know? And we all kind of like laughed about it at the time that, You know, like, oh, here, I was identifying hoaxers and I had let this person.

I mean, they were only in the group for maybe two weeks. About 10 days later, one of our members was on Gawker, or I think it was Gawker. And there was a story about a woman who had posed as a man and had met a teenager and spent, like, the weekend with them. And, again, this is going to get crazy. So the person had told this teenager that they were a biological male, and they had had, like, sexual relations and things like that. And later on, he had told this person that he was 16 also. Later on, it turned out that not only was he 22, but also he had been lying about his gender. He was actually a biological woman.

So he was arrested, and I believe, like, went to jail for a while. And that was really gross. I mean, it was kind of horrible to think that we had allowed a statutory rapist in the group and somebody that would lie. I mean, definitely that was rape on so many levels. Yeah, that's really disturbing. And I think, you know, I think it's, it really points to sort of the complexities of who might be really drawn to some of these stories. I could just be, it could be people with a personal experience that they relate to. I mean, listen, I think about this a lot with, you know, with my listeners, right?

And there's like people that come to the show for all different kinds of reasons. Some people have a professional interest. Some people are just true crime fans. Some people, you know, a fair amount of people have some personal experience in their own lives. And then I always have to acknowledge that there are certainly people who are listening that are engaged in some of these behaviors. And that that's just something I've seen evident. of elsewhere. And, you know, I think that sounds like you had, you know, a moment of discovery there. And then how did you kind of feel at that point about this group that you'd assembled?

I mean, I'm sure that made you sort of, yeah, I'm sure that was just a real bomb going off in that group. It was pretty terrible. I mean, it was just a gross thing that happened for sure. I had somebody else, I think, do an interview with Gawker. Like Gawker was interested in, like, doing a follow-up and I just didn't want to talk about it because it was so gross. But, you know, like it definitely was linked to the group, which is kind of not great. But I will agree with you on the, for a while after I had been writing about hoaxes for a while, I was really meticulous in my early entries to kind of prove what the person had done and how I found out who they were and things like that. Then we had a fan page on Facebook and I was writing about one hoaxer and I

looked at their Facebook likes and they were a follower of my fan page, somebody that I was about to write about. So I thought, what am I doing? Am I writing a how to on how to get away with this stuff? You know, like I'm super meticulously, like, I looked at their IP address and it was linked here. I mean, just, I didn't like, I did not like that feeling. I think just like you, it was a struggle to kind of realize that. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think, you know, so you continue kind of this hoax hunting. project. And, you know, as this evolves, you're beginning to really see some of the complexities of exposing people who are engaging in these behaviors, especially because there is often

a pretty extreme reaction. So can you tell us about, like, when you sort of realize that, oh, there's, there could be like a real risk to the person who I'm exposing. if I go public with one of these. Yeah, I mean, I did 2020 after the first hoax, and they had tried to get Emily Deere to appear on the show, and she said no. I had a bunch of people at my house to watch the 2020 episodes the first time I was ever on TV.

So it was like my cousins and friends and everybody, and all of a sudden they had hidden camera footage of Emily, like, walking down the street and eating a candy bar. I mean, she just looked like, like we all look like, you know, when we don't know there's a camera following us, around and I thought oh my god I cannot believe that I like signed off on this project that they are like kind of hunting this woman to let you know she said no that she doesn't want to be on it again like this is hopefully they wouldn't do that now that was 15 years ago or however long ago like it was

it was but it was gross you know it was totally gross um then my comment section was super duper I mean it wasn't even moderated and people were really I really set a tone in what I wrote about that was like remember there are two sides to this like this person is struggling to and for a while everybody was really compassionate and empathetic um then they weren't i mean then it was like even people that were in the hoax group like the group of a hundred people that i had formed on facebook would be like i want to kill this bitch like i want to um this one is the worst one yet you know like and i'm i kept saying like okay but we kind of agreed when we started this that we were going to look at both sides of this and this isn't i mean i I really, from the beginning, almost the beginning, I was like, okay, I need to really examine my motivations in writing this. Like, I don't want to write to be a punishment to this person. I don't want to write to kind of hold somebody up in like a old time stock and say, like, let's throw tomatoes at this person. I really wanted it to be an educational thing. Like, this is what you need to watch out for. And I had talked to Dr. Mark Feldman, who is the doctor that came up with, Munchausen by Internet. He's brilliant, a psychiatrist and a psychologist, which the fact that he has to do interviews

with me, I'm just like, oh, my God, this poor guy, like, Taryn the English major. But he's... I mean, listen, Mark's a dear friend, and I'm also was an English major. I was a creative writing major. Oh, yeah. So you get it. You get it when you're like, okay, why? Like, how did this happen?

How am I the expert on this? You know? Such a good thinker on the subject, for sure. Oh, he's so wonderful. He really has been, was so sweet. And again, like, I came out of nowhere in this, you know, like, he's talking about. about how many eight years of education and I'm like, one day I was on Facebook and I like stumbled on this folks. So yeah. But he was telling me that I asked him, you know, like I asked him to look

at the blog and I was like, what do you think? And he said that there might be some value in these people seeing their own name on this, that they would kind of move on and not perpetuate another hoax. I mean, I'm sure you know for sure that the problem of Munchausen by Internet is that they just kind of keep doing this in a different community. Like they don't. stop. At least they didn't 13 years ago. I haven't really updated myself on like the psychological profile, but I'm assuming that they just go to a different community. No, it's an extremely compulsive behavior. Yeah. I mean, how sad. So with my group kind of imploding, I felt really awkward kind of posting personal information about the people that I was writing about. And it

turned out like some people in the group, I don't, and again, like I don't know who were sending people like warning letters almost, it being like, we're looking at you or like, you're the worst. We know that you're fake and like signing my name on things. So then I was like, okay, I can't have a Facebook group anymore. You know, like just from a, I'm a good person perspective, like I don't want to have like somebody that we're just looking at that I haven't even decided to write about having their personal information doxed in a small group and then having people reach out and harass them. I mean, like, what are we doing here, people? So yeah, the group ended. And that was kind of rough, just because, I mean, I think some of the people resented. I mean, I kept a small

group of people that I really did trust, but I think some people did resent it because they had helped from the beginning, and then I kind of just decided not to do that anymore. I really enjoyed this conversation with Taryn Wright, and there's so much more that we get into that we will be back next week with part two, where we're going to dig into the evolution of online hoaxes, catfishing, and what it means to be the person chasing them. That's all next week on Nobody Should Believe Me. Nobody Should Believe Me is produced and hosted by me, Andrea Dunlop. Our editor is Greta Stromquist, and our senior producer is Mariah Gossett.

Administrative support from Nola Karmouche. Thank you.