Someone did pose as Annie Oakley once, but she was a woman:
In 1903, sensational cocaine prohibition stories were selling well. The newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst published a false story that Oakley had been arrested for stealing to support a cocaine habit. The woman actually arrested was a burlesque performer who told Chicago police that her name was “Annie Oakley”. The original Annie Oakley spent much of the next six years winning 54 of 55 libel lawsuits against newspapers. She collected less in judgments than were her legal expenses, but to her, a restored reputation justified the loss of time and money.
Most of the newspapers that printed the story had relied on wire services, and upon learning of the libelous error they immediately retracted the false story with apologies. Hearst, however, tried to avoid paying the anticipated court judgments of $15,000 ($300,000, adjusted for inflation) by sending an investigator to collect reputation-smearing gossip from Oakley's past. The investigator found nothing.
By all accounts Oakley was persuasive in the courtroom; she dressed conservatively, spoke courteously, and exuded respectability. When defense lawyers accused her of seeking publicity and charged her with immodesty on stage, Oakley almost always remained calm, denying that she ever appeared in “short skirts” or did “hand-springs” in her act. Pressed by one attorney on the subject of education, she said it was “a very good thing when backed by common sense, and a very bad thing in the head of a cheap lawyer.”
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