Think about this for a second: When you plug into the Internet and chat with people from potentially anywhere around the world, do you really know who you’re connected with? Can you be sure of who’s using who’s phone or signed in on who’s email account? The Web offers us fabulous access, but even teens are starting to recognize that when they dash off their scores of text messages each day they can never be totally sure who’s really on the receiving end.
Here’s a cautionary tale in point: According to the Chicago Tribune, a young woman named Paula Bonhomme had an 18-month relationship with a Colorado volunteer firefighter named Jesse that she met online. Their give-and-take started with some “flirty exchanges” on a message board and then grew into emails, texts, letters, exchanged photos, gifts (including a block of wood with their initials carved in it that Jesse picked up while fighting a forest fire) and eventually daily phone calls. Bonhomme exchanged emails with Jesse’s family members and friends. And, even though the pair had never met, things had progressed to the point where the smitten Bonhomme had left an unhappy marriage and was about to move to Colorado. But just before she did, she received a message from Jesse’s sis that the firefighter had actually been secretly struggling with cancer and had died.
Tragic? You bet. But even more tragic is the fact that Jesse, his young son and about 20 other friends and family with whom Bonhomme had been communicating were all a fabrication. A woman named Janna St. James had made the whole kit and caboodle up out of thin air and was manipulating Bonhomme’s life—even making phone calls using a voice-altering device.
To say the least, when Bonhomme found out the truth she was stunned, and she’s now suing St. James for unspecified damages. And in reality, I’ve only communicated just a fraction of this complicated story. Even after Jesse’s supposed death, for instance, Bonhomme was receiving emails from the man’s “family,” such as the email she got from his grieving 6-year-old “son” that read, “My daddy really died. I still cry every day and you will … it’s okay to do that.”
Cruel? Sick? Twisted? You bet. St. James’ reasons? The Tribune article pointed to an online description the woman herself had posted:
Some who have never had any direct contact with me whatsoever and some who have and think they know me at all like to say I’m the world’s best online scammer EVER. Every decade or so I get a taste to pose as a man (and up to 20 other people simultaneously) and reel me in some juicy middle-aged woman flesh for purposes they never quite explain. It sure ain’t money or sex.
“Who does that?” Bonhomme said in the article. “When you take it all apart and look at it, oh, you feel like such an idiot. … But when it’s unspooled on you tiny bit by tiny bit and mixed in with reality, how do you even know where the lie begins?”
Pretending to be someone you’re not isn’t new, of course. Everything from Bible stories to James Bond movies drive that point home. But now, when we’re far more likely to post on our friends’ walls than knock on their doors and when we have intimate conversations via 150-character text blasts, lies seem so much easier to tell.
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