Read on Twitter
worm discourse diminished and went into the west so that the age of “is this hypothetically dead professor potentially an incredibly deep fake” discourse could rise
and i gotta say! none of it makes sense! and now i almost miss the worms!
anyways, anybody who knew SB beyond the pseud and outside of a BA McL context is very welcome to get in touch, because i am having about 10 concurrent conversations with various individuals/groups over this and none of us can figure any of it out
this is one of my big hangups. if SB was a real and autonomous human, she was allegedly interacting with MTS in a client/support capacity, and should not have been anywhere near BA’s bed, much less had an established “side.”
couple options arise at this point?
-this was a fully invented person (by ???)
-this was an unknown person selectively misrepresenting themself who has not come forward to clarify anything
-SB is real & BA has crossed yet another deeply problematic ethical boundary in leading MTS
-this was a fully invented person (by ???)
-this was an unknown person selectively misrepresenting themself who has not come forward to clarify anything
-SB is real & BA has crossed yet another deeply problematic ethical boundary in leading MTS
this is further evidence against the “real person” case https://twitter.com/metoofieldwork/status/1290020825119129600?s=21
this might make sense if SB was corralling emails and passing them along to BA, but in combination with other stuff feels...off. https://twitter.com/chromcatography/status/1290006777988145154?s=21 https://twitter.com/chromcatography/status/1290006777988145154
noteworthy disclaimer that’s easy to lose track of: https://twitter.com/chromcatography/status/1290020454803976193?s=21 https://twitter.com/chromcatography/status/1290020454803976193
more stock photo weirdness, captured by a friend and shared with permission:
Anecdotally, multiple people have conveyed to me that SB and BA’s tweeting styles were very similar in very distinctive ways, including specific punctuation quirks and weird combativeness. Make of that what y’all will.
The account’s vague claims of Indigeneity (understandable in a past of good faith, given how rapidly that’d de-anonymize a uni lecturer) were specified as Hopi repeatedly this week by BA. Not sure if anyone in Hopi or adjacent communities knows of someone mourning a relation?
Also, fwiw, having spoken with a number of long-serving former MTS leadership/volunteers through the course of the day, no one but BA seems to have ever interacted with this person outside of twitter DMs for that account.
The sciencing_bi account was made in 2016, so I was initially disinclined to believe it was fully fake, since that is a *very* long time to keep up a false persona. But at this point? When it got ASU closure dates wrong, & no profs there know any lecturers who’ve died recently?
I have seen no credible evidence that this was a real person (unverifiable claims from accts with <50 followers don’t count). I am seeing mounting evidence that this was a cultivated fake persona, & that BethAnn McLaughlin was the only person who would’ve known her true identity.
BethAnn and I have been mutually blocked for a while, given her tendency to harass my friends for publicly talking about her abusing them, & I unfollowed sciencing_bi a while back for the account’s persistent bullying of the same friends, so I haven’t kept tabs on either of them.
I won’t claim to have up-to-date firsthand knowledge of how either account operates.
But all credible evidence currently suggests that BethAnn, a white bi woman, operated a profile pretending to be an Indigenous bi woman for 4 years, & faked that person’s death this week.
But all credible evidence currently suggests that BethAnn, a white bi woman, operated a profile pretending to be an Indigenous bi woman for 4 years, & faked that person’s death this week.
It should be noted that, anecdotally, the first self-IDs of the SB account as Indigenous seem to have arisen earlier this year, after BethAnn was accused of being racist & abusive of BIPOC in MeTooSTEM (again). So they don’t seem super credible.
Here’s some more weirdness on the Indigenous ID claims, shared by a friend. Prior to 2020, their tone re: “Native Americans” indicated ID’ing as exterior to that group; first claims of Indigeneity seem to have arisen this spring/summer and seem...fishy to me.
Info from the ASU side: https://twitter.com/rachelleingang/status/1290027883155480577?s=21
This email from BA to a reporter is weird, given her multiple claims that they met in person, including the whole bed sharing bit? https://twitter.com/rachelleingang/status/1290071722494849024?s=21
Here’s one of the alleged occasions on which BA claims to have spent time with SB in person (again, outside of the bed sharing bit???) (grabbed screenshot from a previous qt from earlier that was deleted by OP)
(An aside, as pointed out by a few friends - that’s almost certainly not Yosemite, and looks more like a view in Grand Tetons, which is just a weird and confusing bonus lie to throw in there??)
Ah, so another friend found this article with a pic of BA with her daughter on a trip to Grand Teton National Park - different angle, but it’d indicate that that alleged photo of SB is in fact BA’s daughter given the hat/life jacket matching, etc https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/qa-with-scientist-and-advocate-bethann-mclaughlin-64609
(my bad: thought hat matched at a glance, but didn’t see the navy front on the twitter pic hat until @james_t_webber pointed it out? still, no certainty that it’s anyone in particular)
Also - I don’t have an inherent issue with people retaining anonymity, but the lengths to which this account + BA’s have inconsistently gone to launder authenticity when there’s no discernible difference in tone between the two are...odd.
I really don’t know any anons here who are taken seriously who are fully unknown to everyone they interact with, even close friends, particularly people they claim to have met? I don’t know everybody’s real names, of course, but there’s usually *some* track record.
Academic scientists meet up at conferences, they have publication track records and collaborations, they have random meetups even if they don’t learn each other’s government names. It’d be weird for no one at SB’s uni or in her field to have registered her passing otherwise.
(An aside/update on the stock photo front: most of the pics the SB account posted as though they were original seem to have been stock/internet photo reposts.)
(Also, to finish an earlier thought re: Native ID claims after a convo w a Native friend: Navajo & Hopi cultures are notably discrete, and would at least be separated by an & or / by anyone who was actively part of either group, much less an alleged anthropologist in the SW.)
From an ASU prof friend: “The whole thing about the Dean asking for proof she was Indigenous: ASU knows who their indigenous faculty are. They also know not to ask for a DNA test. It would first ask about tribal enrollment or if any of their family was enrolled.”
also, if you’re new to the situation, @endlesswario provided much better background; I’ve just trying to compile info as it came in https://twitter.com/endlesswario/status/1290062477657436161?s=21
from the same ASU prof friend: there isn’t a Human Anthro 201 survey class taught at ASU. (also, immaterial to the broader situation, but that’s a weird fuckin’ thing to say!)
further evidence supporting a loose “BethAnn is sciencing_bi” hypothesis: https://twitter.com/evodevodna/status/1290017246253707266?s=21
damning addition to the “BA is SB” ev pile (again, from a friend) - the SB account (allegedly a prof w expertise in geology? anthropology? it’s unclear but def not a medical school dept) responding in lieu of BA on a question about med school prof pay structure at Vanderbilt
Both the BA and SB tweet here were sent from twitter for Android, and were tweeted four minutes apart. That’s fairly convincing to me, personally. https://twitter.com/isabelott/status/1290101201397329921?s=21 https://twitter.com/isabelott/status/1290101201397329921
