Missouri woman admits she posed as a man online to blog about sports and harassed women

Here’s a strange twist on our current national discussion about sexual harassment.

A Missouri woman is accused of posing online as a man for eight years so she could blog about baseball and harass other women.

And she started doing it at age 13. Eventually, she concocted a wife and two children.

The woman, identified by Deadspin as Becca Schultz, allegedly posed online as Ryan Schultz. According to the story, Schultz “formed serial relationships with women who use Twitter to talk about baseball and hockey.”

The author of the story, Lindsey Adler, contacted some of the women, who said Schultz would drunkenly berate them, threatened to hurt “himself” if they cut him off and solicited nude pictures.

“I was young and had no idea what to do, so I just acted like I thought a man would,” Schultz told Deadspin.

After a bit of digging, some of the women began to figure things out. The sites that Schultz was writing for began this week to cut ties with “him.”

Schultz came clean, the story reports.

“Once she was in too deep with the persona, she explained, she realized she couldn’t simply begin presenting her real self to the people she knew online and still have them as friends,” the Deadspin story said.

Becca Schultz told Adler she plans to apologize for her dishonesty and abuse.

“I expect backlash,” she said, “but my only hope is that my family and friends in real life are not affected by the choices I made.”

The news was, as expected, shocking.

This story was originally published November 10, 2017 at 12:09 PM with the headline "Missouri woman admits she posed as a man online to blog about sports and harassed women."