Picayune is the word that best describes most of what passes for drama in the world of tech bloggers. Maybe someone reviewed too many headphones or Apple made a mouse that’s ugly when you’re charging it.
That’s why this week’s brouhaha - with genuine fraud and a real life sociopath to accompany the usual pious carping - is noteworthy.
I’m referring to the Samantha Bielefeld affair in which a guy called Victor Johnson pretended to be a female blogger (Samantha), attracted considerable attention and claimed to be the subject of sexist abuse before being unmasked as a fraudster.
But that summary doesn’t do it full justice. Part of the reason I wanted to write this post is that it is a drama that has mainly played out in subtweets and disparate blog posts (and, no doubt, numerous Slack channels that most of us aren’t privy to). So there’s been understandable frustration from some people that they are being asked to make consequential calls on issues as sensitive as someone’s gender or their trustworthiness with scant information to go on.
So primarily I want this post to be an explainer of what we know so far. This is by no means comprehensive - the saga gets ever more complicated the more you delve into it and I’m largely relying on piecing together the same fragments of information as everyone else.
I have followed it from the start (or at least from the point it got interesting). In fact, there’s a case to be made that this is my fault to some extent. But we’ll come on to that.
Here’s the potted history as I can tell. If anyone wants to fill in any gaps or correct any mistakes, get in touch.
In August this year, someone going by the name of Samantha Bielefeld opened a twitter account.
Later that month, John Gruber posted this teaser:
Come mid-September, Samantha decided it was time to launch a blog. Her opening post lamented the lack of female voices in tech coverage and explained that she aimed to help redress the balance.
Two days later she posted a vile email she had received from a Victor Johnson advising her to kill herself. Just the sort of brainless misogyny that some women on the internet have to deal with on a regular basis. Cue understandable anger and support.
She continued to post over the coming month, slagging off Nilay Patel and setting up a Teespring campaign for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Then came Overcast 2.0. (Weird isn’t it that this story hinges on an update to a podcast client, but there it is.)
And this is where I come in. Now I’m conscious that this next bit might seem a bit self-serving but it’s relevant.
October 9th - Marco Arment released Overcast 2.0. It was free and people could support development by becoming patrons.
Over on Samantha’s site she was fairly effusive about the app and the business model:
I like the direction Marco is taking the app with allowing people to become patrons. I want to see the app being constantly reconsidered for years to come, and if it can generate enough income for Marco to dedicate his time to it, everyone’s experience with listening to podcasts will be better off.
October 13th - I, on the other hand, had concerns. What effect would the new pricing model have on competitors? After all, Marco had seemed keen to support podcast apps in general, not just his own. So I wrote it up, posted it here on the site and emailed the hosts of ATP with a link in the hope they would discuss the questions it raised on the show.
Later the same day Marco responded, linking to my post and making the point, inter alia, that he wasn’t “doing anything that other developers can’t do”.
I found that disingenuous and generally thought he’d sidestepped the issues I raised, so I wrote a response.
So that’s all on October 13th, ok. I’m labouring this timeline but it’s important.
October 14th - Samantha Bielefeld posted the perfectly-titled Elephant in the Room in which she questioned whether patronage really was viable for other developers. It immediately garnered considerable attention, with 27,000 unique visitors in 14 hours, according to Bielefeld.
The firestorm over the post started during the night for me. When I read Samantha’s post, similar in many ways to mine but with no link or reference to either of my posts, I emailed her to bring them to her attention.
She sent me a message saying: “I read your two pieces this morning and it prompted my idea to write one of my own.”
What happened since is a bit like a Rashomon film; it probably depends which viewpoint you take as to what you choose to highlight. I’ll try and hew pretty closely to the key facts.
Bielefeld quickly attracted both support and opposition. John C. Welch wrote a lacerating post on Medium which, as well as setting out to settle some personal scores, sought to highlight some of the patronising, negative responses Samantha’s post elicited.
Pressure grew on Bielefeld, who admitted using a pseudonym, to reveal her true identity. Some of that was clearly nefarious but there were hints from various people friendly to Marco that there was something askew with the situation, that this was not just someone who wanted to keep their name quiet for work reasons.
November 16th - Samantha launched paid memberships on her site. (Not to be confused with patronage of course because she was going to throw some extra writing your way for your monthly stipend).
For me, this is one of the most egregious aspects of this story. Not content with lying to people and attacking others under false pretences, Samantha began conning people out of money.
As I write, in fact, she is still conning people out of money: memberships are still live and she is still refusing to admit her falsehoods. She has, however, promised to issue refunds for those that want one.
16th November - the same day, Brent Simmons puts out a call for female bloggers to be listed on his site. Various people suggest Samantha but she remains tellingly absent. Really, this was the moment people - me included - should have realised the truth. Brent is close to the Grubers but a truly independent voice, the meaning behind his post could only have been clearer if it had been titled: ‘Samantha Bielefeld Is A Man’.
21 November - On Twitter, Samantha posts John Gruber’s phone number (since deleted) with the last three digits replaced with XX. (People have asked how Victor got Gruber’s number. John sent it to him) Righteous anger ensued, not least from his wife. She replies to Samantha with:
Victor Johnxxx
Yep, that’s you.
So the accusation was finally public:
And remember Gruber’s tweet back in August about a masquerade twitter account? Well here was the kicker:
To add an extra twist to the story, the full name of the man behind Samantha was Victor Wynn Johnson, a known con man. This wasn’t just some naif who got carried away, this was a concerted fraud.
And what evidence has been adduced:
- The IP addresses of Victor and Samantha are identical, according to emails sent by both.
- The lame joke used on the footer of Samantha’s website - “Most Rights Reserved, Some Are Very Outgoing” is almost identical to the one used on Victor’s old site: “Most rights reserved, a small minority are very outgoing”.
- Victor Johnson was, of course, the person who purportedly emailed Samantha on day three of her blog to call her a cunt.
All circumstantial, right? But viewed together it’s compelling. Consider the odds that a random guy sends you a (well-timed) threatening email while sharing the same IP address and the same bad taste in humorous footers.
What convinces me, however, is that there is no way on earth the Grubers would have gone so big on this if they weren’t sure. As Amy Jane tweeted
No fucking way. Now, I don’t expect that to convince you. I’m not here to convince everyone. I will say, though, that I felt embarrassed to have been so late to the truth three days ago - I even posted an interview with ‘Samantha’ to the site last week - so I’m at a loss as to how anyone can remain a Bielever now despite not a shred of countervailing evidence from the person purporting to be Bielefeld.
So that’s the timeline. There are a couple of other points I wanted to mention briefly:
There has been some lamentation that the debate over Samantha’s identity has meant we never had the debate over patronage. We did. John Siracusa did a fine job, in Accidental Tech Podcast episode 139, of interrogating the issue with Marco, following up and asking most of the questions I wanted him to ask.
I’m not saying that’s the end of it, but it’s not right to say people immediately moved onto identity issues.
Another point I’ve seen repeatedly made is: who cares what gender she is, she had the guts to raise an issue when no one else dared.
In a post by Alvaro Serrano on this issue today, he says Samantha talked about things “that nobody else was willing to talk about”. That’s demonstrably not true, and it’s why I laboured the timeline earlier.
I raised the issue of patronage before Samantha. Her post was a result (and a partial rehash) of mine. What is true is that she sparked a huge debate while I got nothing but a couple of retweets.
That’s partly down to her bigger audience (though plenty of people read my article thanks to Marco linking to it) and partly it comes from her attempt to work out Marco’s annual podcast revenue. But is there another element. Consider this exchange on Twitter:
As we’ve seen, Tina has already been proven right and it might be worth giving some thought to the reasons for that.
But don’t let Victor conflate any failings in the community or any issues around patronage with his lies and his betrayal. The guy must be genuinely sociopathic to have lived out this fantasy for months and continue it past any point of credibility. To what end? Financial gain? For the attention? He’s promising to post by the end of the week but I wouldn’t expect an honest answer. I’ll hear him out and then move on, I’ve got much smaller things to be outraged about.
