As it turns out, a baseball blogger named Ryan Schultz was not a married man writing online for the better part of a decade. In fact, Ryan Schultz was actually a girl named Becca Shultz, a 21-year-old who started writing online at age 13 and later began acting out against women online.
Lindsey Adler reported the bizarre story for Deadspin on Thursday, interviewing women who were harassed by Schultz and helped to expose that the writer was not truthful about who they were. Schultz, who had worked for both SB Nation and Baseball Prospectus, was fired from both gigs after a wild story of abuse and deceit was uncovered earlier this week.
The story seems to unravel last weekend, when the account @rschultzy20, which claimed to be Ryan Schultz, made a misogynistic joke on Twitter that upset many people. The account was deleted, then reactivated and deleted again. Meanwhile, people contacted Adler to chronicle the strange behavior of Shultz and investigate whether the writer actually was who they said they were.
What emerged is that not only did Ryan not exist, it was a fake family member of a girl named Becca Schultz, who later admitted to women that she was not who she said she was. These women later confirmed that Schultz had crossed the line a number of times in communicating with women online.
Erin and the other four people involved in the investigation confronted Ryan, who admitted that, yes, they had actually been talking to Becca for all of these years. Once she was in too deep with the persona, she explained, she realized she couldn’t simply begin presenting her real self to the people she knew online and still have them as friends.
After Erin tweeted about Ryan/Becca, a handful of other women began tweeting and talking about their experiences with Ryan. Many of them said Ryan had harassed them, and one told me she had been coerced into sending nude photos of herself under threat of Ryan hurting himself otherwise.
The whole story is wild and disturbing, showing just how strange anonymity online can be. Shultz started writing afraid that her true identity would not be respected online. Yet once she found success, she wielded that persona as a weapon against women and made those she harmed look into the writer enough that she was ultimately exposed.
Give Deadspin a click and dive into a crazy story with some terrific reporting by Adler.
