Six days after a post on the blog A Gay Girl in Damascus triggered panic among its readers by suggesting that the blogÂ’s author, who claimed to be a Syrian-American lesbian caught up in the protest movement, had been detained in the Syrian capital, a new entry appeared on Sunday that described the entire online diary as a work of fiction by an American man.
The new post, headlined “Apology to Readers,” was signed by Tom MacMaster, a 40-year-old graduate student, who identified himself as “The sole author of all posts on this blog.” That would include four months of what appeared to be diary entries from Amina Abdallah Arraf, a self-described 35-year-old lesbian born and raised in the United States but now living in Damascus, and two posts attributed to Rania O. Ismail, a cousin of Ms. Arraf’s, who relayed news of her arrest to the blog’s readers last week.
In a telephone interview with The Lede on Monday morning, Mr. MacMaster, who is currently in Turkey, said, “I sort of by accident… created something that had a lot more interest than I had ever possibly expected and then when I tried to shut it down it just kept getting bigger.” He explained that he had initially created Amina, his Arab lesbian character, as “a handle” he would use when he wanted to contribute comments to online discussions. His aim, he said was to use the character to present “a perspective that doesn’t often get heard on the Middle East and that was also a challenge for me, as somebody who has aspirations as a novelist, to write in a voice of a character who is absolutely not me.”
He got the idea to start a blog in the guise of his character, he said, when a Web site called Lez Get Real published two long comments about Syria that he had submitted in AminaÂ’s name in February. That Web site published a long apology on Friday, explaining that its editors had helped to start the Gay Girl in Damascus blog. In the comment thread beneath that apology, one of the editors of the site explained that the bloggerÂ’s 135 contributions to Lez Get Real in recent months had all seemed to come from computers located in Scotland, not Syria. Mr. MacMaster moved to Scotland from the U.S. last year to study history.
Before Sunday, Mr. MacMaster had denied that he was the blogÂ’s author when reporters from two publications, The Washington Post and The Electronic Intifada, confronted him with circumstantial evidence that seemed to connect him to Amina Abdallah Arraf. Both reporting teams had discovered that someone who claimed to be Ms. Arraf had asked several years ago for mail to be delivered to a house in Stone Mountain, Ga. which was owned by Mr. MacMaster at the time. (An old invitation to a barbecue at the house, posted on Facebook by Mr. MacMaster in 2008, is still online.)
Mr. MacMaster initially told The Post, “Look, if I was the genius who had pulled this off, I would say, ‘Yeah,’ and write a book.”
After he published his apology on the blog on Sunday, Mr. MacMaster confirmed to Ali Abunimah and Benjamin Doherty of The Electronic Intifada, a pro-Palestinian Web site, that he was indeed the blogÂ’s author. His wife, Britta Froelicher, who is pursuing a degree in Syrian studies, later hinted to N.P.R. and confirmed to The Guardian that her husband was the blogÂ’s author in an e-mail.
As part of an investigation led by Andy Carvin, N.P.R. had discovered that photographs of Syria sent by the author of the Gay Girl in Damascus blog to a Facebook friend in Canada recently had been posted online in 2008 by Ms. Froelicher. Contacted by N.P.R. on Sunday, Ms. Froelicher pointed the broadcaster to the new apology posted on the Gay Girl in Damascus blog and said that the couple was still on vacation in Turkey, “and just really want to have a nice time and not deal with all this craziness at the moment.”