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

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.

• Selma Blair talks about her MS diagnosis. (via Jezebel)
• Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, aka Aquaman’s Black Manta, is in talks to star in Jordan Peele’s Candyman Variety reboot. (via )
• Check out this excerpt from a book I can’t wait to read: Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. (via The Guardian) This quote isn’t included in the passage but it gives a good indication of the rage (and information!) awaiting you:
  See more

  aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh https://t.co/FFqgi6OJ23 pic.twitter.com/1qgPQSdR4G

  — Marie Le Conte (@youngvulgarian) February 23, 2019

• In other Things That Are Old But That We Saw Today, this is an incredible essay: “I am a transwoman. I am in the closet. I am not coming out.” (via Medium)
• New York Democrats want to decriminalize sex work! (via Salon)
• This is a fantastic breakdown of the history of Black History Month, including why it happens in February and why there isn’t a “White History Month.”
  

(image: screencap via The Cut)

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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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