Posted on 06/28/2004 10:12:43 PM PDT by Lijahsbubbe
A Woodbury resident admits popular Web diary called 'Plain Layne' was all a sham
San Jose Mercury News
For more than three years, a twenty-something Minnesota woman named Layne Johnson lured thousands of people to her Web site every day with a poignant and brutally honest diary of her life.
She was witty, sexually adventurous and intimate with her readers, sharing photos of her travels and exchanging private e-mails and instant messages with fans. She posted messages to other people's Web logs and created personal profiles at social networking sites. Many readers felt deeply connected to her.
Then, three weeks ago, the "Plain Layne" Web log mysteriously disappeared from the Internet, sending her fans into a tizzy.
Now the person behind Layne has come forward and admitted that it was all an elaborate hoax.
Odin Soli — a 35-year-old male entrepreneur and writer, married with two children and living in Woodbury —created Layne as an experiment in "interactive fiction."
In a telephone interview, Soli said the character helped him deal with the pressures of his own life, including a rare disease that is killing him. "I honestly don't know if I could have kept going if I didn't have this character to pour my life into," he said.
The deception has left Layne's fans, who made upward of 10,000 hits a day toward the end, struggling with a complex set of emotions, from anger and betrayal to respect for the writing and a con well done. And it demonstrates how easy it is for the Internet to foster intimacy among total strangers.
"Most of us would really like to know who to thank for the 3½ years of laughter, insight and enjoyment that 'Layne' gave us … and frankly, some of us would like to give 'her' a piece of their mind for being such a con artist," one Layne fan posted on a Web site last week.
The episode bears a striking resemblance to the Kaycee Swenson case of 2001, in which a 40-year-old homemaker created a bogus site that chronicled the final year of a dying teenager.
However, Soli's deception was more sophisticated because it exploited the social aspects of Web logs, which allow readers to interact with authors by posting comments directly onto their diary entries.
Layne first appeared on the Internet in late 2001 at http://plainlayne.dreamhost.com. Her almost daily postings discussed in frank detail her relationships, her travels and her adventures at "Minicorp," her high-tech Minnesota employer. Local followers tried to spot her at Timberwolves games and running around Twin Cities lakes.
Fans deduced from her diaries that she was a University of Minnesota architect major who worked for 3M.
At one point, she revealed she was raped, causing her to re-examine her sexual identity and become a lesbian.
"For many people, it became a reality show, a soap opera," said Ryan Schultz, a 40-year-old university librarian from Winnipeg, Canada. "People would get their fix and be settled for the day."
In the comments section on Layne's Web log, readers would debate her daily decisions, and Layne would sometimes join in. Eventually, some readers began to correspond with her through e-mail, sharing advice and details about their own lives.
There are millions of Web logs, or blogs, worldwide, many of them chronicling the mundane lives of teens and stay-at-home moms. What set Layne's blog apart was the writing.
"You felt like you were there, feeling what she was feeling," said David Grenier, who read the blog from the beginning.
Some readers suspected all along that Layne was a fake. The writing was too polished, and the tone of her diary changed in odd ways.
Then, on June 9, "Plain Layne" abruptly vanished.
Hard-core fans immediately began investigating. Who was she? Had anyone actually seen her or spoken with her on the phone? Amateur sleuths found unusual similarities between the Plain Layne site and a defunct online diary written by someone named Acanit.
Layne e-mailed a few friends and said her therapist had suggested she take a break. But the con was quickly unraveling.
On June 23, St. Paul blogger Mitch Berg, an old friend of Soli, revealed that he knew the real story behind Layne but couldn't say more. Soon after, others fingered Soli as the perpetrator.
Some were appalled at the deception. "I have a bunch of e-mail exchanges with 'Layne' that, in retrospect, make me sort of ill to read because they were pretty intimate topics (depression, adoption, etc...)," one person commented on a blog.
On Friday, Soli posted an unsigned explanation of the hoax on a new Web site (http://emitter.dreamhost.com). It says the deception began with his previous blog with the fictional Acanit, which he shut down in 2001.
NO APOLOGIES
Soli graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1992 with a bachelor's degree in history and got a master's degree in history from the University of California at San Diego. He started two Minnesota tech companies, Aptura and AgWave Technologies, and now works in sales for FindLaw, a Mountain View, Calif., provider of online legal resources. In 2001, he was diagnosed with a rare heart disease that he says will likely kill him before he is 50.
In an online biography he calls himself a novelist and said in an interview that his online characters were literary exercises that consumed him.
Berg, who followed the Layne saga without knowing that Soli was behind it, questions why people got so attached to her. "People supplied their own vortex," he said. "They swam toward the hole in the water."
But Grenier disagrees, pointing to an unsolicited e-mail he received from Layne last Christmas. "It wasn't like it was a one-way thing," said Grenier, a Rhode Island wedding photographer. "It was a person who was deliberately trying to pull you in."
Soli said he did not anticipate the deep connections he would form with his readers. "I grew extremely fond of them," he said.
But Soli does not believe he owes anyone an apology. Though he worked hard at the Layne fabrication, he says the clues were there for anyone to question the reality.
Soli is now trying to start a third company so he can secure his family's financial future after his death. The time pressures forced him to finally pull the plug on Layne.
It was an abrupt end. But, Soli said, "real life doesn't have closure."
Well, now we know where MoveOn.blah got the idea for interactive fiction.
*ping*
More cyber scamerama!
Eh. I'm not surprised. Everyone on the internet seems to a jet-setting, underwear model, captain of industry with a bunch of commando skills.
Reality is something else altogether.
This gives me hope that the New York Times will one day disappear and the real authors will admit to the hoax.
I love that part...
It looks like the attempt I made at toning down the content of my FR homepage went for naught.
LOL. A more apt description of many would be someone "setting" their big butt in front of the computer, in their underwear with a bunch of Captain Crunch.
No! You're destroying the delicate balance of my reality and fantasy lives!
(Great heaving sobs coupled with the sound of star wars collectables falling over)
Bwahaha!
lol!
I never claimed to be an underwear model. I don't wear any...
:O
Then that comes around the the "commando" thing, then, doesn't it?
Yeah..."goin' commando" LOL
but sometimes, when I have to carry extra equipment on secret missions, it gets a little, shall we say "uncomfortable"...
That, and the wetsuits chafe in odd places...
At http://www.tshirthell.com, they sell a T-shirt which says, "I'm the teenage girl you ****ed off in the chatroom with", obviously intended to be worn by some old guy, like this perhaps:
Warning, don't click the link if you're easily offended, that's one of their *milder* T-shirts.
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