Jeff D’Antonio is a high school science teacher living in the mountains of New Hampshire. He’s involved with his town’s search and rescue team and an avid outdoorsman but also feels at home at a theater watching his adopted daughter Katie, a budding professional actress, perform. Jeff is sensitive and kind and completely devoted to his wife Jenny and their three young daughters. When his best friend Jill was diagnosed with breast cancer, he was a constant source of support for her until she died, leaving her daughter Katie in his care. He donated a kidney to his brother Chris (who was awarded a Purple Heart after being injured in Iraq), he delivered a baby on the side of the road, he takes in troubled foster children… all in all, Jeff D’Antonio is the kind of guy you’d say is too good to be true.
And you’d be right.
This blog is as fake as fake can be.
Jeff D’Antonio has been posting online since at least 2006 when he began posting on a breast cancer support website about the tragic illness and death of his best friend since childhood, Jill.
Jill’s husband had been killed in a car accident a few years before. When Jill was diagnosed with cancer and it became apparent that she was going to die, she asked Jeff and Jenny to adopt Katie, her 8 year old daughter. Jill died, and Jeff lost the best friend he had ever had.
Jeff asked that no money be sent to Katie and instead any memorial contributions went to the Susan G. Komen foundation.
Jeff made a Find a Grave page dedicated to Jill.
Beautiful, except that someone on our team contacted Mount Calvaire Cemetery in New Hampshire, and no one by that name is buried there.
Jeff got so much support for his (imaginary) friend that he became a sponsor of the site. The Caregiver and Men’s Support board on the site was sponsored by him and dedicated to the memory of Jill.
Then Jeff moved over to Blogger in 2009 where he started writing about his family, life in the mountains, the various problems with the administration at the high school where he worked and, of course, his undying devotion to his best friend, poor dead Jill.
First of all, let’s check out Jeff’s pictures on his sidebar.
This picture of Jeff rock climbing? It can be found here.
Kayaking? Found here.
Our hero sitting and thinking? Check this out.
Jeff and Jenny, Soulmates extraordinaire? Found here.
Now let’s look at Katie, Jeff’s adopted daughter. She is talented beyond belief and gets her first paid acting gig at the age of 10… in a theater company that doesn’t exist. Here she is. Beautiful right?
That’s actually young actress Annalisa DiBernardo.
Here’s another picture of Katie, this time playing Annie on stage.
Yeah, that’s not really Katie either.
Katie’s singing career really takes off and Jeff posts lots of videos of her singing in various places. She even got to sing the National Anthem before a Red Sox game. When our team contacted Dan Lyons with the Red Sox organization, they let us know that Fenway Park doesn’t have fireworks during the anthem and that they very sincerely doubt this clip is from a Red Sox game.
Jeff writes often about the many times he saves the day. He would like you to know, however, that he is not a superhero at all, no matter how many adoring fans believe him to be.
He’s not Superman, he’s just Jeff. Yet he spends a lot of time working with his town search and rescue organization. A team member contacted the leader of search and rescue team local to Jeff. He had never heard of a Jeff D’Antonio, or for that matter the White Mountains Search and Rescue Team.
His daughter Laura followed in Jeff’s Super Footsteps. When her teacher had a heart attack at school, she performed CPR and then when the school nurse didn’t feel confident enough in her abilities to use a machine and shock the teacher’s heart back into rhythm, Laura D’Antonio grabbed the paddles and went at it.
She was 11. Yeah.
Remember Chris, Jeff’s brother, the disabled Iraqi War veteran? Jeff supposedly gave him a kidney. His Purple Heart? No Chris D’Antonio has ever been rewarded the Purple Heart.
Jeff writes often of the high school where he teaches.
Good to know he’s being careful of what he writes in his real name. It makes it harder for the person behind this fake to claim it’s a creative writing assignment. Jeff D’Antonio made a lot of friends in the breast cancer support community. Some of them comment on every blog entry he writes. He was even included in a book about the struggles caregivers face. These poor people have been helping a stranger deal with grief, some of them for over six years now. Little did they know that this stranger wasn’t really Jeff D’Antonio, Superman, at all.
Who is the man behind the curtain of this one? That’s for our next entry.
NOTE: Jeff’s blog has been deleted… but we have screenshots of the entire thing. Those will be in the next post, as well as Jeff’s identity. Teaser: Jeff isn’t a woman in her 20s.
(Thanks as always to the ladies and gentlemen who have been researching this stuff since the beginning. You’re amazing!)
