This is a package sent to Reader 1 from “Warrior Eli.” It contained fifty plastic bracelets meant to raise awareness to Eli Dirr’s cancer battle, pictures of Eli printed out and suitable for framing, and several drawings by Eli that are pretty impressive for a 6 year old but not so hot when you realize they were drawn by someone who is 22.
“J,
im so disappointed. you came into my life at the most vulnerable time for me, when i was just diagnosed with crohn’s disease at 12 years old, and i started talking to you when i was 13. i had no friends. i was lonely and miserable. you talked to me when i was sent to memphis for boarding school and were a friend through my darkest times. you were there when i battled a drug addiction, when i went through side effect after side effect of my medications for crohn’s. you listened to me about my worries of my boyfriend leaving for the Marines. You know everything there is to know about me. i trusted you.
in return, you fed me crap. i thought i had a serious friendship with you. you were my online big brother, and now i find out you’re not even real. i put so much of myself into your story. your “family” i handed out at least 200 Warrior Eli wristbands, and advocated for him on my own facebook. i cried when Dana died. i even offered to fly up to Canada to help you with your kids the second i turned 18.
I bought all of this story that you fed to me. i really did. i really thought i could trust you. im in so much pain right now because i can’t even grieve over the loss of a friend because that friend didn’t exist. I keep logging on to facebook excited how i can vent about these recent turn of events, until i remember that you’re not there anymore.
you lied until the very last second. you had the chance to come clean with me, and you kept lying. that hurt the most. Honestly, after 4 years, even if you said that this was all a lie, and you were sorry for everything, i would have been mad obviously, but who wouldnt? but eventually, i would have healed. i would have forgiven you. and i would have been able to be there for you when you were REALLY discovered.
but instead, you didnt trust me. you just used me, for unknown reasons.
i have no idea why you kept up this friendship with me, as far as i’m aware of, there are only a few people who actually maintained a relationship with you for a long period of time. i dont understand what the point of me was. i didnt donate money, i passed out bracelets that i got for free. I thought, maybe, you kept me around because you needed a friend, because you were lonely, but its not like you told me anything real. everything we talked about was either about E, your kids, Dana, or your job, and none of these things exist.
I wanted so much to believe you. I was defending you against the people that showed me the wordpress site. but then i saw lily and jude, oh sorry, kate and adam, on another person’s blog. and then all your other kids from random people’s facebooks around the world. it killed me.
my lesson is well learned, never trust someone you meet on the internet. i haven’t even begun to recover from the fact you sent me hard copies of pictures of a sick child you never even met, and that you drew pictures with crayons saying they were from a boy who didnt even exist. the boy who likes Cars the movie and loved his family more than life. who comes from a family of ice hockey players and once referred to me as his girlfriend.
i keep trying to brush this off as if it was no big deal, what should i have expected? you’re just someone on the internet. but its more than that. i got so attached and so involved, and now its gone. i miss J. i miss my friend who was there for me during the hardest 4 years of my life. but he was never even real. nothing that was part of him was real. and that kills me.
i knew you lied to me, at least a little. it was the little things, like your tattoos, i looked at all your pictures, and i couldn’t find a single one of you with the tattoos. so i thought maybe that was a lie to look cool. The rebellious teen who got stupid tattoos when they were younger. Then you told me the story of Sammy, and i couldn’t find it anywhere online, so i thought you either made it up or were exaggerating. or maybe you changed his name. i didnt really care. you talked about it like it was important to you, so i went along with it because i cared.
Then it was Dana. i thought no one could be so sick that they would make something like that up online, but you did. i tried to believe you. but the way you acted when she was gone was the calling card that you were lying. at first i thought it was just shock, but you made a mistake. you started talking different. using different words than J would have, you even sent a smiley face on the facebook chat when you said you were just happy about having Evelyn, i knew something was off. J NEVER sent smiley icons. come on, i’ve been you “friend” for four years. i know better.
i wish i knew better than to have believed all of this. so much time and effort was put into helping you and your “family” and now im destroyed. i told you how i dont really have that many friends anymore, and now i just have one less.
i cried for hours after i saw the post with your apology letter. you acted like it was no big deal. whatever, people got hurt, who cares?
I care.
did 4 years really mean nothing to you? was this roleplay just one big game to you and you dont care at all if anyone gets hurt?
i got hurt.
a lot.
So this is it. i said what i needed to say. i dont have anything left of me to give you, because you know every single detail about me. what i want to do with my life. my fears of my boyfriend leaving and me relapsing on drugs. my family problems.
i know absolutely nothing about you. i know about a fictional character. but i know nothing about the real person behind it all.
i dont expect you to respond honestly. you can if you want, you can email taryn, or you can email me directly. but i know you wont. you’ve hidden behind facebook walls through other people’s names and pictures for so long, you probably feel like you dont owe me anything.
I know one thing for sure though. I already miss JS and Eli so much. and dana, timmy, dougie, katie, marko, tayo, lily, jude, jack, and the baby i never got to learn the personality of, evie.
i miss the whole family. and i miss my friend.
i hope this was worth it to you.”
“J” told me he loved me. He wished he could have me and Dana too. We had a cyber romantic and sexual “relationship” for a year.
Oh man. Please email me. warriorelihoax@gmail.com
I did
OMG!
oh gross… that sucks way more than what happened to me. ew!
This all sounds very familiar. Before I got married J would always hit on me like no other. After I got married he would occasionally make flirty comments to me. I just brushed them off because once again I knew he was a hockey player (former one) and I knew how they could be. So it didn’t phase me one bit.
Reader 1. A lot of the stuff you mentioned was a lot of the things I too was told. I too had offered to come up to Canada after ‘Dana’ passed away if he needed help. But of course there was always an excuse to follow up after it. Reader 1, if you would like a friend to talk to you and help you through things, please comment on this post or let Taryn know that is is okay that I have your email address.. I love helping people and you sound like you could use a good friend. Since we were bot
Reader 1 I hope you get some counseling or have someone close by to talk this out with. I’m worried about you.
honestly, im okay now. im upset and disappointed obviously, but this is a learning experience and i’ll be fine in the long run.
-Reader 1
One more thing that bothers me is the day after the pages went missing, I had messed J asking him what was going on and I had a full blown conversation with Dane. Dane was telling me that people were calling Warrior Eli a hoax and what not and saying that the photos were stolen. I of course bought into everything until I did a search on Warrior Eli and I found this site. I then mentioned to ‘Dane’ that there was a site up and he told me to stop reading it because they were just trying to get people to drink their ‘koolaid’. I of course lied and said that I couldn’t even make it past the first post when in reality I was reading everything. Looking at the blog that had pictures of Adam and Kate and reading every comment from each poster. It continued to blow me away piece by piece. One thing that did happen during that conversation was Dane told me J wasn’t going to be on Facebook for awhile but I was more than welcome to text him. But I couldn’t call him because he didn’t have international calling. The number I was given was a Toronto number. My only guess is she had this set up through google or something along those lines. I texted the number Monday morning and what do you know I did receive plenty of responses back.
email me his number and I’ll call him right now
What were the responses?
I’d also like to know what the responses were. If you’d like to email me anonymously, it’s warriorelihoax@gmail.com
Folks, this is why you need to be monitoring your kids on the internet. My 13 year old would never have had an “internet” relationship like this.
What a horrible situation.
I AGREE!
To those with JS’s phone #….have you texted recently? Is there a response? IDK..Iw ould be texting liek crazy things like ” are youreadingthis?”…” are you getting help?”…etc!
Reader1, I’m so sorry you were deceived by someone you felt you could trust. Please find a place where you talk with someone.
Based on “J’s” comment to Reader1 on Monday during their back and forth, this will happen again to someone else. This Emily will just “wait till this fizzles out some then disappear off Facebook… Maybe create a new one with a different version of my name”. It’s horrible to think that someone else might get duped by Emily in the future.
Totally agree and I thought the same thing when I read “JS’s” comment to Reader 1.
I know that legally there’s very little that can be done, if anything, but I’m hoping with your continued spotlight on this, more people will come forward who were fooled by “JS” and the whole story. And maybe there’s someone or multiple someones who did send money or valuable gifts that will come forward so that something can be done to stop her from doing this again.
Shit, someone give me the number I’ll call him/her right now.
keep us posted!!!
No one has given me his number. Maybe that’s a good thing because I’d totally call him/her out for this shit.
I sent the number to Taryn
You can find her fathers number when you search her name. I’d call her parents!
Reader ! – I can’t imagine what you are going through right now. I will say that my daughter was duped into a stupid online relationship a few years ago around your age and I was soooo sure I was checking all of her internet actions and she still found a way to get around that. Kids are smart. I want you to know that your story touched me. If you would like another friend, please let Taryn know…she has my email. I would be more than happy to be a “REAL” friend and help you through this or whatever you may need.
That would be Reader 1…my fingers don’t work this early š
Reader 1: Don’t let this color your view of the compassion of strangers. There are real people out here who actually do care. I understand how you feel right now. I feel that way too. What did Emily get out of this? What purpose did it serve? My only thought is that she is a horribly lonely and alone person who thinks she has nothing to offer anyone so she has to live in a dream land to feel like she is someone. She has no regards to who she is hurting with her lies. I hope she knows that a quickly penned apology letter is not enough to mend the hurt she has caused some people. I do hope that this weighs on her mind at night. But please, reader 1, don’t give up faith in others.
Mx
thats what i was thinking too, that she must have just been really lonely and didn’t think anyone would like the real her.
its sad. but still upsetting that she knows my innermost thoughts and secrets and i know absolutely nothing about her :/ oh well
-Reader 1
It is very unfair you were betrayed like this and at a quite a young age. I hope you are able to heal and trust again.
That is sooo messed up
Has Emily taken all the profiles down yet, as she indicated she would?
No. She’s altered a lot of them, though. A lot of the sock puppet ones used to have pictures associated with them, tagged with JS and Dana, including pictures of the “Dirr” children. Now most of those are stripped bare. I do have a lot of screen shots, though š
I’m still in a state of awe about it. And honestly, a little bit of admiration. I’ve been writing since I was ten (I was always getting busted in school – one time I was accused of cheating during a spelling test because in between the teacher saying the words, I was writing on a different sheet of paper) and I have yet to finish any of the novels I’ve started. The reason? I lose direction of my three or four main characters in the midst of real life. And that’s just writing, not actively pretending to be those people.
In comparison, I do play on online RP game, and right now I have 8 characters (there were some very unplanned pregnancies). It’s so overwhelming just having the 8 characters, even though I only currently RP 3 of them.
I can’t even fathom the amount of dedication to do something of this magnitude. I’m honestly at least 15% tempted to invite her to come play Popmundo just due to the level of imagination she’s shown. At least there she’d be in a place where it’s acceptable to become someone else.
Although I can barely stomach her, Nancy Grace might have enough passion to have a field day with this. She could certainly get to the bottom of it, with all of her resources.
I’d watch Nancy Grace just to see her rip this “Emily” apart.
Dear reader 1, I feel so sorry for you. I too had “online friends” when I was younger, and I cannot even think about how I would have felt when someone had lied to me like that ( I’m sure the grammar of this sentence is weird, sorry, I am not a native speaker). My heart goes out to you, stay strong!
How to any of you know that “reader 1″‘is real? It could be just another one of her personas!
This one I can promise you is something I verified š
anonymous and anyone else, feel free to ask taryn for my email address if you want to talk to me directly. i have no problem talking to anyone about this situation, i just obviously have learned better than to post my email address directly online. however, i can assure you, i am definitely not emily. there is no way i would be able to keep up with like 100 facebook pages! i have enough trouble with 1! lol
-Reader 1
“JS” was indeed quite the flirt. Anytime he’d start getting “inappropriate” with me, I attributed it to the vast amount of stress he was under and was probably just seeking any distraction and always steered his train back in a safer area… but I knew if he was talking to me like this, I sure wasn’t the only one. It’s awful that so many people were so hurt by this.
What I am still having problems wrapping my mind around is the vast amount of time that Emily spent cultivating these relationships. When did she sleep? That is a lot of time keeping up 40something FB accounts, posting for them, messaging friends from them, posting on the friends’ walls, etc. I know I had “conversations” with both “Dana” and “JS” going on at the same time (with the 2 separate accounts) all the time. My mind spins just thinking about it.
Hey, could you email me? Thank you!
Maybe Emily is a lesbian and hides behind js to flirt w women because she wouldn’t be accepted and is not ok w who she really is š just a thought
Mercury, I am so sorry this happened to you.. I hope it does not affect your ability to trust in people. I am very active in the cancer community and I know myself, part of me wanted to just not repost anything, etc.. But, I cannot let some koko for cocoa puffs person throw me off helping people.. For everyone one bad person, there are 5 that truly are genuine.
thank you, i really appreciate it. its been around a week since this happened and its still so difficult to grasp. i can’t comprehend how someone felt the need to scam so many people when they were in need of a friend im so sad that emily felt like she could be doing this to people who really needed support, but i guess she just wanted to feel important and needed…
-Reader 1