Posted on 11/10/2017 9:29:31 AM PST by jjotto
For the last eight years, baseball fan-turned-writer Becca Schultz has presented herself online as Ryan Schultz, a false identity she assumed when she was 13 years old, duping and harassing women on Twitter along the way.
On Wednesday night, a woman named Erin tweeted a series of screenshots announcing that Schultz is not actually Ryan, a married father of two studying to become a pharmacist. Instead, Schultz is a 21-year-old college student in the Midwest, whose entire career as an aspiring baseball writer has been under a fraudulent byline.
Schultz began contributing to Baseball Prospectus’s local White Sox blog at the end of the 2016 season and wrote for BP South Side and BP Wrigleyville throughout the 2017 season. Additionally, Schultz wrote for the SB Nation sabermetrics site Beyond the Box Score throughout 2017.
People who knew Ryan Schultz online say that in retrospect, some of his behavior seemed odd, but no one expected that this moody White Sox fan from Missouri would actually be a teenage girl.
Schultz’s fraud was as true to the catfish genre as can be. She told the people who discovered she was not who she said she was that she assumed the identity because she felt as if she couldn’t write about baseball professionally as a woman, especially at the age of 13. As the deception went on, she couldn’t figure out how to get out of the middle of her web of lies.
Over time, Ryan formed serial relationships with women who use Twitter to talk about baseball and hockey. Some women told me that he would get drunk and berate them; others told me they felt emotionally abused and manipulated because he would imply that he’d hurt himself if they didn’t continue to talk to him. Ryan received nudes from at least two women I spoke with, one of whom said she did it because she was afraid he would hurt himself if she didn’t.
Schultz’s story is interesting for reasons far beyond its sheer shock value. It’s entirely reasonable that at the time she created the Ryan persona, she might not have thought she could easily have a career writing about baseball as a woman. She’s also drawn a big red arrow sign pointing toward the exploitative ecosystem of online sportswriting, which created the conditions for her to get her enviable opportunities without much interrogation from editors who have a lot to do and few resources with which to do it.
Most of all, though, there are real women who have been genuinely hurt by their interactions with a woman who, as she tells the story, caught herself up in a lie she didn’t know how to untell, not least because it was bringing her what she wanted.
Just dayum.
Wth?
On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog, or whatever.
Growing up on the wannerful Nortwest side of Chicaga and being a lifelong Cubs fan, I can understand how a Sox fan could be a little...strange. This seems stranger than usual.
If she was writing since the age of 13 she obviously has some talent.......
No one is beating down my internet door asking for nudes (and I’m a guy), but if anyone says they need nude photos or else they will “hurt themselves” the answer is, “sad to hear it, you should get help right away” ..... who on earth sends nude photos to strangers on the internet, and especially under such pressure???
So many people in this world are simply nuts.
Ping
Yes weird. And also so?
Writers often used fake names. Female writers have often written under male pseudonyms, especially in areas of interest to males.
The funny thing is that arrogant and smarmy Sabermetric aficionados are reading teenage girls stuff.
At 13 I could understand, but to continue till you’re 21?................
Someone has to be mentally unbalanced to root for the White Sox....
One more thing.
They are talking about a career.
Did she actually get paid for writing at these blogs?
Was she being paid to write or was this strictly voluntary?
Hahaha, funny, not so funny...
Funny
Sounds like movie “Boys don’t Cry”
She was paid. ‘Baseball Prospectus’ is not a blog, but a respected source of statistical analysis of MLB. Political prognosticator Nate Silver was once with Baseball Prospectus.
Quite likely, yes. In the blogoverse, you can start small as a little known poster, but if you get enough attention and eyes/views, you can become a ‘contributor’, in which case you will receive a small sum based on the number of views/clicks your articles attract.
This is part of why many people pimp their blogs/articles on FR, to get the views/clicks/moneyz.
From the sounds of things, she was fairly ‘successful’. She probably could have continued the lie and made decent money at it.
Decent being a relative term, that is...
Both fascinating and infuriating.
I’ll bet this has been happening far, far more frequently that the average poster would imagine.
There are thousands of people who have been quietly laughing all the way to the bank for years!
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