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You guys may remember a few weeks ago a #ViRaL story was buzzing around the interwebs that appeared to be written by the most self-indulgent girl in everyone’s high school. The piece, which appeared on the popular article crowdsourcing site the Odyssey was titled: Sorry Not Sorry, My Parents Paid For My Coachella Trip and was allegedly penned by a Syracuse University student named Kaycie Allen.
The article contained some outlandishly privileged passages that would fit seamlessly on a satire site like The Onion: “Sorry? It’s not my fault that my parents have enough money to buy their daughter and her friends the gift of going to one of the most amazing melting pots of all things weird and beautiful.”
The piece garnered 240,000 views for its excessively snobby, unapologetic tone, and was featured on Insider Magazine, NPR, Entertainment Tonight, along with being tweeted about by celebs like Chrissy Teigen and Barb from Stranger Things.
I have never once heard the argument that people make fun of Coachella-goers because their parents buy their tickets
— chrissy teigen (@chrissyteigen) April 25, 2018
After the story went mega-viral, the suspicions started flooding in.
According to Buzzfeed, people began reverse image-searching the header photo and found that it actually belonged to an Instagram influencer. Others searched the Syracuse directory and found that no one by the name of Kaycie Smith attended the school.
The next day, an Odyssey editor added a note to the post reading “is intended to be a satire of an experience at Coachella” before removing the post a few days later. The note following the removal read:
“Odyssey is a platform for real people to share authentic ideas. It has come to our attention that the creator of the article originally featured on this page may have joined Odyssey using false information, violating our terms of service.”
PLOT TWIST: The story was actually written by a 28-year-old man living in Los Angeles named Chris Spies. Chris catfished the site after he became angry over the site’s reliance on inciting outrage in their pieces. Like this one titled “You May Have Worn The Prom Dress With Him, But I Get To Wear The Wedding Dress.”
“All I did is create a fake Gmail account,” he said. “They didn’t ask for any writing samples or any proof of any kind.”
“It was purposely terribly written, both grammatically and attitude,” he said. “There’s no reason that article should’ve ever seen the light of day.”
Spies summed up the moral of the story perfectly in a stunt that turned into accidental performance art.
“A lot of people believed it because I think they just wanted to believe it,” he said. “They really needed to be outraged at this thing.”
If you aren’t mad online, you aren’t doing it right.