Daily Share: The Men's Activist Who Catfished the Internet

A Craigslist ad recently went viral when a SoCal mother supposedly posted a request for a feminist tutor for her college-aged son who was failing his gender studies class.

“My son, Nate, is 22 and a student at UCLA. He has been struggling the whole quarter with his gender studies class that focuses on feminism and feminist theories, and he has a big paper that will be due in a few weeks, and he has not even started. He’s a very typical young man his age – finds the whole idea of feminism and gender studies boring and uninteresting. However his graduation is dependent on successfully finishing this class.

I’m looking for someone who is knowledgeable in this subject and can meet with him 2-3 times a week and help him develop and bring this paper to fruition. We live in Bel-Air near UCLA and you can either meet him here, at any campus library or over lunch (he’s quite the sophisticated young man who enjoys elegant restaurants!) I anticipate he will not need more than 1-2 weeks worth of time to prepare this.”

Slate writer Ruth Graham contacted the mom who was conveniently out of town but put her in contact with her son. She spoke with the young business major who went by Nate, but could not verify his identity. When she emailed Professor Elizabeth Marchant, who “Nate” claimed was his professor that quarter, she was on sabbatical — she wasn’t even teaching! Upon further investigation, the writer eventually found that this person, whose name is actually Nader Modgeddi, is behind the horrible online harassment of several writers. In fact, the anti-harassment site Male Violence has over 40 pages of absolutely repugnant tweets directed at several feminists going back to 2014, some of them calling for the rape of their targets. Caitlin Roper of The Guardian was one of the women targeted and she has written about her experience.

“The man who targeted me has been identified. His name is Nader, he is 25 and lives in California. He has been linked to at least eight different twitter accounts he uses to abuse women. In fact, the first rape threats he sent me came from the fake account he had created of yet another feminist campaigner he had been targeting.

He is so brazen about his incitement to rape me, so sure of his invulnerability, that he barely even tried to conceal his real identity. Unfortunately for him, in the course of harassing countless women he left a trail leading to his name, image, phone number, email address, Facebook page and pictures of him exposing his erect penis.”

When Ruth Graham called him on this, the man came clean. He’s 27 — not 22 — and he is not a student at UCLA. He was a man who publicly called for the rape of women who opposed him and he was trying to lure them into a physical space with him. What were his real intentions?

Read about the whole thing here.

Featured Image: Ed Yourdon, Flickr Creative Commons

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intersectional feminism