Incredibly obtuse tweet from Elle Oh Hell, a man pretending to be his wife on Twitter.
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Big on the Internet

Things We Saw Today: Female Twitter Comedian Outed Themselves as a Man Pretending to Be His Own Wife, Who Is Now Leaving Him

Elle Oh Hell No.
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Vivian Kane
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Published: Feb 26, 2019 06:05 pm

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This bit of internet drama happened over the weekend, but I try not to open Twitter on the weekends, which means it’s a Thing I Saw Today, and I need to yell about it with you.

Elle Oh Hell (@ElleOhHell) was a popular Twitter account with about 24,000 followers and often ended up on various sites’ roundups of funny tweets from women. Except over the weekend, “Elle” announced that she wasn’t a woman, but a man who had cultivated a persona around this female character using his wife’s picture as his avatar. Except now he and his wife are splitting up, and he has apparently lost the rights to her image in the divorce.

“Who would want to be a man on the internet,” he asks? Really?

In his apology, not-Elle insisted that his goal was not to “try to get a girlfriend out of this,” but he certainly didn’t have anything close to a decent understanding of what an incredibly creepy betrayal this sort of catfishing was for the women he interacted with.

A woman named Jade (@TheDreamGhoul) told The Cut, “Elle violated the trust of the women whose DMs he made his way into, and I know several people who spoke freely with him about very personal issues that one would not otherwise talk about with someone operating under a completely false identity. He also tweeted about female-specific experiences, and even made it into a ‘Best Tweets’ list about getting your period. It was at best very entitled, and at worst outright gross.”

Either he didn’t know or didn’t care that by deleting the account–which he has–that opened it up for someone else to grab the handle–which they did.

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(image: screencap via The Cut)

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Image of Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane
Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.
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