Sigh. Here we go again.
This blogger lost a baby to a cord accident and then gave birth to Chloe in April. On Monday, her husband was badly hurt in a car accident and Chloe was critically injured.
Baby Chloe died on Tuesday.
Hundreds of comments flooded in and posts sprang up on blogs expressing shock, anger and condolences to the young mother who had been through so much.
Except the whole mess is a lie. I emailed the blog author and she replied with an email address that included “J*** and Courtney” and a last name (I’m redacting this to give the family some privacy, thanks for the good point, Erin). Some Googling brought up a Facebook page, and there really is a baby named Chloe, born on the same day as poor doomed Chloe from the Rainbow blog.
None of the Facebook friends of Facebook Chloe’s mom or dad had mentioned an accident and their families hadn’t said a peep about it. There were no google results for an accident in their hometown or anywhere near it.
After emailing back and forth with “Courtney,” the author of the blog, she finally admitted she had stolen the identities of this family and created a tale about a dead baby as an “escape from life.”
The Other Side of the Rainbow has now been deleted. You can find the entire blog in screen shots here.
The blog had only existed for a little over a month but it had built up quite the following in support communities for people who have had stillbirths or were trying to conceive. Tonight there were hundreds of comments of sympathy from people who talked about their own dead children and how they coped with their incredible losses. More tears shed over a baby who is perfectly fine in real life.
(Thanks as always to the Super Sleuths who helped with the Emily mess, the Puryear drama and now this thankfully not dead baby blog)